The “Getting Things Done” philosophy and workflow is something I’ve been trying to implement lately. The costs up front are high, but the benefits are many—eventually, I hope to tune my brain to work something like a pre-emptively scheduled multicore processor. Heh. We’ll see.

In the meantime, here are some interesting applications for the Mac that have caught my attention. I’ve written a short review of each of them—why I like it or why I don’t. Please feel free to chip in if I’ve missed a feature, or if I’ve missed out on a great application somewhere.

ShoveBox ($25)

ShoveBox is a little gem I found a while ago that is simple and very useful—it acts as a fantastic aggregator of random bits of information throughout the workday. It has an “inbox” where new things get shoved so you can organize later when you have the time. Just drag and drop.

While not truly a “GTD” application, there are plenty of reasons why ShoveBox could work like one. For example, I’m particularly fond of the QuickJot window—press a shortcut key of your choosing (I have it bound to F7) and a transparent window appears where you can quickly type a message or note to yourself for later. Also, power users can use “rules” to sort items automatically, and they can even execute shell commands!

Once items are “shoved” or “jotted” into ShoveBox, you can open the Organizer window to … well, organize. There is a Mail-like interface that is quite familiar—just drag items to folders and keep things where they belong.

The search capability in the Organizer seems to work well, although I would like to see better keyboard support. At present, you must use the mouse to click the search area, then type, then use your mouse again to select the item you want out of the result list.

In fact, if I have one complaint for this application, it’s the overall poor keyboard support. For example, if you want to open an item from the Organizer window, only a double-click will do it (if you press “enter”, it helpfully lets you edit the title, but there’s no way to get out of editing mode if you made a mistake). If the folders on the left have the keyboard focus (i.e. pressing the arrow keys moves from folder to folder), then there is no way to move the focus to the items on the right.

If the author would pay attention to keyboard-only workflow, I would probably drop any GTD-specific application for this one. It’s that sharp.

Thinking Rock (Free)

Thinking Rock is much more of a GTD application than ShoveBox. In exchange for simplicity, you get quite a powerful tutor that has all of the bells and whistles you’d expect of a GTD app. Thinking Rock guides you through a lot of the “flowchart” involved in making decisions—is it actionable? should it be deferred? can you put a date to it? what context should it be placed in?

One of my favorite things about Thinking Rock is the overview (”home” icon). Unlike other GTD applications that assume you understand the Getting Things Done workflow, Thinking Rock provides a graphical flowchart / overview page that looks like this:

Another part of ThinkingRock that is especially well thought out is the way in which the form pages change dynamically to reflect your decisions about an item. For example, there is a radio button with two options “This item is actionable”, “This item is NOT actionable”. When you choose “not actionable”, most of the form gets cleaned up so that you just focus on reasonable choices: i.e. “Ok, if it’s not actionable right now, when would you like to schedule it?”

The downside to ThinkingRock (at least on a PPC Mac) is that it’s a Java app. In practice, what that means for me is that it takes between 15 and 20 seconds to load the application, and changing from screen to screen is like molasses. In addition, there is no syncing with iCal. Also, since it’s not a native Mac app, it does suffer from not following the Apple design guidelines—for example, the icons are quite small and not very intuitive. It took a little poking around to know how to get back to the overview screen.

With these caveats in mind, however, I haven’t found anything as well-designed and carried out for those of us who need a little guidance through the GTD method. I will probably use ThinkingRock as a learning tool until I settle on a Mac OS X native app.

Things ($49)

Now for a real GTD app that’s also a native Mac OS X app. There are several applications that would fall under this category (and I’ve listed some of them below, “Other Apps”) but after reviewing several, I’ve found Things to be the most intuitive, beautiful, and least complicated of the group.

Tasks are simple and easy to add to the system—in fact, I don’t think I’ve used a cleaner interface for tasks. UI widgets that you don’t need are tucked away when you don’t need them, and available when you do (such as date, reminder). Tasks can easily be promoted to become projects (drag and drop to projects). And the “tags” system of categorizing and managing contexts is both flexible and simple. I’ve found that I don’t need many contexts yet, so I don’t use tags much—but I sense that as I rely more heavily on Things to do my organizing, I will depend on tags for structure and filtering.

One thing that really appeals to me about Things is the use of “areas” in addition to “projects”. For some reason, it irks me to put something like “maintain my relationship with Kelty” in a “project”. It’s not really a project, it’s an ongoing area of interest and concern. Thus, there is a place to put items and projects that have no due date but still need to remain “in the queue”. They’re kind of like system background processes. (Or “high priority foreground processes” in the case of my relationship with Kelty )

Currently, Things is in alpha and has some limitations (and probably some bugs). For example, items in the sidebar can not be dragged. Also, items within projects cannot be turned into new projects (but unfiled items can), and the shortcut key that brings up a quick-entry transparent window cannot be bound to the F (function) keys.

Overall, Things is my favorite pick so far—as soon as it comes out of Alpha (sometime this spring), I will probably purchase it. Oh, and by the way, if you sign up for the mailing list by the 31^st of January, you’ll get 20% off when the final product is shipped.

Other Apps I’m Keeping My Eye On

Actiontastic (Free), iGTD 2 (Free), OmniFocus ($80), Midnight Inbox ($35)

All of the above apps look excellent and may be suited to others. iGTD 2 is particularly good-looking, but only works on Leopard (I haven’t upgraded yet.) OmniFocus looks to be the most well-rounded and professional application. But Midnight Inbox is a close second, with some very nice collection features (e.g. it can systematically grab files, emails, notes, or other items from other Mac applications and put them in your inbox for sorting.) Actiontastic hasn’t reached 1.0 yet, but it also looks promising.