A story about my new Todo/GTD list application, MaybeLater

About eighteen months ago, I came across David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, with the bold tagline “How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity”. While this post isn’t supposed to be an advertisement for the book, I tried it and it worked for me. I’d just started a new job, and aware of how disorganised I’d been during my PhD, I wanted a system to make sure I made a good impression with my new colleagues (also, I was tired of forgetting things) – so I tried a few applications which aim to help with a GTD system, and settled on one. I used this almost religiously – every thought I had either gets entered straight into the application if I’m at work at my desk, or gets written on one of the pink sticky notes I keep in my pocket, and stuck in my wallet.

This has worked pretty well for me since then, and I like to think that I’m fairly organised at work, and all my tasks for when I’m at home, or away, also get entered into the system. The problem which has repeatedly presented itself is that the application lives on my machine at work, and I rarely have access to that when I’m not in the office – although my tasks were recorded, they weren’t available when I needed to complete them.

This brought me to the conclusion that I should use a remote application for managing my lists, and after a quick look around I didn’t find any that appealed to me (many very good looking applications were recommended to me which were closed systems, and I have a tendency to like running my own systems if I can).

Fortunately, I’ve been wanting an excuse to learn the Django web framework for a while, and so I set to work writing a new GTD app which does what I want it to do as simply as I could. The result is MaybeLater. I’ve spent an hour or two on this most nights for the last week, and yesterday morning it reached the stage where I had enough features implemented to allow me to switch from my old application to MaybeLater exclusively. It’s still reasonably raw and featureless, but it does the job for me.

Last night, my better half also started using it, and within 30 minutes or so, the bug tracker had its first two entries (I’ve since fixed one of them).

One thing I miss about the old application was the ability to quickly enter a new task without firing up my web browser, logging in etc. I’ve made it as easy as I could without much effort in the web interface so far (although I have plans for improving this), but my next task is going to be implementing an XMPP interface, so I can simply send a plain-text message to a bot in my roster and have it entered into my task inbox. It seems like a good excuse to roll out Nathan Fritz’s easy-to-use SleekXMPP library which I already use a lot when I work on the SleekBot XMPP groupchat bot.

It should be fun to see where this goes.

Categories: Coding, Jabber
11 Comments »