2007-02-20 23:31
Online GTD Application: Vitalist
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.
Vitalist is an online GTD application I haven’t mentioned yet. Which is a shame, because the little I’ve tested it so far, it’s great, and beats Nozbe (which I recently blogged about and which effectively priced itself out of my GTD application horizon) in several respects.
I know I’ve seen Vitalist before, but that was quite a while back, in its infancy. Right then it was dismissed as just not ready for prime time yet.
But now it looks like it’s matured quite well, and the last few days it’s been cropping up in my Technorati GTD feed with positive mentions, so I thought I’d try it again, especially since I couldn’t get Tracks up and running as I planned to.
It’s now good enough that it has replaced Nozbe—and before that, Tracks—in the collection of Firefox tabs that I use for my home page, and I expect I’ll stop looking for alternatives for a while and actually Get Things Done …
Some things I like about Vitalist
Dumping stuff in there is easy. There’s an Inbox, where you can input a stream of actions. Hitting enter posts the action and lets you enter a new one right away. And today they added the ability to add actions by sending emails to a special address (username-NNNN@vitalist.com, where NNNN is a 4–6 digit personal code). Which means I can also use MMS messages to enter actions.
You don’t need to assign actions to a particular project. This means you can enter one-off things (“Buy cat food”, “Return lawn mower to neighbor” etc.)
Daily email reminders. You can get your ‘Dashboard’ mailed to you every day. The Dashboard displays current pressing issues — that is, items associated with a point in time, like ticklers and overdue and upcoming actions.
Export any view to print, feed, iCal and more. This way you can get your Actions page, Contexts page or any other Vitalist page that has a row of icons and links in the top right in your preferred format. Well, among the available ones, of course.
Mobile access. I can log in to Vitalist with my new Treo 680, with its limited browser, to check out the actions or enter new ones. This seriously reduces the need for an offline version or for printing lists, as I almost always have my phone when I’m away from a computer with Internet access.
Reasonable pricing. Free with ads, or $5/mo for file attachments (don’t need them, at least not yet), sharing (spouse not into this kind of thing), SSL (not that paranoid) and no ads (not that bothered by them.)
Some things I don’t like about Vitalist
Reminders don’t arrive at the correct time. I think they’re six hours behind, but I’ll need to test more to find out.
Keyboard shortcuts are flaky. One can optionally use unmodified keystrokes to navigate and do things in Vitalist, but this clashes with Quick Find in Firefox.
Submitting forms with errors resets the forms. If you enter a reminder date without a due date, for example, the New Action form is displayed again with an error message pointing this out at the top, and with a new, empty form below. Using the browser’s Back button doesn’t work, either. Very annoying.
Conclusion
I feel like I’m running around in the GTD application landscape like, well, something running from place to place in fast succession. But right now it feels like I’ve settled down a bit, since I think I’m pretty pleased with most aspects of Vitalist as a GTD solution.
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