zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Svenn Bjerkem <svenn.bjerkem@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2013-02-19 at 03:13 -0800, jayseye wrote:
> For what it's worth, I found your explanation useful, Svenn. I've been
> actively exploring many options for using the Task List effectively:
> 
> I asked about that here on the mailing list recently, in the context
> of GTD. So far that post has received one private reply. Perhaps I
> should have asked, more generally, how folks use the Task List...
> 
I have read the GTD book by David Allen and I know the concept very
well, and I have tried various tools that claim to be GTD, but end up
very bureaucratic and useless.

I think Allen express something very essential about GTD: You need to
have an archive system which is absolutely reliable so that you can get
stuff out of your head and into the system and trust that you will find
it again. Zim is text files with markup so if everything breaks, command
line tools can be used. Storage can be on DropBox or SparkleShare so a
backup is available (zim internal VCS is also available) if configured.
Because I trust my system, I can really do GTD the Allen Way with zim.

Because we have the Tasklist and the Journal plugins, we really do not
need the GTD inbox explicitly, but we are free to make one if we like.
The link and backlink functionality can give absolute control on when
work was done on a particular task (this is a use case and not a
plugin), but the very free format in Zim let you experiment with
use-cases and still keep your data.

The way attachment folders work, reference data can be stored with its
task unchanged (as long as the file is not named .txt), and will move
with the task if the task needs to be moved somewhere. Knowing that
stuff can be moved without problem gives me the assurance that I can
dump something quickly (like a git stash) and come back to it later. The
ever-recurring question "Where is the best place to store this?" is
completely gone. I just write "TODO: Find a better home for this" and go
on. When I do the weekly review, Tasklist will 'git stash list' the blob
back into my memory and I can process it in a more appropriate way.

The search function could be better, but for 99% of my use, I can do
with the built in search function. For the last 1% I trust my command
line tools. I can't do this on a web-app or something with a binary
back-end database. Trust is amazingly important when it comes to GTD.

-- 
Svenn