RickSpace

Today has been a good day for reading and perusing the internetwebthingamajigger.

I started off with the wikipedia entry on agile software development recommended by my buddy bofe in his posting today.

I honestly didn’t read too much of that before I happened to see my RSS reader indicating that Scoble had made a post of things he was reading which eventually lead me to an article listing Ten Rules for Web Startups by Evan Williams that I found intriguing. And this is where my actual reading/searching began. On step 10, he mentions David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) process and I’ve heard of this thing no less than a hundred times during my casual reading, so I decided to take a look and see what I could find. It seems there are a lot of people out there talking about it and most of them are swearing by its effectiveness. I will not make any attempt to describe it here, but will instead point you to others who already have done so eloquently. So, without further ado, here are those links:

43 Folders - Getting Started with “Getting Things Done”
Excellent summary of GTD with David Lawson
A great piece that outlines a minor variation in method that makes the difficulty (painful) steps (such as weekly reviews) a bit less painful. The ‘new’ method is referred to as the ‘PigPog’ method.

After reading this good bit of information, I feel I have a decent grasp of what the method is, and how to employ it; the worst part of the whole thing, I think, is that there are SO many ways to do it, and so many chances to use neat gadgets and gizmos, how is one to resist and make things as simple as possible? Wouldn’t just using paper + notecards be the most simple method? Following link after link after link, looking for suggestions on implementations of the system, and honestly looking for free PIM software that would facilitate this sort of use, I eventually stumbled upon Tracks. I am not yet totally convinced that it will be a great solution, but the roots from which it came sound promising. Basically, a guy was reading the GTD book while also trying to learn Ruby on Rails by doing a ToDo List example program. As he read the book and worked on the example, he realized he really could do a good bit with the example to make it useful for the GTD processes. Eventually, the program became useable and functional enough that he released it and I don’t believe has done a whole lot with it since. This may well be something I use as a learning experience for Ruby as well, if I decide to do some Ruby.

After more than an hour of getting phpMyAdmin installed (already had PHP, Apache and MySQL), getting Ruby, Rails, Gems and RedCloth all installed and working correctly, I finally proceeded with the installation of Tracks. Got it working in relatively short order and now I have it up and going and am evaluating it. Thus far, it looks like a pretty good application but I will need more time before I can really give a proper opinion on it. I also think I’ll obtain a used copy of GTD from Amazon so I can consider perhaps further extending Tracks in the future.

Just thought you guys may enjoy seeing what I’ve been doing for the last little bit. Hope some of the stuff makes sense and helps someone out; I know a couple of my friends could use some help with organization and getting tasks done