beyond the clouds

For the past year or so, I’ve been using Ethan Schoonover’s awesome Kinkless GTD (kGTD) to manage my active (and inactive) task lists. My brother Chris introduced me to GTD some time before that, and I was immediately hooked. The comments floating around the Web heralding GTD as a great solution for the geek masses was right on—the same anal-retentive nature I took to projects lent itself extremely well to this system. kGTD was one of my early discoveries; the only problem was that OmniOutliner Professional was decidedly not free. At that point in my life the only software I had ever paid for was Veta Universal for my then-swank Nokia 3650. $50 (and that was academic pricing) for an outlining app was crazy to me. Instead, I would pretend to be slick and use a variety of email addresses at my employ to keep registering for daily trial license of OOP; as long as I didn’t quit the app, it (and kGTD) kept running.

This summer found me working across the street in Hillenbrand managing conferences for that building as well as in Meredith. As soon as I saw conference as a project, kGTD became the perfect tool to manage the many tasks each group presented. Since the pay was pretty good (and virtually no expenses) I dropped the $50 for an OOP license and dumped massive amounts into kGTD.

Fittingly, I only used it for a couple days and then neglected it for the remainder of the summer. To this day, I use kGTD for a couple days, then seemingly forget about it until a month later when a new wave of inspiration to manage tasks arises again. I’m so used to balancing and remembering tasks in my mind that kGTD doesn’t hardly get any use. It’s frustrating and yet nothing I didn’t expect.

Enter Actiontastic. Initially I was drawn to the idea of a (for now) free GTD app that didn’t require the purchase of an app to run it; an actual self-contained, Mac OS X native GTD app! Despite my investment in OOP I downloaded Actiontastic and started playing around. While not as robust as kGTD (possibly only in my mind) it’s a great product even in beta. The one immediate advantage I see is the possibility of running Actiontastic on multiple Macs (at least during the beta). OOP was a one-machine license and running two Mac’s made using kGTD on both unrealistic without dropping another $50. Although Actiontastic does not have built-in synching (.Mac or otherwise) I can fake it by synching Actiontastic’s SQLite database file (in ~/Library/Application Support/Actiontastic). When Actiontastic hits 1.0, I’ll be very interested to see what the final price will be.

On a sidenote, I’m admittedly most interested in what The Omni Group’s direction for OmniFocus will be; if an honest-to-God GTD app from TOG came out with Ethan consulting on the design, the combination will likely win my use (and registration payment).