PyGTD, by Keith Martin, is an interesting little Python command-line program for GTD. You input your projects, tasks, and contexts into some specially formatted files and run this program and it spits out a todo.txt file which is your reference. As you complete tasks, you update the todo.txt file and run the program and it syncs the changes back to your context files.
This is cute and might be the ticket for certain die-hard Unix command-line freaks, but I found it a bit too complex and cumbersome. And for me, if it’s not drop-dead easy, I will end up not doing it in the heat of the moment when it’s a busy day and I have things flying at me from all directions.
As it happens, I’ve been playing a bit lately with my own homegrown Python-based command-line GTD setup. Mine I think is pretty simple and thus tenable as something that could be used on a daily basis, but I’ll have to test it in the real-world for a few weeks to see how it “scales”. If it goes well, I will be sure to post about it.
I’m also working on a little Python program as well. It’s based around a directory of ReST formatted text files. I will be interested in seeing yours if you post it.
Hmm, what are ReST text files? Is this REST as in Representational State Transfer?
Mine uses hierarchical Unix directories to represent tasks and their subtasks – this hierarchy of tasks is basically a generalization of David Allen’s projects and tasks. I figured why limit yourself to two levels of hierarchy, especially since David refers to other levels, such as “roles”, “purpose”, etc. Tasks then can have one or more “tags” (represented simply as dot files in the directory) which are basically a generalization of his concept of contexts. The Python program then lets you ask for, say, all the tasks with the tag “Computer” and there are facilities for listing and jumping to that directory using an external program called cdargs, along with a bash function. You also can easily see the tree by using standard programs that display file trees. It’s funky, but it just might work. For me at least.
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. 🙂
ReST is ReStructuredText from docutils. Similar idea but instead of have a directory per task, It’s a file per task and the file uses the metadata information from ReST to do things similar to yours where you can query contexts and so on. Also by including ReST I can easily turn everything into a webpage and slap it up as my homepage.
Very interesting. Will you post some code? I’ve been using pyGTD a while and like it. But I was thinking in doing some python programing myself too. Maybe we could share some ideas.
Do you know the Above & Beyond program from http://www.1soft.com is interesting too.
If you liked Above & Beyond, then you should definitely check out TimeTo for Windows (www.timeto.org).