GTD Wannabe

Online GTD App: MyTicklerFile

This post is part of a series evaluating online GTD applications. See here for the ground rules of my evaluation. You can also see a list of apps that just didn’t get evaluated.

Today, I’m going to talk about MyTicklerFile, which “allows you to manage projects, track your time and monitor your activities as you get things done”. I created a little spreadsheet to help me evaluate these applications, and here you can see the results for this application:

As you might expect, green is good, yellow is iffy, and red is bad. The grey shading means that I stopped evaluating this application based on my “deal breaker” requirements and didn’t bother moving further down the list.

Lest you think that I truly dislike the application – it’s not that. It has the potential to be a great tickler file for GTD, hence the name. However, I don’t need a tickler file; I need an application to handle my next actions and projects.

Dislikes

Some of the things I didn’t like about the application:

• There are three service plans: free, basic, and power. However, even on the power plan, you are limited to 30 projects (!) and that’s at a cost of $19/month. Way too steep for such a tiny limit. I’m not even employed yet, and I have more than 30 projects.
• There is no specific concept of context, although you could bastardize tags for this.
• You can attach a date to a tickler, but it’s really meant as a tickler system, not a deferred next action. I really need to be able to have next actions with deferred start dates, and possibly with due dates.

Likes

Things that I liked:

• It has a nice calendar interface, so if you were just looking for a calendar, or tickler, then this could be for you.
• It does offer search. So few applications that I’ve looked at online do.
• I particularly like the long view, so you can see at a glance where you have ticklers in the system.

Conclusion

Based on the fact that MyTicklerFile failed on three of my “deal breakers”, it’s not a contender for me.