Looking for the ideal GTD app. Here are a few of the features it should have:
Supporting materials should be bound to projects: if most of your projects involve the creation of documents, and many of them have associated reference materials as well. You would like to be able to look at a project, or a task under a project, and with a click create or open an associated document. For instance, you are working on a long academic article for a book; you'd like to have all of your notes, PDFs of research materials, drafts, and other materials available whenever you open that project. Foldera does this in a way and is geared more towards business collaboration than towards individual task management.
Document editing: you want to be able to create and edit documents from within the same interface that you use to look at my projects and tasks. Whether this uses an internal document editor or a link to a third-party service like Google Docs or Zoho doesn’t matter, as long as the document is saved back to the project it belongs to. So using the above example, if you are working on a draft of your article, you want to be able to open the document, write, and save the document back into the project it belongs to.
Bulk upload: Why on earth do so many online apps allow you to upload documents only one at a time? What you’d really like to see is a desktop app that would allow you to synchronize files, perhaps by flagging them on the desktop in some way, and then upload them in the background .
Integration with desktop tools like Outlook: you’d like to be able to work in Outlook or other desktop apps and have the work appear in your online space — and vice versa. So when you check a todo list item “done” online, it’s also marked “done” in Outlook. Several online apps do one-way imports from Outlook, and a few do manual syncs.
Integration with mobile tools: For many people, a PC isn’t the only tool they work with. You can use a Treo, and others use iPhones, Blackberries, and even Windows Mobile devices (it’s true!) when a PC isn’t handy. Yet few online apps try very hard to integrate with them. Even if access can’t be “live”, it would be nice to have work show up at least when the device is synchronized. What you’d really like, though, is integration with your smartphone’s apps, or third-party apps like Google’s — Google has shown that it’s possible to make sophisticated online apps that work on a variety of mobile devices.
Automatic promotion of future tasks: When you develop a project outline, you generally write down a list of tasks that need to be done to complete the project. But when you look at your todo list, I just want to know what to do now. Most of the apps I’ve seen dump all the todos from all your projects into one master list, which is useless to you — how can you revise the first draft of an article when you haven’t even been to the library to check out the books you need to research it yet? You want your GTD app to promote the very next action to your todo list whenever you mark the item right before it as finished.
Links to other services: you’d really like to see a way to pass data back and forth between online services, but barring that you’d like at least to add links into the interface to other online services.
No-nag tasks: you would like to schedule time or set reminders for things that you only need to be reminded about once. You'd like to be able to create a category of reminders that go off once and if I’m not there to respond to them, they just disappear.
An exit strategy :How do you get your data out of an online app is at least as important as how you get it in. Your needs are bound to change in the future, or the programmers may decide to change something in a way that no longer meets your unchanged needs — or the company that hosts the service may go out of business or cancel the service. If your data is trapped in their system, You are screwed. You need a way to bulk download everything in their original formats (for documents, files, etc.) or in documented web standards (xml, RSS) that can be ported to a new system, or at least opened on your desktop so you can transfer information over manually.
