The Brian Hayes

Using Things and Anxiety for GTD

I’ve finally worked out a GTD system that I’m happy with.  I’ve struggled with a way to stay on top of the daily deluge of to-dos that come in from everyone from clients to co-workers to myself. I’ve managed to come up with a system that I’m pretty happy about and that works well.

The backbone of the system is Things. This is a GTD-ish application for mac that has a pretty full feature set.  I’m by no means a GTD freak and I’m sure I break rules for that everyday. I like things for a couple of reason.  Quick entry allows a simple keystroke to open a window to create a new to-do item. It’s fast and easy. Projects, tags and due dates are only other areas I use. Each to-do is assigned to a project (typically just a client name) and tagged with the name of who is involved. These two become much more important when using Anxiety as a HUD.  That’s really the extent of my interaction with Things. I do have their iPhone app and can sync to that on wifi but I don’t use that often.

In comes Anxiety. Anxiety is a lightweight to-do list.  The core feature of why this works so well is that both Things and Anxiety and use the new Leopard feature of system-wide database. This means that they can use iCal to sync to-do items back and forth. Anxiety provides a great HUD view for all of my to-do items that are listed in Things. Using project and tags for people as I mentioned above all of my to-do items show up in Anxiety in the following format:

Project Name: To-do task item @tag(person’s name)

I have Anxiety syncing just items due Today in Things and checking them off in Anxiety checks them off in Things. So far I’ve been pretty happy with this method.