Can You Trust Your GTD Trusted System?

Posted on January 15, 2009 by Bruce Keener

In our recent discussion of mind sweeping, you probably deduced, rightly so, that you will not really trust your GTD system if it doesn’t have everything in it that interests you.

Another way that a GTD system can become untrustworthy is for it to be susceptible to physically crumbling/going away. Let’s consider a couple of examples.

Example 1

Google announced yesterday that it is killing off several products, including Google Notebook. If you are using Google Notebook as part of your GTD system, it might not crumble on you, but support for it is now gone.

Example 2

I noticed the following “tweets” in my Twitter stream this morning:

Rubel Twitter Comment

Okay … So What?

Seems to me that Steve is being smart in not choosing to use new products in his GTD system (Steve is a big fan of using Gmail as his GTD hub). I have avoided using some of the newer products because I am not certain how long they will be around, especially in today’s economy.

My key GTD list manager right now is Remember The Milk, which I sync with Appigo’s Todo application on my iPod Touch. Since both of those products are fairly new, I am thinking it would be prudent for me to printout all of my tasks, to have as a backup … just in case.

Having a backup is a smart thing to do, anyway. I would already have one, but one of the things on my @Errands list is to buy a printer, since my current one is dead.

Anyway, I wanted to plant this thought with you, in case you might be using a system that could wind up disappearing. Also, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this … am I making a bigger deal out of it than it really is?

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  • John

    All the more reason to use pen and paper. ;)

    I’m becoming seriously addicted to Evernote though. I’ve got some important stuff in there. Maybe I should scrub it and archive the really important stuff on to my own hard drives.

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

    I am truly thinking of doing the pen and paper route myself, John. Next time I’m at Staples I want to look at the new David Allen Coordinator, to see if the paper quality is good, and to give it a general checkout.

    A lot of people are getting “addicted to” Evernote, which is why I thought the tweet from Steve Rubel was particularly noteworthy. Of course, they could well survive, and I hope they do. They have a rather unique product, which I think gives them a good chance of survival, and they seem to be very customer focused and tuned into to customer feedback. However, it could pay to have a backup. These are challenging times, and many startups are simply not going to make it. Indeed, many of the old-timers are not going to do well either. I just noticed, on the “hardware” side, that Circuit City is now belly up, and I thought they had a really good operation.

    Anyway, thanks for the comment.

  • http://www.marinamartin.com Marina Martin

    I share the concern about not using products that provide widely-compatible backups.

    Evernote has an XML export option. Highlight all your notes (or the ones you want to backup) and go to File, Export. You can open the resulting file in any text program… there will be extraneous code, but it’s fully-human-readable. Additionally, if Evernote disappeared overnight I bet multiple programmers would put up an easy tool for cleaning the XML file up.

    I would not suggest printing as a backup for your to-do list … that’d be tedious to re-enter. Instead, back it up electronically, and save a copy of the backup remotely (perhaps on a web server, or in GMail).

    Everything you do online should be backed up somewhere. Your GMail should be backed up via POP locally, your Delicious and GReader should be backed up, etc.

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

    Marina,
    Thank you for sharing the XML export option for Evernote. Your point about having some sort of backup is good … I just checked to see if I can export my Remember The Milk tasks and it turns out I can export them to iCal on iMac, so that is nice to know. Also, excellent points about backing up Delicious and GMail and GReader!

  • http://www.micropersuasion.com Steve Rubel

    In all of these cases, you can easily export your data. I like Gmail because I know the more I and others use it, the more Google makes money and therefore can use that to invest in more features. It’s a virtuous cycle. RTM is nice and they do have revenues. Same for Evernote. But for me, investing in GMail is like buying IBM in the 70s. You can’t go wrong plus I can sync it all via IMAP. And it means one less app to use. That’s just how I like to work. Everyone is different.

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

    Steve,
    Marvelous clarifying comment. Gmail is an excellent investment, and it is one app that we can count on indefinitely, for the reasons you mention (along with the fact that Google would lose all credibility if they dropped it).

    Your point about having as few apps as practical is one that wholeheartedly endorse. One of my recent posts, processing info when there’s too much of it, referenced your post on making Gmail your gateway to the web. I dropped Basecamp a couple of weeks ago, despite how nice it is, so I would be “forced” to keep all of my project information in one place (RTM).

    Anyway, thank you very much for the comment. I am a huge admirer of your site (and your tweets).

  • http://illini6.blogspot.com Inner Prop

    I use a PDA synced to both my work and home desktops. This system has triple redundancy, security and is mobile.

    I don’t understand why Palm doesn’t see it that way. The new Pre doesn’t sync at all. I’m seriously worried if my TX goes down in the next couple of years there won’t be anyone making anything comparable.

  • http://ruudhein.com Ruud Hein

    I use Evernote intensely and have done so since 2005. The new direction the company has taken is promising and has actually rekindled my fondness for the application. I have to state though that I use Evernote almost exclusively through the desktop software: the data *also* lives in the cloud but a priori as a SQLite database on my own hard disk. If Evernote shut down tomorrow, my data is both on my desktop machine and laptop.

    There are numerous ways of getting information out of Evernote but in the end think it doesn’t matter that much. GTDWannabe wrote about that once; that when switching to another application instead of worrying about export/import, you often simply start over.

    Me, I like doing stuff twice and store information multiple times. I email information to my Gmail account which forwards it into Evernote, for example. I also grab some information and dump it into Personal Brain.

    Finally, best point is from Marina: wherever your golden copy may be, you should possess a backup.

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