We could all be more organized. Some people find organization easy and manage to naturally live in a world of clipboards, charts and tick boxes. For the rest of us it’s not always a breeze to impose some semblance of order onto our lives and getting stuff done is usually a bit of a struggle.
If you need all the help you can get to stay on track, then you may find the approach suggested by David Allen of GTD (getting things done) helpful. This is a set of guiding principles that help you to manage the mess of personal and work tasks that occupy most of our lives and many geeks have embraced it, and can be embraced through your PC in the form of open-source freebie, GeeTeeDee, which runs in Windows and Linux.
When it comes to managing tasks, one huge to-do list has limitations. It probably includes things that can only be completed at the office, other tasks that you can only do at home and it ignores times when you could be productive to some extent, like when sitting on a bus.
Location and the available resources often dictate what you’re able to achieve, so it makes sense to get your task list to reflect that. Then, when you find yourself waiting on a colleague and you happen to have your phone to hand, you can quickly look up what calls you need to make and use the time productively.
GeeTeeDee is designed to take advantage of these principles so you can create groups of tasks that reflect different situations and give you the best chance to seize the moment when it arises.
When the program’s running, select a group in the left-hand pane or create a new one by right clicking and choosing Add Group then selecting a suitable icon and giving it a name. Click New to create a task in this group and add any notes you need plus a due date. You can quickly tick off your tasks as you get them done, bringing order to chaos and leaving you feeling in control of your life and surroundings.
GeeTeeDee 0.1.274 is available as a free open-source download for PCs running Windows or Linux.
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