I use David Allen’s Get Things Done (GTD) philosophy. It is one of the things that does not carry its own baggage and does not get in the way of doing. It is about doing than doing about doing, if you understand what I mean. Collect, process, organize and review now seem natural to me and this process has helped me streamline and organize my tasks.
In a lot of ways I think that GTD is most compatible with eXtreme Programming. The whole idea of keeping the process light-weight and ability to do certain things on the spot, without the whole application-approval mentality keeps them tightly integrated for me. GTD and XP might operate in different spaces, but they seem to have the same underlying philosophy. And, I have found others who have similar thoughts.
I have tried using various pieces of software for GTD. But some have stuck with me.
One of the tools I cannot do without is BasKet. It does not ask for type, it does not ask for size, and it does not require you to do anything for saving. It simply makes collecting information easy.
Along with it, I have used Tracks earlier, which is a Web based tool and works on all platforms. Recently I had switched to ThinkingRock, since I still have more affinity to desktop applications than web applications, especially if they are going to sit on my machine.
Another application I use along with these is Gmail, which works great with the GTDInbox Firefox extension. However I try to keep Gmail within the scope of communication than task management.
In spite of using three different applications, it does help me a lot. You might argue that there is no seamless integration between them, but it has hardly bothered me. I like the applications which let me focus on the subject rather than itself. If you are interested in GTD, following links can help:
I want to include GTD part of software development process. Time management and productivity are critical to any software process to work. I will try to follow this with more thoughts on that.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
I am currently taking a dip in GTD, and thinking about how it can be applied to software development. I have been pretty happy with the method so far, but am yet to discover a lot more!
Would love to know more from your experiences!
April 20th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Thank you for mentioning us! It’s interesting that you highlight the focus on communication rather than task management. That is certainly an important distinction, and one we hope to focus on in the future.
April 21st, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Thanks for the link!
November 9th, 2008 at 6:21 am
Hi,
This is a good collection of tools and I will take a look on them. Besides time management methods I also have been focussing on how to save a little bit of time here and there. You can find the result on my time management blog where I published about 200 concrete time saving tips on how to gain an extra hour every day.
http://memytime.wordpress.com/
It is being updated every day and tips can be applied at work, at home or on the road.