Site Review: GTDagenda.com

GTDagenda.com is a paid membership site that provides people the online tools to organize their tasks and track their progress. It is modeled after the advice given in the popular book, Getting Things Done by David Allen. I first started using it back in January, and I have been using it to track my tasks ever since.

My big goal for the year has been to get more organized. It isn’t an easy goal. Life is complicated and every time you think you have things under control, it throws something new at you. For me it was a lingering illness that struck me on the second day of the year and didn’t let up until March. I wasn’t quite so sick that I couldn’t do my job (most days) but it took almost all of the energy I had just to get through a work day. Consequently, my efforts at organizing my work life have been far more effective than my efforts at organizing my personal life, but I keep plugging away.

I begin most of my days at work by reviewing my task list and spending a few minutes brainstorming. I actually think about the best ways to accomplish my tasks before I start doing them. I try to figure out what the roadblocks are and how I can get through them or around them. I make a plan and on my best days I stick to that plan. Not every day is my best day, but there is no doubt that I have been more productive, even when my body wasn’t at its best.

As a tool for helping me accomplish my organizational goals, GTDagenda.com has been very useful. GTDagenda.com allows me to keep a list of my projects, tasks, and next actions. I start off with my goals. I identify the outcome that I want to accomplish. I then make a list of projects that will help me achieve that goal, and I divide the projects up into tasks and next actions. It is very good at doing this, although the interface could be more intuitive. It took me a while to learn the fastest way to do this, and even that method isn’t quite as automatic as I would like. I would love to have a page that allowed me to fill out all of these things without jumping around. As it is I tend to load about four pages for even the most basic project. As David Allen explains in his book, the longer it takes to track something, the more likely you are to not track it.

The other two things I would like to see added to GTDagenda.com are a search feature and a more robust note-taking system. There is no way for me to do a quick search for a particular task. Instead I have to scan the entire list or try to narrow it down by selecting a category. I have about 50 tasks on my list right now, and at one point it was closer to 75. Scanning through every task every time you want to change something can slow you up. Note taking is just a great idea all around. I often have information I want to attach to my tasks, and the only note feature is a single line field that isn’t suitable for more than about 50 characters. It will do in a pinch, but I often have more to say than that.

These are minor complaints though. GTDagenda.com is definitely a useful too for tracking projects and it does follow the Getting Things Done process well. It also has some very useful features, such as the daily task email. Every day I get my list of outstanding tasks in my in box. They also have a mobile phone version of the site that gives me the basic functionality I need to access a task. These two items make it easy to stay on top of my tasks even when I only have my Blackberry.

If you are looking to get organized, I recommend that you read Getting Things Done, and if you think it is the system for you, give GTDagenda.com a try.

Disclosure Note: I was given free access to this site in order to review it. Links are affiliate links.

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