
Getting Things Done For Hackers - vgnet
http://gtdfh.branchable.com/
======
espinchi
Very helpful advice there.

Here's the GTD approach I've been following lately, which I'm very happy
about. It's based in the tool Trello.

I have several boards (for personal stuff, for my main side-project, for work,
for another project, and long-term goals). They all have four lists: Backlog,
To Do, Doing, Done. Every Sunday, "Done" is archived into "Done (2012.04.08)"
and I create a new, empty "Done" list. Then I bring tasks from the Backlog
into To Do, in a way that everything in this list is what I plan to get done
during the one-week sprint.

For projects I do with other people, we follow a similar approach, it's
working great.

I wrote a toy script that parses the Trello JSON output into text format that
I use for the weekly progress reports at my day job.

My productivity has overall improved. But, even more importantly, I feel less
overwhelmed by all the different tasks I have in the pipeline.

~~~
ar4s
This sounds like what I'm doing, without the text dump. But I like that, I
like that a lot. I'm not a dev, any chance I could get the script from you? ;)

~~~
espinchi
Here's the super basic tool/script I wrote for it:
<http://pablop.github.com/trello-weekly-report/>

I'm planning to improve this over time, purely as an exercise to get more
fluent in Python and Git.

This was actually a good excuse to get started with GitHub :)

~~~
ar4s
You're the man (woman?)! Sorry I didn't respond sooner. I've been playing with
the sample JSON... mind if I bother you with some questions?

Dunno if you accept Bitcoin, but I'd be happy to spare a few coins :)

------
thejerz
Well written & no-BS GTD summary. Thanks for sharing.

I just stopped using GTD after 5 years on the system, including 3 years on
OmniFocus. I respect David Allen and GTD a lot. But I found a better solution:
daily outcomes.

Say you are building a social network startup called FaceSpace. Here's what
your daily outcome list may look like:

Help people communicate more quickly -> Launch beta of FaceSpace -> Call Jason
for programmer recommendations

We're going after the "why" -- instead of just doing tasks.

You'll have maybe 5-8 of these for the day.

How is this different than GTD?

1) No long queues of things to do. Start fresh every day. What persists is the
outcomes we're after 2) Aware of the "why" behind a task gives you feelings of
motivation and purpose 3) Focusing on the "why" forces you to do 100%
necessary tasks 4) If life throws you a curve ball and you change the task,
it's okay... We're focused on achieving outcomes, not tasks

I think GTD is great but I feel it focuses on tasks at the expense of focusing
on the big picture. You shouldn't be waiting for a weekly review to see the
big picture -- that's just way too long. For me, staying focused on realizing
my outcomes all day has led to more directed and forward-driving tasks. As
many great men have said, it's not about which tasks you do it's about which
tasks you don't do. Focusing on the outcome helps you choose the best tasks.

Outcome lists FTW.

~~~
dfreire
Would you care to elaborate on this a bit? In your example the daily outcome
is:

Help people communicate more quickly -> Launch beta of FaceSpace -> Call Jason
for programmer recommendations

But the actual outcome (task) for that day would be "Call Jason for programmer
recommendations", right? I mean the "Launch beta of FaceSpace" seems more of a
long term or strategic goal, and the "Help people communicate more quickly"
more of a purpose, or like they say nowadays, a mantra.

So if you repeat this every day, isn't this overwhelming?

And there are a lot of intermediate steps between the "Call Jason" and the
"Launch website", so how do you keep track of these?

Finally, how do you see this as a substitute for GTD? (Since GTD is a
practical approach to keep track of everyday's bits of todos, that appear from
everywhere.)

------
dasil003
Some very good hints in here. I think the part where I differ most is that I'm
a huge proponent of OmniFocus. It's quite a complex piece of software, but it
is also very well designed, so you can put together a lot of different
workflows and be mostly keyboard driven.

Being able to cross-reference projects/contexts with easy filters for next
action or ticklers is invaluable. Repeating events and automatic review
scheduling are the icing on the cake. I believe in GTD enough that I would
still do it in pure paper format if I needed to, but OmniFocus can remove most
of the overhead which makes it all the more attractive.

It's a good enough program that I'm contemplating switching from Android to
iPhone just to have it on my mobile.

~~~
dwich
Agreed, they put a lot of thought into small conveniences that most other apps
ignore. It's nice to have it grab e-mails as task items, and to just type
"taskname<tab>1w<tab>1m" to create a task that won't be addressed for a week,
but is due in a month.

------
easonchan42
I think if you care about the GTD stuff itself too much, you are no getting
things done at all.

Maybe you just doing fake work, getting some fake motivation from a list of
GTD advice which you will lose while you continue reading HN, twitter, etc.

In my opinion, getting things done is just 3 simple step.

get thing!

do it!

done!

~~~
victork2
This is very true. These GTD methods and everything is to "getting things
done" what mac Donalds is to eating: it's quick; it's cheap but it's also a
lot of crap.

This read is part of the big family of "self-motivation" seminars and "find
your inner strength "bullshit. I hate to break it this way but drive is
something you cultivate yourself, no generic "method" will do it for you. The
irony is in those lists and methodology is most of the time people are
motivated to do the setup for it: buy the books, the special furnitures, plan
on organizing their time and in the end, when it's supposed to start the
method falls flat and you realize that you aren't changed. Slacking is still a
big part of your life, losing time on the internet, looking at Facebook etc...
still eats a large portion of the time you get everyday.

Oh and please can we cut down on the term "hacker" ? I know it's called hacker
news but it's a bit presumptuous to name it that way for almost everything
that is posted here.

~~~
easonchan42
And many people make money from it. They blog about it, write book about it,
and there are even some GTD group, meetup etc... They profit!

But the whole thing is a paradox. The things those people are getting done is
write/talk/think about the "getting things done" stuff. But if they do, they
are no getting things done.

It's fun to think this way XD.

------
ognyankulev
Amongst GTD software, what sticked in my use case is Emacs org-mode as
described in <http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html>

~~~
tbatterii
Yep same here, if you are slinging code all day in emacs, it's nice to be able
to bring up your agenda in another buffer when you need it so that you aren't
switching too much out of context.

I use remember to add tasks as they come up so that I can quickly get back in
to what I was working on. For me it all has to do with dealing with the little
interruptions from people throughout the day.

Ideally this wouldn't happen at all, and I could focus 100% on what I'm
supposed to be doing. But in the real world, people people interact, a phone
call/email etc.... When I'm coding and someone arrives at my desk and says
something like "Sorry to bother you this will only take a minute...", it
triggers my fingers (C-R n) and once the conversation has ended I hopefully
have notes of action items I need to address maybe even with a due date if i'm
lucky.(C-c C-c) Or if it was pointless/not actionable (C-c C-k) and my cursor
is right back where I was before being interrupted.

    
    
      http://sachachua.com/blog/2008/01/capturing-notes-with-remember/
      http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/remember.html
    

I also track time with org-mode. (C-c a n) to bring up the agenda view, cursor
to task i'm going to work on (C-c C-x i) to clock in. When I mark the task
complete it clocks me out. Over the week of doing this, you will see your
tasks on the timeline in your agenda view which gives you an awesome sense of
accomplishment.

If you stick with it you'll have enough data to generate some really nerdy
reports on what you do all day, or if you are freelancing, a format that goes
a long way towards a proper invoice. I've never had a client ask for more
information about what I was doing by applying this technique.

Like with everything emacs, I've barely scratched the surface on what is
possible.

emacs + org-mode + remember = a process that can scale from macro to micro and
is very adaptable to your needs.

~~~
ams6110
I use org-mode for project planning and time tracking. I do need to figure out
agendas and remember mode, two things I've not been using.

One thing about org-mode is that it's a single-person tool. I'm not aware of
any way it could really work with multiple updaters.

~~~
tbatterii
yeah I don't think "multiple people mode" would work. I'm not too inclined to
let other people at the files in my home directory either. :)

------
guynamedloren
I find this method works pretty well:

\- Identify big problems

\- Split big problems into small, manageable tasks

\- Assign tasks to others if necessary

\- Complete tasks -> solve problem

Yeah, it sounds simple, but it's an extremely effective and lightweight
solution.

~~~
mackyinc
I do the first two as well, and since I don't have any other people working
with me, my third is scheduling the task.

------
LVB
Good overview of the system.

Concise, logically divided, and refreshingly free of excessive hyperbole,
witticism, and "insider" language that is all too common in pieces written
"for hackers". Well done.

------
tadzik
Any way to have this articles compiled, as an ebook or something?

~~~
jonmb
I uploaded a PDF here: <http://mario-kart.net/GTDForHackers.pdf>

And the ePub: <http://mario-kart.net/GTDForHackers.epub>

(Sorry the formatting is a little weird)

Plain text: <http://mario-kart.net/GTDForHackers.txt>

~~~
tadzik
Thank you, good sir.

------
Adaptive
I've mentioned Taskwarrior previously (command line task management, GTDable),
but it's worth noting that it recently hit 2.0 and has an upcoming server
component (in alpha):

<http://taskwarrior.org/>

~~~
mlacitation
I'm copying this from a previous comment of mine because I always end up
writing about the great features of Taskwarrior:

Seconding taskwarrior for being a great todo handler. It has a minimalistic
interface, but doesn't lack any features that you (might) find yourself
wanting after a while of use. The IRC channel (#taskwarrior on Freenode) is
active too. The command-line tools are perfect and let you make your system as
minimal or as complex as you want. Over time, I've:

1) Set up a cron job that pumps my current list out to a text file behind an
.htaccess'd directory. This way, I can see my list without needing SSH access.

2) I've also got a little Dashboard widget that pulls that text down, so I can
swipe to the top-left hot corner and see them at a glance.

3) I'm using Alfred (<http://www.alfredapp.com/>) on my Mac, so I wrote a
simple trigger called "task add" that connects to my box and adds it there.
There's also a few posts out there for DropBox integration if you use that.

4) I didn't write this, but if you use oh-my-zsh, there's a plugin for
Taskwarrior. I've learned about a couple options by pressing tab.

~~~
Adaptive
Nice tips. I'm using Alfred on OS X and Xmonad.Prompt on Arch but the cron to
web view is a new clever idea.

------
eXpl0it3r
Why does the words 'hacker' and 'hacking' getting so much abused? Being a
'hacker' once meant something, one had to work hard to gain the respect from
people, nowadays it's just about getting something done with in a few hours
that bearly works. Also calling yourself a hacker doesn't really make you
hacker, because it's all about the respect you get from the people admiring
your work. Better stay with the words like 'programmer', 'developer',
'artist', etc...

~~~
joshontheweb
Perhaps it's a bit like calling yourself exploiter.

------
DiabloD3
In something unrelated: Holy crap does that site load fast.

~~~
jonmb
That's one reason why I like pure HTML pages with no database backend. They
load so much faster than your average Wordpress site.

This site does seem to be dynamic though. Maybe a custom engine, or simply
cached correctly.

 _Edit:_ He's using <http://ikiwiki.info/>

~~~
zackattack
On a side note, how hard would it be to write a WordPress extension that
generates static HTML every time you write a new post or a new comment gets
approved/submitted?

~~~
jonmb
There's already a couple popular ones, like W3 Total Cache:
<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/>

------
patrocles
i figure everyone writes their own. i wrote <http://planhack.com>

~~~
badboy
Wow. I really like the concept but I'm missing some more features for my own
use.

Is it open source? That would be great to hack on it. Or does it atleast have
an API? That way I could script some more functionality.

------
jonmb
This is cool. For me, I've found that getting into good daily habits makes the
biggest difference in my life. I use JoesGoals.com to track them. I set it as
my home page. 42goals.com is also good.

------
alexlumley
This is a great summary. Thanks for sharing.

