Jonathan Bernard's Getting Things Done implementation.

This is my adaptation of the Getting Things Done system by David Allen. There are a lot of tools that adapt his system for various digital platforms, but most of them move away from the folder-based system he created. They try to create new systems based on the core principles of the method outlined in Getting Things Done, but I was unable to find a system that followed the details of his method. I do not think there is anything wrong with reimagining the system based on the core principles. David Allen advocates that in the book himself. Still, I was very attracted to the folder-based implementation that he descibes; I only wanted to use digital folders and files instead of physical folders and pages.

History and Motivation

My method initially started as a simple collection of folders, intended to mirror the physical system. As I used this I noticed some common use patterns that would benefit from an automated tool. In particular, I wanted to have the system walk my through the process phase. It was too easy for me to forget some of the important principles of this phase: immediately doing anything that could be done in 5 minutes or less, identifying the next action for an item, and sorting the action correctly. Out of this the command-line tool was born.

As I started using the system for everything I started desiring to have some way to publish my plans (or at least some contexts of my plans, like work). This lead me to implement a REST API that interfaced with the repository (still just files) so that I could easily embed this information in a web page, or allow controlled access to the system from a client application.

How It Works

TODO

Code Index

com.jdblabs.gtd

Item

One item in the GTD system (a next action for example). This class is a wrapper around the File to make it easier to work programatically with GTD items.

PropertyHelp

Simple serialization support for item properties. Used to read and write properties from an item file.

Util

Utility methods common to this implementation of the Getting Things Done method.

com.jdblabs.gtd.cli

GTDCLI

Command-line interface to the GTD repository. The repository organization is intended to be simple enough that standard UNIX command-line tools are sufficient, but it is useful to add some specific commands to walk you through the processing phase or manage duplicated entries (when tracking an item in a next-actions context and a project folder, for example).

com.jdblabs.gts.servlet

GTDServlet

Standard Java servlet to expose the repository via