GTD Wannabe

It’s Your Data

My last post on online apps has generated an interesting sidebar discussion. Richard, creator of Tudumo, an offline GTD application, just posted about the concept of data, and the fact that your data, regardless of what application it’s in, is your data.

Tudumo is a nice little app, and I’ve been playing with the beta off and on now for a while (not full use, mind you, but dipping into the new releases to see what’s up). It’s one of the few offline apps that I’ll be blogging about later on.

What I particularly like though is Richard’s responsiveness. Not only was he very quick to respond to comments I had about the beta, but this recent post of his shows a genuine concern for his users. All users, actually.

He’s putting out a call to action for fellow GTD app developers – why not collaborate on a common standard – nothing crazy mind you, but something that let’s people import and export their data from app to app. Several times now, I’ve manually input all of my next actions into a new app, so that I could give it a serious test drive. There were a couple that let me input from text files, but that only gave me the body of the next action, not things like contexts, project names, dates, etc.

I’m all for a common standard. I don’t care much what it looks like, as long as it has at least most of the necessary data: next action text, context, project, (optional) due date, (optional) start date, note field. Heck, I’d be happy with a csv file! However, there is something to be said for the flexibility of xml; that way, you could have extra fields if necessary, without breaking the import/export for anyone else.

It’s an exciting idea. Let’s get on the bandwagon! Of course, I’m not actually a GTD app developer. Sigh. But if you are, or if you know any, pass on the link to Richard’s call to action.

Photo by Dave Fitch.