Getting Things Done. GTD.

My colleague Eric Guilyardi showed me Pagico on Friday. I was sufficiently impressed that I spent a few hours on Saturday morning playing with it.

Why? Well, I’m continually feeling hassled by the number of things that I’m trying to keep track of, the size of my inbox etc, so a good GTD tool has always been something I’ve been looking for.

Years ago I used Remember the Milk (successfully, for some months, but in the end it it couldn’t deal with the complexity of information I wanted to store in it). I’ve used a range of notes tools, and I’m currently using Evernote. I use it for everything of course, but for GTD, I just use a weekly to-do list with check boxes, but it doesn’t organise things … and I find I ignore the reminders … so is there something better out there?

Well, Pagico on Eric’s screen certainly looked like it. I particularly liked the someday tasks, that show up for tomorrow. I liked the “dashboard” (pseudo-Gantt) … and when I read about it I liked the idea of Evernote and email integration. So, as i said, I spent some hours with it. Of course, in doing so, I did a bit of googling… and started wondering whether Pagico was really what I want.

However, meanwhile, in just trying to work out how to use Pagico, I did some really useful thinking about how to organise my workflow into task lists, tasks, projects and collections. I (manually) moved a bunch of emails into Pagico (and archived them in Gmail). I archived everything else. I achieved inbox zero for the first time in, well, it seems like forever (certainly at least a year). The lesson I take from that particular exercise is that the “organise” part of GTD is incredibly important, and probably independent of the tool (provided it has at least three levels of hierarchy).

Experience with Pagico itself? Well, I had some little glitches I didn’t like, so on Saturday I wrote to the developer. On Sunday I had a reply, I replied, he replied. Blimey, that’s responsive (and I made it clear I was only using the trial version and might not buy). Sounds like he’ll fix some of the things I didn’t like/wanted. Blimey again.

At this point I have a lot of actions in a few projects. We’ll see how the week goes, but I’m already a bit disappointed in that the evernote integration is weak - one only gets to drag a web-link in, so it doesn’t work with native (mac[^1](/computing/2014/08/building_your_own_jasmin_virtual_machine/). But I have to confess, for management gubbins, I do like the Mac. Damn it. Worse, nowadays, management gubbins is most of my day job, which is why the blogging has dried up. Damn it again. Oh, and I have to say, the macbook hardware is really good too!]) application I use. Also, my email is in gmail. I haven’t found a way of marking an email as a task, or how to drag an email into Pagico. For me that’s absolutely crucial. I suppose I could load gmail into the Mac email app (from where d&d apparently works), but I am rather partial to google’s filtering into priority inbox etc … (but maybe I don’t need that with a good GTD tool).

So, just this few hours of playing with Pagico has made me realise that: I do need a really good GTD tool, even the thinking that this GTD tool made me do was useful, but it needs evernote, email and calendar integration. Oh, and it has to have a good android interface on phone and tablet. Will it be Pagico, or will it be something else?

As I said above, I did some googling, and in doing so I discovered that the whole GTD world has moved on a lot since I last paid attention. purplezengoat, for example, has a very interesting list of tools to think about. I intend to think about them, possibly concentrating on iqtell and zendone. But I’m going to give Pagico a week. Stay tuned. [^1]: Yes, I sold my soul and moved to a macbook about six months ago, but never fear, i only do management gubbins on it, my real work is done on a [linux virtual machine

trackbacks (1)

Pagico Experience at week one. (from “Bryan’s Blog” on (on Sunday 01 February, 2015))Ok, I promised to report my experience with pagico at week one …

comments (2)

Chris R (on Monday 26 January, 2015) Bryan, I use Gmail via the MacMail app (using IMAP), but it doesn’t stop me using Gmail via native web interface when I need to. Would that work?

Bryan (on Monday 26 January, 2015) Hi Chris. Thanks. Indeed that’s an option … but I’ve done a bit more since I wrote that. It turns out that the drag’n’drop from mac mail doesn’t really do what I want either. I’ll write it up at the end of the week.