Category Archives: GTD General

General posts about the Getting Things Done methodology.

Action Tracker – GTD App on FileMaker Pro Review

Action Tracker is a simple yet effective take on the productivity model advocated by David Allen in his “Getting Things Done” system.

The program is based on the FileMaker Pro software and uses this basis to create a clean, functional and fairly minimalist design for users to sort and manage their tasks through.

The official home of Action Tracker is at Macproductive.com but it appears that the site is no longer registered or the company has let is lapse out of error. The application can be still downloaded from various Mac Download sites for free.

Visuals with Action Tracker are fairly average but ultimately succeed in the essential goal of encouraging easy navigation and access to the extensive feature set provided by the platform.

Those already acquainted with FileMaker Pro should find a certain level of familiarity in the aesthetics presented here. Action Tracker possesses the same level of Mac sheen that most of the OS’ first-party programs host — a factor which ultimately works to make it into a clear and graphically sound choice for a productivity software foundation.

Action Tracker’s strongest suit is undoubtedly the number of features made available by the program. The aforementioned FileMaker Pro platform has enabled Action Tracker’s designers to offer a wide variety of options and customization for users to take advantage of.

All of the GTD staples devotees have come to expect in software (to-do lists with contexts, reminders, status and so forth) are in place with Action Tracker. Each element of sorting and organizing has been paid good attention as well and the detail provided in sorting is fantastic.

Users are able to micro-manage each item through the attachment of external documents (including Excel, PowerPoint, and Word file extensions aside the support for photo, video and PDF formats) while also enjoying the ability to link work with web and email addresses through a simple, clickable interface.

List items can also be linked together for easy reference across the system, a touch which aids in ensuring smooth navigation and speedy movement from project to project.

Action Tracker could have benefited from the inclusion of mobile application support but it’s clear that Denny Henke, designer of the system, is working on a limited budget so far.

The system makes up for this shortcoming with the presence of a feature which prepares selected lists for note card printing, a low-tech but ultimately effective method of addressing portability for serious, regular users.

If there is a major flaw in the Action Tracker system it can be attributed to the previously mentioned strengths in feature creation. Although the FileMaker Pro foundation allows for a fantastic level of customization and depth to the software, the uninitiated may have a fairly difficult time figuring out how to get started with their work.

The program isn’t overly complicated but learning its intricacies is somewhat daunting for those who are being exposed to FileMaker Pro for the first time via Action Tracker.

A greater level of community involvement could have gone a long way toward addressing the issues with Action Tracker’s learning curve. While users are still able to seek out guides, tutorials and forums through external sources, the main project homepage lacks in any real aid for those just taking the system for a spin.

The creation of a hosted message board or tutorial would go a long way toward helping out novices with getting the most from the system and will hopefully see an appearance in the future.

Ultimately Action Tracker is a solid choice for GTD adherents who are enticed (rather than put off) by the idea of a productivity platform which requires a good amount of invested time to warrant proper results.

Their may be an issue with the ongoing support and development for the application as it would appear that the domain is no longer being used by the team behind Action Tracker.

The fairly no-nonsense approach to Action Tracker’s core features combine with the depth and customization possible within them to create a difficult but rewarding productivity system.

Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 8th March 2009

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Had a great day yesterday at ThinkVisibility which was a one day social media, SEO, and blogging conference that was held in my home town of Leeds. Great speakers and I left the day feeling inspired!

Here are a collection of links for this week.

My first link for this week is a great post on GTDTimes from David Pierce explaining why the Web Works for GTD. David is a reader of this blog and regular commenter and it is great to see him turn his hand to writing, well done and great post!
My second link is a link to a post that reviews Things for the iPhone. I briefly tried Things but I am still firmly routed to my GTD App of choice, OmniFocus.
My third link is a link to a Helpful Guide on how to Reduce Stress. Nice little post where the author identifies Procrastination as the largest issue. Worth a read or listen as they have the facility to play the blog post via a podcast.
My fourth link is a nice list of Top iPhone Apps from the Molanphy Blog. I am posting this link as I read the short review of Ambience and then went ahead and bought it.
My fifth and last link for this week is a link to a competition on the Nozbe Blog to win a free pass to the GTD Summit in San Francisco. This is a free gift with a $2295 value and if you are around the bay area a great prize to win! You have to comment on the post at the Nozbe blog in order to stand a chance of winning.

Wishing you all a productive week, as always!

Andrew..

Share your Spotify Playlists at ShareMyPlaylists.com

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A few weeks ago I blogged about Spotify and I released a Motivational Songs Spotify playlist.

Well, Kieron from UK Offer Media has taken a collection of Spotify Playlists and created a site where users can share them.

My Motivational Songs Spotify playlist is on the site and has been receiving great rankings.

So, if you use Spotify take a look at the ShareMyPlaylist.com site and if you are note yet a Spotify user, now is the time to check it out!

MIndManager GTD Mind Mapping Webinar

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MindJet Mind Manager
Michael Deutch is the Chief Evangelist for Mindjet and a fellow and also a fellow follower of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) Methodology.

Michael is running a Webinar on March the 24th from 1000 to 1100 PDT that is going to show you how Michael has incorporated Mind Mapping into his GTD system using MindManager from MindJet.

Michael writes for the MindJet Blog and has done some great posts covering GTD and productivity.

Information for the free webinar can be found here. I am going to try to be on it live but if not will definitely catch it after the event.

Sounds like a great event from a great guy and a great company! Be sure to check it out..

Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 1st March 2009

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The main event of this week was the arrival of my new shiny 17″ MacBook Pro.

To mark this event I thought I would take a break from the usual and provide five great links that help you when you come to upgrade your Mac and o not want to use the migration assistant.

Apologies in advance to Windows and Linux users as this is obviously a Mac specific post.

Even if you are not buying a new Mac, the bloated way Apple handles media may mean that you have to move your iTunes or iPhoto library to an external disk so these links contain gems of information.

Here are a collection of five links that I have found useful this week when migrating from my old MacBook Pro to my new MacBook Pro.

My first link for this week is the Apple Page covering the Migration Assistant. This is an amazing tool that I have used before that allows you to copy all of your settings from your Old Mac to your New Mac over a Firewire cable. Makes upgrading a dream if you are happy with the build of your old machine.
My second link is a link to a post from eHow about how to Migrate your Mac Email. The post shows you how to move your email as well as preserve your settings such as Smart Mailboxes and Mailbox Rules.
My third link is a link to an olf post from Merlin Mann that covers Some Handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes. I used this post to recreate these mailboxes that fit in with Merlin’s Inbox Zero methodology.
My fourth link is a thread on the Apple Forums about how to move your iPhoto library. I copied the whole of my library to my new MacBook Pro and everything was preserved, just how it should be.
My fifth and last link for this week is a post from the iLounge about how to move your ITunes library. My iTunes library is 40GB and I have it on my new MacBook Pro but I am thinking of moving it to an external storage device so I can share it through the house and also conserve space on my MacBook HDD.

Wishing you all a productive week, as always!

Andrew..

My New MacBook Pro – How I Migrated

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I have been quiet this week due to being very busy with work and also receiving my new 17″ MacBook Pro on Wednesday evening.

MacBook Pro

I am just about done with the migration and though I would share some of my findings for anybody wlse who is moving from an old Mac to a new one.

I could have used the Migration Assistant and sucked my old laptop to my new one. I used this when I rebuilt my old laptop and upgraded the hard drive and it worked amazingly. As my old laptop was three years old, and had been used to test a lot of software I decided to opt for the manual approach.

Being an organized person, my data was all organized under my Documents folder. This made it pretty easy to move my Documents to my NAS, and then to my new Mac preserving the same structure as I had before.

I did a bit of pruning before the copy and got rid of old information that I no longer needed. I also archived some of it off to DVDs to go into the Someday/Maybe drawer that I use to good effect.

The data was the easy part. I then had to migrate Mail and all my media such as my iPhoto Library, Aperture Library, and my iTunes Library.

Let’s start with the media. I did expect problems when moving my media due to the customizations that I have done to my media including tagging etc. Well, to my surpirse, I copied my Aperture and iPhoto libraries to my new machine and they all worked fine. I then deauthorized my old laptop from within iTunes, copied the iTunes folder to my new laptop and all went smooth.

I was using iLife ’09 on both my old and new Mac’s so everything was very easy to migrate. iPhoto and Aperture both use a Library. These are package files that contain all the other files and represent themselves as a single file within the Operating System. Sure does make copying easier!

Now onto Email migration. I have a few mailboxes that I use on the Mail.app client built into the Mac Operating System. My main mailboxes are IMAP through Google Apps so these were as easy as setting up the new mail accounts on the new laptop.

I have a few old POP accounts and for these I created the POP account on the new laptop and archived the old mail onto one of my USB disks for storage and the ability to search through this at a later date if needed.

All smooth so far. Now to re-install some of the applications I use. There are a few killer applications that I use and could not live without. These are my core apps that I installed and I decided that if I need any of ther other apps on my old laptop then I would install them as required.

My core apps are:

I downloaded the latest version of each app and used my serial numbers where applicable that I always store in Evernote. This is a great use of Evernote and I have been storing my software licenses in it since I got it.

So, all migrated and working good. The new laptop is amazing. So much faster than the old one and I cannot wait for the dual link DVI connector to arrive so I can hook it up to my 30″ Display.

Had a real busy week this week and my head has been all over the place. I have been doing some testing for customers and my home office currently looks like a junkyard from PC World. I hate it when my office is cluttered and I am finishing this post to go and declutter!

Hope you are all enjoying your weekend.

Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 22nd February 2009

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Hope you all have had a great week. I passed my exam last Monday that I had been studying hard for over the past few weeks. I made some great Mind Maps that sure did help with the retention of information.

I must write more about my experiences with Mind Mapping as they help me with so many aspects of my life.

Here are my collection of links for this week.

My first link for this week is a another great post from the MindJet Blog about Getting Projects Done. This post looks at using Mind Manager 8, Google Docs, and Basecamp to streamline your project process. These great posts keep on coming out of Michael Deutch, well done!
My second link is a link to a post outlining 69 Great OS X Time Savers. Being a Mac User and somebody who loves saving time I found this a great little list. I do most of the items on the list but I did pick up a few new tips.
My third link is a link to a nice little post about Ubiquitous Capture with regards to GTD. I have written a few posts myself on Ubiquitous Capture as they in my opinion, are a key to success with GTD
My fourth link is a link to a nice little post about Mind Mapping and GTD. This is from a blogger who luckily attended a Making it All Work seminar in Amsterdam.
My fifth and last link for this week is an Introduction to GTD for Fashion People from the Ann Ching Wang blog. Nice read from somebody with a different perspective.

I attended another Northern UK Bloggers meetup on Friday. Another great meeting and great to share ideas and thoughts with fellow bloggers.

Wishing you all a productive week, as always!

Andrew..

Tracks – Ruby on Rails GTD Application Review

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Tracks GTD is a Ruby on Rails web-based application that is meant to serve as a hub for users to organize their life and work within. The system is an open-source (hence, free) program from the Tracks team of developers and is an impressive platform which offers relatively immediate accessibility for anyone new to the application.

Tracks GTD

Tracks GTD looks great and is easy to get running as the installer even includes the WEBrick Webserver. The program runs smoothly on Windows and Mac operating systems alike.

There is a bit of clutter to get used to but nothing is so bad that it will get in the way of day-to-day use of the system. Everything looks very clean with functionality having obviously been placed as a priority of the design contributors working on Tracks GTD.

The homepage for the application isn’t too pretty but this shouldn’t be much of a deterrent for most users as it isn’t necessary to view every time the program is run.

Considering the level of in-depth coding which has gone into the Tracks GTD platform, the design does a great job of highlighting significant aspects of the program while stepping out of the way enough to ensure quick, smooth load times.

Tracks GTD

The interface hosts a lot of great features and represents a solid array of the organizational plans or tools set forward by David Allen in the Getting Things Done Methodology. Everything is extremely customizable, a fantastic trait for users who wish to play with the system and tweak it until it’s set up for the model that can provide them with maximum efficiency.

The system automatically refreshes new data entries and allows for quick updating of various categories and sub-categories (including GTD staples like Projects, Tasks, Next Action, and Someday/Maybe groupings) along with different geographical contexts (like at home, at computer, at phone and so forth).

Tracks GTD

Users can receive RSS, iCal and plain text feeds as well as highlighting and display options which pop-up tasks scheduled when they are chronologically relevant.

There is also a stat feature which displays your productivity over a set period of time through a visual display, a feature which isn’t really important but that still provides a bit of satisfaction for having achieved set goals and projects.

Some of the options are fairly unnecessary but, just the same, Tracks GTD doesn’t have any glaring flaws that should hold anyone back from giving it a try.

One of the best aspects worth mentioning in an overall review of the system is that of Tracks GTD’s ongoing development.

The open-source nature of the application makes it encouraging for feedback and new designs to be submitted to the Tracks team from those who have adopted the platform as part of their organizational process. This level of user interaction fosters a sense of community and encourages even better versions of Tracks GTD to be released in the future.

Tracks GTD

While there are other GTD organizational systems worth looking at, Tracks GTD is one of the best, downloadable options out there for those looking into implementing a GTD app in their daily life.

The platform is fairly unorthodox in terms of information input and display but Tracks GTD is also one of the most unique and deep programs currently available.

For that feature alone, it’s a good idea to take it for a spin yourself and see if it’s the right productivity tool for your work and life style.

Be sure to check out this Tracks Screencast that is in Quicktime format and as always, I love to hear your comments!

Cool Little Firefox Time Saving Tip

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Just watched a nice little video from fellow productivity blogger, Jared Goralnick over at Technotheory.com.

I thought I would share it. Cannot believe I had not noticed this before and I am sure I will now use this all the time!

Got any other neat little Firefox tips? If so, let me know by leaving a comment below.

Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 15th February 2009