I have been thinking for a while about writing a detailed review of ThinkingRock, which I find more and more useful for my implementation of GTD. Unfortunately two bloggers did beat me to it recently.
In Getting organized with a GTD application – using either ThinkingRock or MyLife Organized, Jeff Schumacher has been conducting an interesting comparison between the two softwares. As a Mac user, I was interested in what Jeff had to say, as he uses the ThinkingRock on the Windows OS. However, it must be said that whilst Jeff’s mention TR as beeing “slow to start up ( due to JRE )” and a “Memory hog”, I have not been experiencing anything of the sort on my Mac, despite modest specs (a 2004 1GHz PowerPC G4 with 1.25GB of RAM).
The other post is a detailed review by Rumanian blogger Dragos, who blogs at eDragonu – the choice of a personal path: Review: ThinkingRock version 1.2.3
As the last thing I would like to do, would be to repeat what was said in these excellent posts, I shall restrict myself to throwing a few comments, on what I believe to be an important aspect of ThinkingRock, which they have not really insisted upon.
In the management of “Next Actions”, ThinkingRock introduces a very useful distinction between active and inactive next actions.
The choice is between the following option:
- inactive,
- do it asap,
- shedule for [a date],
- delegate to
In practice, I do not use at all the “Shedule for [a date]“. If a “Next Action” needs sheduling, it should go on my calendar; nearer the time, when the reminder I would have set up pops up or during my weekly review, I will activate the Next Action by changing its status to “do it asap”. Being able to differenciate between “inactive” and “do it asap” is extremely useful. This allows to draw a list of all the next actions one can think of, for a given project, but to only activate those which need to be done first. This avoids the risk of feeling overwhelmed by huge lists of Next Actions.
When an NA has been completed, it can be ticked as done and will disappear. However, when it is a reoccuring task, a good way to go about it, is to change its status to “inactive”. To take a example, this is what I have started doing with my weekly food shopping list.
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Hi Pascal,
And first of all thank you for mentioning my review, I’m glad it couls shed some light on this area.
Nevertheless, I thought you might be interested in the way I use the “schedule for” type of action. I actually set that date for the action, and then use the “Preferences” option in the main menu. From there, at the “Calendar” entry, I chose “Publish iCalendar file” and then chose a path to my local webserver. Then, in iCal, I just subscribe to the calendar created, provided that I run my local webserver all the time. And, voila, in my iCalendar I have all the scheduled tasks from ThinkingRock and all the ToDo’s (they are actual the Next Actions from ThinkingRock).
This one-way synchronisation helps me identify the tasks that I run through ThinkingRock – which are the vast majority – from the occasional tasks that I input directly into my iCal.
One different approach to this has Actiontastic which has a two-way sync option with iCal in the latest 0.9.1 beta, but I hadn’t had time to check that yet. Anyway, I plan a complete review of Actiontastic in my blog in the next few days.
Best Regards.
Thanks for the tip. I shall try it.