Part 2: GTD tickler file proposal — The tools
Second part of the series of of tickler file in todo.txt format with the tools to support integration
In Part 1 of this article, I had proposed a tickler.txt file format along the lines of the todo.txt file format. In this post, I wanted to share with you the tools that I had developed for managing my tickler file and moving items to the todo.txt from my tickler.txt.
So before I plunge into using the tools, let me give you some background
My current GTD setup
- My todo.txt is in a folder on Dropbox since I use both TodoTxtMac on my desktop and simpletask dropbox edition on my phone and dropbox keeps everything in sync (atleast most of the time!)
- I do my weekly reviews on sundays. In many cases, my tools would make that assumption !
- I am extremely forgetful so I tend to keep everything on todo.txt and/or tickler.txt
My GTD files
Here is a quick screen grab of my Dropbox GTD folder.
I want to explain each file and its contents one at a time
- cleanupdone.sh — A shell script that allows me to remove any completed items from my todo.txt and move it to my done.txt
- done.txt — Where all completed actions go and finally rest.
- format.txt — A simple example file containing various todo.txt file format examples to help me enter an entry in todo.txt manually during my weekly reviews
- ideas.txt — Various ideas that I get from other readers on what the tools should do. I keep track of them here.
- projects.done.txt — This is a master list of completed projects. I use it to track all the projects that I know I have completed so that my automated tools will not prompt me for a next action when they find a project in this file.
- tickler.txt — My tickler file that maintains various entries along the lines of the tickler format proposal
- todo.txt — I guess I can skip this one
- weeklyreview.py — A python based script that automates my weekly review in many parts. I will detail this out in the next section.
Weeklyreview Automation
My weekly review automation script does the following
- Creates a list of all the projects that are currently “alive” and that do not have a next action assigned to them. It puts it in a file called review-YYYY-MM-DD.txt so I can manually add next actions to it.
- Looks at the tickler.txt file and find out possible actionable items for the upcoming week and adds them to todo.txt
I run this script once a week on sunday and once it completes processing, it creates a review-YYYY-MM-DD.txt file. This file contains projects that dont have a next action in the todo.txt file or a future action in the tickler.txt file.
I then decide whether these projects require a next action or should be marked as completed. If they are completed projects, I add them to projects.done.txt file. This way the tool when run the second time recognises that the project is completed and will skip it.
Advantages of weekly review automation
The biggest advantage of weekly review automation are
My tickler file is continuously scanned for possible projects that should/can be activated and automatically moved to the todo.txt file. This used to be a time consuming process when I had a manual tickler file and it is fairly automatic now.
My current list of active projects are closely tracked and any projects that don't have a potential next action is immediately identified and tracked. This typically is painful in the todo.txt method since there is no way to keep track of current list of active projects. My tool, instead of tracking currently active projects, takes all my projects and removes completed ones from it and whatever is left is considered currently live.
Downloading my weeklyreview script
If you are looking for just the program that you can run on your desktop, download the versions here
Source Code
If you are interested in the code head over to my github project and grab a copy.
