Author: MiKael NAVARRO klnavarro@gmail.com.
yaGTD project is a very simple utility designed to make the management of your to-do list quick and easy.
I have several long-term projects at work, and I need reminders
to spend time on the important things that aren't too urgent.
When, in 2006, I read David Allen's personal-productivity book
Getting Things Done_, I tried to apply this method on my personal
projects; So, I needed a 'trusted system' ...
.. _Getting Things Done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTD
But what another to-do list? There are hundreds of to-do lists on the web, some commercial, some free, some need on-line connection while other not, some are integrated into an email client and some web sites were built to manage your to-do list, but I was looking for something a little different.
.. _Gmail: http://saw.themurdaughs.com/gtd%20with%20gmail.pdf .. _GTDGmail: http://www.gtdgmail.com/ .. _Tracks: http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/ .. _GTDTiddlyWiki: http://shared.snapgrid.com/gtd_tiddlywiki.html
What I wanted was something lightweight and flexible, a simple way to carry and maintain my tasks around on a USB stick. The program needed to be capable of running on different platforms and must not depend on any data format or any web connection.
I tried several software for managing to-do lists, including the excellent
iKog_ and pyGTD_ [#]_ programs, but I found that the former was missing the
notion of urgency and importance (preached by Stephen Covey into
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People_), and the latter made it
too laborious to maintain data.
.. _iKog: http://www.henspace.co.uk/ikog/index.html .. pyGTD: http://96db.com/pyGTD/ .. [#] pyGTD is now part of VimGTD (original ^^). .. _VimGTD: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1699
.. _Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671708635/areadersjournal
And so, after several months of occasional experimentation, I decided to write my own tool that includes the easy to use but powerful commmand line interface from iKog_ and the management of Covey concepts from pyGTD_.
To resume, if you are looking for fancy menus and windows, go away; But, if you are comfortable at the command line a simple plain text is an age-old but perfect method for tracking your stuff, and yaGTD can help you to manage efficiently this file.
.. _why plain text makes sense: http://ginatrapani.github.com/todo.txt-cli/
yaGTD is a free software available under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence. Refer to the file COPYING (which should be included in this distribution) for the specific terms of this licence.
Python 2.3 or later must be installed on your system.
Theorically must works on all platforms.
Simply run::
$ python yagtd.py
then, see documentation for more details.
For (non-interactively) CLI a wrapper yagtd-cli.py is available
under tools directory.
An Emacs major mode for viewing yaGTD to-do list, and a wrapper
yagtd-s60.py for pyS60 (Symbian) smartphone are available under
tools directory.
-- MiKael NAVARRO