GTD with Python & TextMate

I've recently been reading 43Folders, initially as a great resource for Mac "productivity" software (aka stuff on which to waste my time), but after reading more and more about Getting Things Done, I decided to get the book and see if I could sort my chaotic life out.

Well, I haven't got there yet, but I reckon it's improving.

Being a geek, though, I wasn't prepared to implement it with having some automated way of producing the various lists that it requires. I'm not going to go into loads of detail here about what the method entails, only to say that the basics consist of:

• capture all the stuff you have in your life in an Inbox (or inboxes, e.g. e-mail and paper)
• regularly process that stuff
• decide whether to the item you're processing now, defer it, or delegate it
• if you defer it, where does it live? Assign it a context in which it can be done, e.g. @Home, @Work, etc.

Various geek solutions have been proposed, using things like OmniOutliner, VimOutliner, etc, but something was lacking for me - it's probably the way I'm "interpreting" the GTD system (I haven't finished the book yet!), but I couldn't cope with having Next Actions in both Contexts and Projects lists - I couldn't persuade a tool to produce a Contexts list from the Projects lists. Obviously a bit of sed/awk/perl/grep trickery was in order.

Except... a bit of browsing brought me to this page. Which almost gave me the answer - automatic generating of action lists...

A little bit of tweaking later, and I have a script and some snippets which let me enter all my next actions in a single file : projects.txt, in the following format

    Project Title
    -------------

    [ ] @context: Task [Project Title]

for agenda items, then I have date and time fields too. Now, there is a bit of duplication (entering the project title twice), but a little bit of tweaking should sort that out too.

The TextMate snippets to create that are:

    [ ] @agenda: ${1:date} ${2:time} ${3:action} [${4:project}]
    [ ] @calls: ${1:action} [${2:project}]

And I assign a tab trigger of @c or @a, etc.

The ruby code to extract the data from the above into a context list is exactly the same as that on the web page I mentioned earlier. So, basically, none of this work is mine!

All plugged into GeekTool, and my next actions list appears on my desktop...

The best bit? It's all text-based, so it'll work anywhere, ready for the next time my Mac blows up...