I’m not a full-on GTD nut; in fact, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with years with to-do lists, organizers, PDAs, and the like. I love the organization they bring to my life; I hate the fact that I can see I’m so busy.

If that makes sense to you, read on.

These past few months, I’ve had quite a bit on my mind: finishing and defending a doctoral thesis, transitioning to a postdoctoral post (little devices, languages, and operating systems related), and all the while generally jetting around the world (Houston (USA), Denmark, Scotland, Los Angeles (USA), Cleveland (USA), and Portugal). Really, when I signed up, they didn’t tell me about the travel. Honest.

So what do I do? I’m not such a fan of calendars; they’re heavyweight. As a Mac user, and fan of outliners, I like Kinkless GTD + OmniOutliner Pro. However, at some level, this is heavy. Nice, but heavy; it requires several applications (OmniOutliner, iCal) plus some big Applescripts.

Recently, I found ToDo.txt. This looks promising for the old-school GTD nut in you. It’s a couple of shell scripts that maintain a text file, using things like sed, awk, and grep to update and present your GTD lists. Now, this looks promising, but I’m torn in two directions. In one, it’s simplicity itself. In the other, I abhor shell scripts; they’re the ugliest sin ever inflicted on programmers after C, and plain text is about as far from a robust back-end as you can get. (Accessible via vi? Yes. Any consistency guarantees? No.)

As you can see, tools are toys—they are what we look at when we don’t really want to Get Things Done. At the same time, I’ve found that using Kinkless + OOP has been very useful. It just… isn’t quite what I want yet. It seems like a GTD system should be very easy to use (quick), omnipresent, and portable—I should never have to be without my to-do list.

Part of me thinks that I just need to use an old-fashioned Hipster PDA, and be done with it. Another part of me says that my soon-to-arrive Irex Iliad may become a useful tool for carrying around plain-text GTD lists—it is, after all, should be a very portable, low-power eInk device well suited to this kind of thing. Something that combines the ease-of-use of ToDo.txt with the ability to render and synchronize those lists to my Iliad… it’s possible, anyway.

If I stumble onto something amazing, I’ll let you know.