How do folks stay on task? Work ethic? Inspiration from Stephen R. Covey or David Allen? Tools? Ability to focus? Coffee?
For most folks I’ve asked directly, the answer is “some combination of the above”.
Inspired by this post by Justin Miranda of OpenMRS and a recent conversation with George, I decided to give my 2ยข on some stuff I’ve tried and what seems to work.
I used to use PocketMod (half in jest), then a big vimoutliner-formatted plain text TODO file under version control, but lately I use RememberTheMilk because of the various views of tasks, APIs and ease of use.
I use gnotime for time tracking. The interface is pretty dismal so I just use one task to keep track of hours. It actually has a slick (albeit arcane) guile/html reporting engine, and I’ve made one simple custom report so I can import hours into our timesheet system at work.
For work – I use http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/PlannerMode which almost certainly puts your puny vimoutliner to shame (that last part works best if you can imagine it through a stereotyped iron curtain accent). It integrates with other stuff and could probably feed into RTM but I don’t know how and haven’t needed it, but it has publishing features and Sacha Chua (or whoever the maintainer is) uses (or used) it to publish her blog.
For personal junk, I, too use RTM. Do you follow @rtm? It’s way sweet.
When I did time tracking in my consulting gig, we used harvest, which got the job done nicely: http://www.getharvest.com/
Comment by patrick — March 19, 2009 @ 12:04 pm UTC
I use GTDTiddlyWiki to organize several paper lists; I’ve just changed the CSS to print on 8 1/2 x 11 paper, which I find very useful when I’m away from a computer. I staple those lists and keep them in a plain file folder. I keep the original digital copy sync’ed between my three different work locations by saving it to my DropBox during my Weekly Review.
Unfortunately, GnoTime’s UI does suck and got me looking around for another solution just last week, and I’ve found that GTimeLog does the job quite nicely. I like how it’s text-based, and will group related tasks in the daily or weekly reports. I guess it could use a nice pluggable reports interface like GnoTime.
Comment by Forest Monsen — April 8, 2009 @ 2:33 pm UTC