Thinking Rock redux

A couple of months ago I reviewed the Thinking Rock application, java-based ‘pure GTD’ application to manage tasks. Since I published that review, the activity over at www.thinkingrock.com.au has been, well, somewhat less than frenetic. The application is still in beta (officially, ‘epsilon’), and there are many comments there, basically saying ‘where’s the new version’?’ After all, this current version was released on June 17 2007, and of course there’s been a little water under the bridge since then. It seems the developers, the much-loved Jeremy and Claire, are under a bit of pressure to get it together.

I was a bit drawn into that – and a lot of people seem to be walking away to find their ‘nirvana’. Usually off to something like ‘My Life Organised’. So I did take a look at what other software might exist. But I also came across this blog entry from ‘GTD Wannabe’: Are you Resisting your Trusted System? about resisting your system and tinkering with it and changing the software all the time – only to change again about six weeks later.

There are a few issues with Thinking Rock. The interface isn’t beautiful. Some of the components of the interface are frustrating (e.g. kludgy edit fields, etc).

But I’m still with it. It isn’t beautiful, but like Winston Churchill it seems to get the job done. Many of the functions I think are missing I find I can use – for instance, I never used to use projects, but I have now discovered I can ‘future date’ a project and it (and all its tasks) will roll over on the relevant date. You can also have templated projects with actions already set out for it (potentially, VERY useful – e.g. shopping lists – no more back-of-the-envelope lists for me).

I did have a problem in that, with this approach, all of my tasks are sitting on my PC rather than on my mobile device. Outlooks’ task management is hopeless (sorry, I just can’t get it to do GTD without some major elements missing, and without buying an expensive plugin Outlook knows absolutely nothing about the concept of projects). But I simply wrote a bit of Outlook code that parses my TR xml file, filters out tasks that are ‘due asap’, overdue, or due today, and my current task list is in Outlook. I can then have the tasks in my Blackberry while I’m roaming around, and simply have to mark an item complete in TR when I get back to my computer.

And here’s the most important thing. I think TR2 has crashed on me, perhaps, twice in the past eight months – and those were JVM errors. Vista in the same time seems to crash once every day, on average (admittedly on bootup, but who wants to wait ten minutes for Vista to not find a solution for a problem?). This is the longest time I have used a task management application. But I think Jeremy and Claire have written some really really good code here, and it’s very reliable, and it works. If it takes them a little while to produce fantastic reliable code, then I’m all for it.

So … yes, I’m still in the TR camp and it works REALLY well for me.

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