Mind The Extensions #4 Monkey GTD

Shopping lists, agendas, diaries, journals, to-do lists, project plans ... all of these, then could be regarded as mind extensions if we accept the extended mind model.
Whether we find the ideas of an extended mind useful, many of us find written lists useful. Back in the 1970s, diaries and jotters morphed into the hugely popular Filofax system with pages for everything from diaries to maps of cities. In business, to do lists evolved into sophisticated paper based systems such as those which continue to be provided by Time Manager International.
A more recent popular approach has been GTD or 'Getting Things Done' from David Allen. GTD rests on the strategy, related to the notion of the extended mind, of offloading tasks to be remembered to a trusted system (paper or software). Freed of the need to spend effort recalling, GTD suggests, the mind can act more efficiently on tasks.

I don't propose to re-describe the GTD system in detail here, there are plenty of places around the Internet to do that. (See references).

I'm starting to look at GTD myself, though I know that similar systems have ended up eating up more of my time than I liked. I tend to prefer using computers to papers, I only recently rediscovered the floor of my study. So I was looking around and found, guess what, an open source project which uses a TiddlyWiki to provide a personal GTD system that can be downloaded onto your computer, memory stick or installed over at Tiddlyspot. The project is called MonkeyGTD and you can find it over at monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com I've started using the system and it works well, (it's sometimes a little slow but I think that's more to do with my PC, which is getting moody in its old age, than it is to MonkeyGTD).

I'm using the system for both work and home projects, 'unencumbered' by reading details and advice about the GTD process at this stage. I expect after a couple of weeks I'll review, read instructions and restart. At the moment I just want to gain a feel for the process and the tool. I'll keep you posted, either here or over at http://bobweb2.tumblr.com/ depending on how much I have to write.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done