Holy carp.  I think I have found the coolest app that I’ve seen in a long time.  It is cer­tainly one of the coolest pro­duc­tiv­ity apps I’ve seen in an even longer time.

First off, let me say that I’m a bit jaded when it comes to “per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity” crap.  I have seen so many lit­tle apps and tricks and tips.  I have seen fancy todo-list pro­grams and out­lin­ers, with all sorts of inte­gra­tion into your email pro­gram, PDA, and what­not.  I also get highly annoyed by peo­ple who have found a great way (for them) to orga­nize their life and sud­denly decide it’s the per­fect way for every­one to orga­nize their lives too, so become evan­ge­lists about it.  I get annoyed by peo­ple who do noth­ing but orga­nize their lives, to the point that they spend all their time on the “meta” like orga­ni­za­tion and no time on the actual “get­ting things done” part.  Hey!  I just spent 8 hours learn­ing this fancy com­puter pro­gram and enter­ing all of my to-do items into it. (Nev­er­mind that those 8 hours could have been bet­ter spent by actu­ally doing the 20 min­utes worth of to-do-item work rather than avoid­ing it.) So yes, I’m a bit jaded.  My orga­ni­za­tion tools?  I use a text edi­tor to edit “todo.txt” and when I want to get really fancy, I use the bare min­i­mum fea­tures of OmniOut­liner.  For longer term and more per­ma­nent stuff (e.g. HOW­TOs that I think I’ll need in the future), I use my own pri­vate Wiki.

The thing I found today is called GTDTid­dly­Wiki.  Pre­sum­ably, GTD means Get­ting Things Done?  Any­way, it is a Wiki (for those famil­iar with the term), much like Medi­aWiki and Wikipedia.  The twist is that it’s imple­mented com­pletely in JavaScript in a sin­gle HTML file.  There’s no “server side.”  There’s no PHP or Perl.  When you make edits to the page, the JavaScript page actu­ally rewrites itself and saves it back to disk.  Even from a programming/engineering point of view, that’s quite a feat and bor­ders on being a Quine (for those that were pay­ing atten­tion dur­ing Godel, Escher, Bach.)

At present, I have a file called “todo.txt” that con­tains a vast col­lec­tion of notes.  Some of it is things to get done.  Some of it is notes to myself (flight num­ber and times.) Some of it is just scratch­pad space for solv­ing a par­tic­u­lar com­pu­ta­tional prob­lem or puz­zle.  Some of it is notes on future blog posts that I’d like to make.  OS X is nice in that I can drag this text file into the wharf (…errr… dock…that’s old NeXTstep/OpenStep ter­mi­nol­ogy slip­ping in…) and have it launch my browser.  I think I’m going to scrap this file in favor of a lit­tle mini Wiki.

Obvi­ously, there are some things that a “real” Wiki does that this lit­tle mini-JavaScript-AJAX Wiki can’t.  For instance, col­lab­o­ra­tion and access from any machine on the inter­net.  For that, I still have my own per­sonal Wiki at Stack Over­flow.  Start­ing today, I’ll replace my todo.txt with the GTD index.html and see where it takes me.  It may even be faster because I always have a browser open, but don’t always have BBE­dit loaded.

The GTD Wiki itself can be loaded in your browser and saved to disk.  Then you can use it imme­di­ately.  I would sug­gest read­ing this arti­cle on Life­Hacker to bet­ter acquaint your­self with its usage beforehand.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. Ever­note?
2. Wikis and notepads and text files, oh my!
3. iPhone turnkey hackery
4. “I’ll take ‘Rea­sons I switched to Mac for $1000,’ Alex!”
5. The num­ber you have dialed has changed.  Please make a note of it.

Tagged as: gtd, software, stackoverflow, tiddlywiki, todo, wiki