For years now, I’ve kept the following directory structure to support my gtd workflow:
gtd/ done.otl next_actions.otl someday_maybe.otl waiting_on.otl Projects/ Reference/ tickler/
I’ve discussed the tickler folder before. But while I like having the next_actions.otl file, I feel it’s stopping me from really following the gtd workflow. I tend to ignore some of the things under Projects/, as I have to manually look through those to find a next action.
So I’m going to try something a bit different. I’m going to not have a next_actions file. Rather, I’ll tag items in files under Projects/ with with ‘nextaction:’, and use ~/bin/nextactions which is basically just
grep -r "^nextaction" $HOME/gtd/Projects
Now that doesn’t make me look at files not having next actions, but it keeps me working under ~/gtd/Projects rather than keeping next_actions.otl open in an editor, which otherwise is the temptation. I can also easily print out all top-level files or directories which don’t have a nextaction in or under them,
==================================================== #!/bin/bash d=$HOME/gtd/Projects for f in $d/*; do grep -rq "^nextaction" $f if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo $f fi done ====================================================
so I can trivially see which project I’ve ignored. Yikes, 23 of them.
We’ll see, I may not like it. For instance, it may seem more awkward cut-pasting things into gtd/done.otl But I think it could improve my workflow.
