Tuesday July 26, 2005

In Praise of Deadware

As you can tell from my blogroll link to 43 Folders, I am a devotee of Getting Things Done—albeit of the PC variety—which really has changed the way I work. For the last several months, I’ve been using a piece of essentially dead software—Keynote, a freeware tabbed-notes app that appears to have stopped evolving in 2003. It’s great, particularly for free-form info juggling, but you have to do a lot of the juggling yourself, rearranging items on your lists by hand.

So, as GTDers are wont to do, I spent the weekend looking for the “perfect GTD application.” I have tried them all: GTDTiddlyWiki, NextAction, a load of shareware PIMs. I’ve tried implementations with Excel and looked into MySQL databases—all just to find a way to sort contexts any way I want them sorted.

Then I finally found Ecco Pro, which is as dead as software gets without being forgotten entirely, as you can tell by the space age bachelor pad font on the packaging. An application that dates to the late ’90s, Ecco still has enthusiastic advocates, and now I know why. Ecco is great, and by far the best way I’ve found to implement a GTD-style system. The reason? Tags. Tags, of course, are all the rage—from Flickr to Gmail—but I’ve yet to see any information managers that use them effectively. And while Ecco doesn’t use tags, per se, it comes as close as anything I’ve seen by allowing you to file items in as many folders—or, if you like, in as many contexts—as you want. And, in turn, you can views those folders in any combination you want using various “views.”

The way I use this functionality is by assigning tasks that can be done in more than one context—say, either at my work computer or at my home computer—to all those contexts and then create views that display all the contexts I have in various situations. My call list might appear in both my Home and Office views, for example, since I have a phone in both places. And these aren’t copies of the items. These are the items themselves, so if you make a call at the office and delete it, it disappears from all folders and views. Powerful stuff. To think I had to resort to deadware to make that happen. And I still use Keynote for all my documents, so I now have a completely discontinued GTD system in place.

You can download Ecco here and find a pretty good (although, for my taste, overly-complicated) GTD template here. That’s where I started.