I love GTD. Ever since I first heard about this approach to productivity and managing one’s life, I’ve been impressed not only by its simplicity, but also by how easy it appears to be to develop an application that can implement it. However, to my best knowledge, most so-called GTD apps out there are either to-do list applications, and those that try to fully implement GTD seem to make it a bit less intuitive than I’d want. For people familiar with GTD, some of these apps might be acceptable, but for a while now, I’ve been wanting to make something that will bring down the entry barrier for anyone looking to handle things in their life more efficiently.
So I set out to think about what such an application would look like, and how it would behave. For one, I will be creating a complete set-up helper, to guide newcomers and instruct them both on GTD and the application itself. I don’t want to make it too complex, though, so I will stick to the minimum necessary to give them a good understanding of GTD, and if they want to learn more, they can always buy David Allen’s book. This guide would show up on the first log in, and there would be two other routes that a user could take: “I know about GTD, just tell me what I need to know about this app” or “I know about GTD and I’m sure I can find my way around here, the app isn’t that complicated anyway. Go away and leave me alone, helper.” (I believe that their description is self-explanatory 
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One of the things I’d like to have is a virtual personal assistant. Since GTD consists of dumping all of your mind’s contents into a place that you can trust and that you will constantly visit, I thought that it would be nice if I was able to just log in from anywhere, and have the app tell me what I should do, how I’m doing in terms of productivity today, and all of that. But this virtual personal assistant wouldn’t have to be that simplistic. Ideally, I would like it to be able to manage everything I have to do, and guide me, in the most intuitive way possible. I’ll develop further on that later.
I think that for this particular application (and considering that there are so many productivity applications out there), integration with other applications is vital for its success. For example, GTD requires the use of a calendar. The application will have a pretty powerful calendar built-in to handle everything, but I think that most people would fall into one of three situations:
- They’re used to a certain calendar application and don’t want to change.
- They would be okay with changing calendars, but it’s just too much effort to transfer everything over, plus they don’t know if all the features they have would still be available.
- They are okay with changing, or they don’t really use a calendar application at the moment.
So obviously, for this application, its calendar must work with other calendars, and make it as simple as possible to keep the calendars in sync with each other. I want to do everything to make this application the easiest to use and get used to possible.
One of the most important things to become more efficient, is to reduce the number of inboxes as much as possible, so that we have less places to check for new items. With the internet, it seems that our number of inboxes is increasing exponentially, with every new web service opening up a new one. Thankfully, however, most of these web services have APIs, and with that in mind, I want to make it possible not only to bring everything together into one main inbox (this application’s inbox), but also to deal with it in the application. Imagine this central inbox containing new e-mails, new @mentions to your Twitter account, new Basecamp tasks/projects assigned to you, or maybe even Facebook direct messages sent to you. I want to make it so that you can log in into this app, and everything you need to do or deal with will be sitting there, waiting for you. Because I am tired of having to check a bunch of different places. If I could read an @mention and reply back on this application, read an e-mail and reply back, or even read a reply to a blog comment I left somewhere, and reply, all within this application, that would make my life far, far easier. The less effort it takes to collect, process and deal with inbox items, the better it is, and the more efficient the application will make us all.
That’s it for now, I’ll follow up soon with some more ideas.