Getting Things Done – Command Line Processor
I’ve been doing a ton of work recently around user experience (UX) – and the importance of UX for architects. One thing that has become apparent is context for user interfaces – often the prettiest, most glamorous user experience does not lead to the best user experience.
I got thinking about this in the relation to the way I manage tasks. As you may know, I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. Since seeing David present in a seminar last year I have been a convert. If you also use GTD you may know that NetCentrics have developed an add-in for Outlook. The add-in is pretty good - adding custom actions to Outlook and allowing you to add additional attributes to tasks, which fit in well with GTD.
One problem I’ve been having however is while Outlook does a good job of storing the tasks, it can be a little clumsy to use – especially for “rapid fire situations”. For example, my boss may come into my office and say “Hey Simon – what’s the status of project X you’ve been working on?” I’ve then got to go into Outlook, switch to tasks, scroll down for the project and try and find the list of tasks. It’s not bad – but it’s not very efficient, especially when you have a list of ~200 ongoing tasks. The same goes for adding a new task – even with the CTRL-K short cut selecting project and action can be slow at times.
Now I’ve been a big fan of the command line for many years. I came from a background in UNIX, and this has stuck with me. I do most of my file organization using the command line and have a lot of scripts that help me be more productive than I am through Windows explorer. During a recent trip to Japan (and lying awake at 3am due to jetlag) I had an idea – wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to access my tasks through the command line? 
A couple of more sleepless nights later and I had a pretty good working version.
Using gtd.exe from the prompt you can use commands such as: >list @home
A780 @Home House Install New Kitchen Cabinet A781 @Home House Install shade in Family Room This lists all of the tasks marked with the @home action – right to the command line. >list ProjectX
5C2A @Waiting For ProjectX Waiting for Bob Smith to call about invoice 5C32 @Office ProjectX Setup meeting with Dan’s group to discuss sessions This lists all of the tasks marked with the "ProjectX" project tag. All of the tasks have a unique 4 digit ID (providing you don’t have more that 65535 tasks of course). This means that you can reference them and perform actions. For example: >complete A781 Task A781 has been completed.
> >list @home
A780 @Home House Install New Kitchen Cabinet …or even open the task within Outlook: >open A781 (task opens in new window) In addition, you can also of course create a new task: >new @home House “Paint bedroom red” ……… New task A9BF (Paint bedroom red) has been created. >list @home A780 @Home House Install New Kitchen Cabinet A9BF @Home House Paint bedroom red Other functionality include searching for tasks, setting a task to “@Waiting For”, and moving tasks between projects and actions. You can supply gtd.exe with command line parameters also (if for example you wanted to do task-related actions from Monad (sorry, ermm.. PowerShell This is still very v1.0-ish, but I’ve posted the sample up on this CodeGallery workspace. If you want to play around with this you’ll also need to install Redemption (you can get this from here) – which is used to provide some of the access to Outlook.
Finally, if you have some cycles and want to work with me on some improvements let me know )).
Do you have a link to this, as codegallery is down? I am interested in seeing how you implemented this. It seems pretty similar to todo.txt or remind (bash script todo list utilities) but the implementation with Outlook would be outstanding
try this link: http://simonguest.com/downloads/gtdcmd.zip
Thanks for the link. Along the same line as tasks in Outlook with GTD, I just published a new form at my blog that makes use of the differences between contexts and projects in autofill listboxes. Check it out if you are interested. Its set up for OL 2003 at this point, but thats an easy fix in VB script.
http://scio.blogspot.com/2007/08/new-gtd-form-for-outlook-tasks.html
Also, can you make a version for OL 2003 as well, it seems it looks exclusively for 12.0.0.0 (OL 2007)
I know this is an old post but I was wondering if you could send me the source code for the gtdcmd I love the app but I want to customize it to my needs. Thanks!