Monday, June 2, 2008

GTD madness for iPhone

Good morning people! Today is the start of the June, well actually its yesterday, but let’s just play this together okay. And on top of that, today is also Monday. It’s the craziest and busiest day, where things that need to be done are piling up on your desk until the end of the weekend.

Alright, I’m sure most of you have already known what GTD is. If not, then please head to my previous post
here at PalmAddict to get more links about it. Now while I’ve mentioned about my last post about GTD, I’m going to discuss two more of GTD apps for mobile phones. Which are specially made for iPhone, looks like I’ve been talking about iPhone all these times. Must because iPhone 2.0 is close to be released soon… ;-D

GTDagenda

The first one is actually a web service, which you can access it with any kind of desktop or laptop web browsers. And you can also open
GTDagenda with your mobile web browsers, just click on this link for the mobile page of GTDagenda; where it’s already been optimized for iPhone’s Safari as well.

I’ve been informed by Dan Baluta; the owner and the developer of the site, and he’s kindly pointed out what makes GTDagenda different from other GTD web-based services out there: It’s structured into 7 main sections that still resemblance to the David Allen’s GTD concept:
  1. Goals
  2. Projects
  3. Tasks
  4. Contexts
  5. Tasks
  6. Next Actions

Those 7 sections will appear the first every time you login to your GTDagenda account on your iPhone, as you can see the screenshot at right. I’m gonna go through real quick on some of the most unique sections:

  • Goals. Split into Career and Personal goals, unlike any other GTD web based services.
    Checklists. You can add items at specific time frame, and link that to tasks and projects. There are three time frames: weekly, monthly and yearly. It’s very useful to use for daily or repetitive activities, easy to view and easy to edit. Again, this one is a unique feature from other competitors.
  • Next Actions. It’s rare for GTD web based services to put this one on, and in GTDagenda it’s put at main menu of the website. Next Actions is very crucial to follow up every tasks & projects you’ve made, where you can group them by priority or by project. Just like in Gmail, where you can give star for each entry and they’ll placed by priority marked with black-colored bubbles. You can also easily use this Next Actions feature not only while creating a new task, but also while you’re editing each tasks. Too bad, there hasn’t any ability yet to do bulk change or create new tasks.
  • Print and email. You can print out your projects, tasks and next action lists. So you can always check them and mark things that have been completed, if you don’t want to keep on opening the desktop and mobile web browser.

Or, you can go directly to GTDagenda Tour page for more explanation on how to use each of them with help of screenshot pictures. If you’re interested to use GTDagenda, then don’t hesitate since it’s a free service with limited features of course. There are two other paid accounts, here’s the break-down of GTDagenda subscriptions:

  • Free: Limited only to 3 goals and 5 projects, contexts and checklists.
  • Basic: US$4.45 per month (means $39.45 per year) Gives you 5 goals and 30 projects, contexts and checklist. Plus you’ll get Schedules & Calendar section.
  • Premium: $7.95 per month (means $7.96 per year) Unlimited of everything.

Overall, GTDagenda is an interesting choice for you who wish to have an alternative and extensive ways to implement the original GTD concept from David Allen. But Dan Baluta is working quite hard to improve this young GTD web service to perfection, here are the new features on the latest update that he mentioned to me:

  • Now Gtdagenda has full Someday/Maybe functionality
  • You can easily move your tasks and projects between "Active" "Someday/Maybe" and "Archive" This will clear your mind, and will boost your productivity.

But my biggest wish, and perhaps for iPhone users too, is that Dan can give GTDagenda better user interface, with more eye-candy colors will not hurt and in fact will become more attractive & less stressful ;-D

Toodledo

Another free GTD web-based service, that uses David Allen’s GTD concept to handle your daily task management. The desktop version can be accessed with any web browsers available, and Toodledo is now also optimized for iPhone. Just point your iPhone’s Safari to this link, to open a special mobile web page. Toodledo has unique features too that separates it from other competitors, there are 6 of them:

  1. Hotlist
  2. Folders
  3. Due-dates
  4. Priorities
  5. Recently Completed
  6. Settings

I think each of those features above is self-explanatory as what it’s written, so no need for more explaining. And if you feel the free version of Toodledo is not enough, you may open two different kind of pro accounts with many additional features; it’s too long to be mentioned here so you have to go to its own page.

So good luck with your next got to do lists, have a great and productive start of the weekend!

[blogged with my Treo 750v]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another good GTD application for the iPhone is Nozbe (http://nozbe.com). When the App Store opens next month I expect several native iPhone applications, such a OmniFocus (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/iphone/)

Andy J. S. said...

Thanks for the tip, Jeroen.
I'll take a deeper look at them and post about them later.

Unknown said...

Andy,
I will try this and put up a review. Thanks!

Andy J. S. said...

You're welcome Joe, glad to help with your passion for GTD. ;-)
By the way, love your blog!