2007-02-17 14:41
Finally signs of life from GTD developers
What is 'GTD'?
GTD stands for "Getting Things Done", and is a "work-life management system" and a book by David Allen.
Get the book here, while also helping me out (affiliate link)
Other GTD resources
43 Folders: Getting started with ‘Getting Things Done’
Tracks is a free GTD web app written in Ruby on Rails.
Just a few weeks after GTD application Nozbe launches, Scrybe developers realize they should probably blog more often. And the day after that, Propel’r developers realize the same thing.
And their progress reports state the same thing: It’s taking us longer than we initially thought. Scrybe developers don’t want to give a date, but I’m guessing they’ll be out of beta way before Propel’rs announced push back of the release date to some time this summer.
Now, it would be too cheap and obvious to point out the fact that developers of GTD applications aren’t Getting Things Done as fast as they thought.
But I think there’s an obvious lesson to be had here: Don’t announce your product prematurely. I don’t know why people do — I can’t really see any benefits. It’s just going to generate (over)hype, high expectations, lots of emails that need answering, and in general a lot of extra work that takes focus and energy away from developing.
In the case of Scrybe, I can see the point of getting lots of beta testers. But Propel’r developers aren’t doing that, so their extremely premature announcement doesn’t make much sense at all. And as they write in the blog post linked to above, they’ll soon release the initial release’s feature list. That’s only going to generate another flood of blog comments and emails from people who want more or other (often obscure) features.
I’m wondering if they shouldn’t at least make recommendations for other web applications people can use in the mean time, maybe along with statements like: “This setup won’t give you feature X or feature Y, but that’s why you’re going to need our product.”
Speaking of which, later today I think I’ll have a go at updating Tracks.
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