Getting Things Done in Thinking Rock

For those of you that aren’t aware, the title of this post; “Getting Things Done” is also the title of a best-selling book on time and task management by David Allen. Although it’s a self-help book, it’s not in the same category of “Become a Millionaire Overnight” style books, what it is, is a good, honest factual book about various systems of time and task management that are actually applicable to the real world and our real lives. If you haven’t read it, and you are serious about getting your life organised, to a point where your brain is used for thought or creativity rather than trying to remember all the things you had to do today, you should go and buy it now. For less than the price of couple of fast food meals, or a couple of pints of beer (depending on where you live!), it’s something that could really change your life, especially if you have a PDA and/or Outlook and everything is as disorganised as it always was!!

For those of you that are aware or do know about GTD as it’s affectionately known, there’s a fantastic tool coming out of Australia called ThinkingRock. the biggest benefit is its value for money, that it is, it’s free! The second great thing is that it’s actively developed, and slowly but surely is improving with each release. They have a very clear idea about where they want to go with the software, and have great community input, they’ve recently added a Windows Mobile GTD partner for ThinkingRock which allows you to synchronise and take your tasks and next actions with you. Although some people may comment that it’s not the prettiest UI in the world, it’s highly functional has all the tools I need on a day-to-day basis, which is much more important than great looking software that’s good for nothing. So go try it, the beta version (2.0) is what I’ve been using on Windows and OSX and it’s been 100% stable so far. It’s written in Java and is almost certainly available for your current platform.

If you already use it, or find it useful enough to use on a day-by-day basis, why not go and contribute something to the software team (you can find a link at the top right corner of the home page), which will only ensure that they are able to spend more time developing the software and making it even better (and perhaps a little prettier )

If you’re already using it, as always I’d love to hear more about it and what you find as the most useful features?. Cheers… ’til next time.