Friday 14 December 2012

Astrid and GTD projects

I've finally figured out a way to use Astrid with the Getting Things Done (GTD) concept of projects, being sequences of actions. One thing you're supposed to do in GTD is to review your projects list to make sure that each project has a current action, to keep it moving. I've always had a Projects list in Astrid, but now I'm using Astrid's "subtasks" feature to assign other tasks to projects.

They're not quite real subtasks, though, just indented from the others which makes them look subordinate. Also, you have to specifically enable the feature and select drag & drop ordering for your list on Astrid for it to work at all. Still, it was a missing piece of the puzzle for me, and I'm glad I sorted it out. Now I have a Projects list with all my ongoing projects on it, plus individual context lists like Shopping, Home and Errands to sort tasks into their necessary groups. It's working pretty well for me so far.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm going to look at some other organisation methods soon.
PPS - Just to see if there's anything better for me than GTD.

3 comments:

LP said...

I'm just looking into Astrid now.

Mainly for the subtask ability - which only very few organizers have.

I would love for an ability to filter on more than one tag (list) so that I could single out projects, contexts, focus areas etc..

LP said...

Just looking into Astrid now.

I have been frustrated for a long time that almost none of the organizers offer subtasks.
But now I noticed that Astrid does.

One thing I'd love to see as well is the possibility to filter on more than one tag (list). So that I can filter on focus area, context etc.

John said...

The subtask ability can be a little bit fiddly, but, as you say, so few task organiser apps bother with it. Filtering by more than one list is something even rarer, and Astrid doesn't do that at all. I don't know of any task list app that does it.