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---
date: "2007-04-04T22:20:37Z"
title: Catching Up Using GTD and Todo.txt
---
<p>Last night I dusted off and started re-reading my copy of
<a href="http://www.davidco.com/">"Getting Things Done" (GTD)</a>. I'm a bit overwhelmed
with projects and new ideas at the moment, so taking some time to
optimize my scheduling algorithm seemed like wise thing to do.</p>
<p>A bit of Googling turned up a plethora of GTD-inspired applications,
including several desktop applications (no thanks), a ton of web-based
task managers (maybe!), and even <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=vim+gtd">a couple of Vim-based solutions</a> plugins (neat!). </p>
<p>On a whim, I decided to check out <a href="http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/">Tracks</a>, a <a href="http://rubyonrails.com/">Rails</a> GTD
application. Tracks was kind of a turd; the documentation
is sparse, there seem to be a couple of weird bugs, and it didn't look
so hot in my web browser (my guess is the stylesheet is pretty
Mac-specific, although I didn't poke around too much to see what the
problem was).</p>
<p>The attempted Tracks install wasn't a total bust, because I used it as
an opportunity to upgrade my internal web/rails <a href="http://linux-vserver.org/">VServer</a>. I've been
using VServers at the house for quite a while now and I love them;
there's even an entry my to-do list to write a VServer post which I
haven't gotten to. Playing around with Tracks also gave me
an opportunity to set up a <a href="http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/" title="Fast HTTP library and server for Ruby">Mongrel</a> cluster, which, barring one minor
hiccup, is as straightforward to configure as <a href="http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/apache.html" title="Proxy and clustering with Mongrel and Apache.">the documentation implies</a>.</p>
<p>Next on my list was <a href="http://todotxt.com/" title="Command-line GTD-style task manager.">Todo.txt</a>. Todo.txt certainly isn't for
everyone; it's a shell script and a text file, and that's pretty much
it. It's also exactly what I wanted; simple, unobtrusive, and
future-proof. I set up the <a href="http://aim.com"><acronym title='AOL Instant Messenger'>AIM</acronym></a> bot too, so I've got a couple
different interfaces for adding and viewing tasks. <a href="http://calendar.google.com/">Google Calendar</a>
integration would be nice, although that's probably been done too and I
just need to dig it up.</p>
<p>Anyway, back to reading and trying to re-shoehorn my brain into GTD and
Todo.txt.</p>
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