Like a few other people, I’m over kGTD. In the first flushes of my infatuation with the way of GTD she was good to me, showed me a few tricks I’d never seen before. We had some good times, syncing away. But my iCal started to fill up with billions of pointles calendars, my projects started to indent to the point where I couldn’t find them anymore, and I never quite got the hang of those… unique keyboard combos needed to navigate around Omni Outliner Pro. Sometimes, important things would go missing, and I gradually started to trust her less, and go back to paper and pens for my lists.
Until now. Todo.txt is a series of command-line scripts for slicing and dicing a text-based todo list. If you stick to a few conventions, you can use the scripts to suck out relevant information as and when you need it. Combined with the humble yet awesome power of the bash shell’s pipe, there are a multitude of ways you can shove your action lists in front of your lazy face. Trust me, if you keep or have ever kept your lists in a text file, you owe it to yourself to check the site out.
Something I always wanted to do with kGTD but never managed to in satisfactory manner was to sync my digital lists to index cards for perusing whilst (gasp!) off-line. Enter linux’s lp command:
todo.sh list | lp -o PageSize=Custom.3x5in -o page-top=10 -o page-bottom=10 -o page-left=5 -o page-right=5 -o lpi=8 -o cpi=15
See here for an explanation of all those crazy lp options.
I just love this stuff. Sometimes it’s almost as good as being back at the terminal of my faithful BBC Micro.