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(If you’re interested in Stikkit, you might also enjoy this handy little program I wrote to import your Gmail contacts into Stikkit, or maybe adding Stikkits directly from your desktop with WinStikker!)
As most of my regular readers probably already know, I’m terribly impressed with Stikkit. Sure, it’s a little rough around the edges, but my goodness is it ever slick. In a previous post, I described how bummed I was that Stikkit wasn’t designed around GTD (selfish, selfish me). There has been a somewhat-active discussion around Stikkit + GTD in the Stikkit Forums, but it doesn’t appear that they ever arrived at a solution. Any proposed solution involved a fundamental change to the software instead of a more creative approach.
Well, dear readers, I’m happy to say that I think I’ve figured out a pretty keen way to use Stikkit as a functional, usable GTD system. It’s not bullet-proof by any means (and, truth be told, I haven’t actually implemented it myself), rather it’s the product of my limited knowledge of Stikkit’s capabilities married with a few hours of brainstorming and diagramming. And please also know going in that, because Stikkit wasn’t designed to be a GTD system, there are a few rather hackish workarounds contained in the following guide. Perhaps some of these things will be added as features to Stikkit somewhere down the road, but this should do for now. Read on, if you dare…
Obviously, the greatest challenge facing a GTDer looking to utilize Stikkit as their trusted system is the lack of hierarchical structure. In other words, Stikkits are not stored in any sort of discernible pattern and are only accessible via Stikkit lists, links from other Stikkits and any tags that are applied to them (or search). It’s the tagging functionality that will be doing the bulk of the work here, along with heavy use of the ‘aka’ capabilities of Stikkit (more on this later). I’ll be presenting this implementation in a somewhat step-by-step configuration - Projects, Tasks/Actions, Calendar and Tickler and Reference - and concluding with a short bit on using Stikkit for ubiquitous capture. But before we get to that, a word of warning:
To do this properly, you are going to be creating and managing a very large (bordering on obscene) amount of Stikkits.
Now then, let’s get to work…
Projects
- Each project will have it’s own Stikkit and will be the nerve center, so to speak, for the entire project. It should be tagged as ‘project’ (so that all projects can easily be viewed in the ‘Tags’ view of the Stikkit site), along with any other relevant tags you wish to assign it. Also, it is advised to create a meaningful (and easy to remember) ‘aka’ for each project Stikkit so it’s easy to link back to the main project Stikkit from any ‘child’ Stikkits.
Tasks/Next Actions
- As a quick glimpse at Stikkit’s help window will tell you, prepending text in a Stikkit with ‘-’ will mark it as an un-finished to-do. This also applies to the first line of text in a Stikkit (which becomes the Stikkit’s title). So, for each Task you have, it gets it’s own Stikkit and should be titled “-Walk the Dog”, etc. This way, all you need to do is click the ‘To-Do’ icon at the top of Stikkit to see a list of your next actions.
Now, I know what you’re thinking - “but what about contexts, good sir!” - don’t worry, just simply tag it with the correct context (’@’ is the same as ‘tag as’, so ‘@home’ will work, etc.). And because you’ve already defined this as a to-do (task), it’ll have a lovely little bubble next to it waiting to be filled in once you’ve completed the action. The default behavior of the To-do list is to show all to-dos, but all you need to do in order to see them for a particular tag/context is enter that context under ‘tagged as’ on the right hand side of the To-do list.
This next bit is where I imagine most folks will start to have a problem. Because there’s no way to open a Stikkit and see what other Stikkits link to it (at least, not that I’m aware of at the time of this writing), you’re going to have to make sure that one of two things happens:
- Your Project Stikkit has links to all of it’s relevant child Stikkits
- All child Stikkits link back to their parent Project Stikkit
In my mind, the first option is the best one as it keeps the Project Stikkit as the backbone of the project itself. One could make a somewhat-compelling case for the second option, but I think that over time, it would cause your Stikkit heap to become rather unweildy.
Calendar and Tickler
- This is one area where Stikkit’s stock functionality really shines. Because of the natural language implementation that chugs along under the hood as you type, you needn’t get any more complicated than:
Steven's Birthday Party is at The Burger Barn on October 21 at 10pm
If you want to be reminded about Steven’s shindig, just go to the next line and type:
remind me
Pretty straight-forward, right? Well, there’s one little hitch, I’m afraid…
By default (and this is the only behavior Stikkit currently supports, as far as I know), you can only get reminders 15-30 minutes before your event starts. So, if I’m out at a craft fair or something on the night of Steven’s party, a text message 15 minutes before the party starts won’t do me much good (unless the party is next door and Steven likes wicker). So, armed with this knowledge, you could just as easily set up a reminder Stikkit, like so:
Steven's Party is in one week on October 14, 2007 remind me
I realize we’re kinda cannibalizing the system here, but statements like that one are pretty natural to write. Thankfully, Stikkit knows just what to do with something like that. And because the Calendar page offers an Atom feed, you can drop it neatly into your favorite RSS reader (some iCal integration would be extremely slick here, if there are any Stikkit developers reading this).
Reference Items
- Again, Stikkit is pre-drilled for exactly this type of thing. Enter your data (whether it’s a person, a link or just a random smattering of information that could be useful later) and make sure you tag it effectively. For example, let’s say that I happen to learn that my new sales contact at Acme, Inc. likes chocolate cupcakes. I might create a Stikkit that looks something like:
Karen from Acme, Inc. really likes chocolate cupcakes This might be useful information when it comes time to ask her for a favor @reference @acme
Again, Stikkit’s flexibility is gold here - you can literally put anything you want into the body of the Stikkit - but the tags are what will save your bacon when you need to retrieve this information.
Ubiquitous Capture
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If you’re at a computer all day long (or even if you’re not, cell phone users), you might be thinking that Stikkit would make a decent dumping ground for unprocessed information. Well, in my opinion, you’d be right
But if you’re just shoveling information into new Stikkits all day long, how do you know what you need to sort through and process? Yep, a tag. How about this:
Make sure you don't forget suzie's birthday in 3 weeks she also happens to like chocolate cupcakes @inbox
So, you fire off 20-30 of those in a given day, all tagged as ‘inbox’. When it comes time to process your inbound items, you need only sort by the ‘inbox’ tag! The only pisser about this is the removal of the inbox tag, but if you’re opening and modifying each Stikkit during processing, it shouldn’t be that big a pain to remove that tag.
So, in a large, gaping nutshell, that’s my how I’d leverage Stikkit into an awesome GTD system. Granted, it is more work than some of the other choices out there, but I’m just so enamored with Stikkit’s coolness that I’m thinking I might actually give this a shot. Oh, and please know that I’ve only barely scratched the surface of what Stikkit can do, so don’t think for a second that functionality is as limited as what I’m describing here. I implore you, go play around with it for awhile and prepare to have your hair blown back. And heaven only knows what sorts of cool stuff could be built using their fancy API.
Now, friends, I’m very curious to hear your reactions/thoughts on this. As I said, this is all theoretical and may fall flat on it’s face in practice - please let me know if you think there’s anything that could be done differently (or better) that would help make Stikkit into a truly great GTD tool!
Technorati Tags: gtd, stikkit, productivity, brainstorm, web2.0
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37 Responses to “How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse”
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[...] The greatest challenge facing a GTDer looking to utilize Stikkit as their trusted system is the lack of hierarchical structure. In other words, Stikkits are not stored in any sort of discernible pattern. […] it’s the tagging functionality that will be doing the bulk of the work here. How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse [...]
Very interesting article, Stikkit is certainly breaking new ground. But what do you use for GTD? (I’m sure there’s a post somewhere, please guide me!) I’ve read a lot of articles of how one could but few that the authors actually implement and are fully satisfied with.
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse (tags: gtd tutorial article) [...]
Great post Brett! I’ve been thinking about setting something up like that, but the only thing thing holding me back is that stikkit is just a tad slow for my taste. Hopefully that will get cleared up too
Awesome work!
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog (tags: blogs gtd howto stikkit toread) [...]
[...] | CrunchRank - Ranking StartUps Everyday.http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001623.phpHow to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets BlogVideo Demonstration: Open a beer bottle with a piece of paper - LifehackerMacGyver Tip: Stop bloody [...]
[...] guest-blogger Brett has a great post on how to whip Stikkit into GTD submission, David Allen style. It’s the tagging functionality that will be doing the bulk of the work here, [...]
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog [...]
Very good and helpful post. However, you do have a problem with spelling. I suggest that you create a project called “Learn to spell correctly,” with a next action of “Look in a dictionary for the meaning of “it’s” and “its.”
I love your posts, but this is something that is very distracting.
George
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse (tags: Productivity Tips HowTo GTD Stikkit) [...]
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog (tags: gtd) [...]
Cool post. Cool enough that I tried Stikkit it out a bit, even though I have no intention of moving my GTD to it. But I did notice one thing. You said “Because there’s no way to open a Stikkit and see what other Stikkits link to it (at least, not that I’m aware of at the time of this writing),” but I think there is a way to do it. From Merlin’s awesome post on stikkit (http://www.43folders.com/2007/02/07/stikkit-introduction/), he showed an example of one stikkit linking to another. So I tried it out.
I created a project stikkit called Blog. Then I created a task stikkit. In the latter, I put “see: {Blog}”. Along the right side of stikkits you can (sometimes) see “related stikkits”. Now, my “create” stikkit is related to Blog. And, if you go to Blog, it’s related back to the task! Very cool, and very easy.
I look forward to hearing more about you using Stikkit for GTD
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse – Cranking Widget’s take on turning Stikkit into a powerful GTD tool. [...]
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog (tags: article blog business cool guides hacks howto tutorial lifehacks organization stikkit gtd productivity) [...]
[...] now, my Stikkit fanboy status is hardly a secret. And while there have been a couple of other posts around here dealing with some theoretical Stikkit coolness, I figured it was time to give something a little [...]
[...] make a new note. That takes clicking and time. Since I’m leaning towards using stikkit for my online GTD system, I want a quick and easy way to stik [...]
[...] evangelist Brett Kelly of Cranking Widgets Blog has just launched a windows tool that allows you to post stikkits from your desktop. Fire up [...]
To George who contends that your “misspellings” are distracting, I contend that George’s latent anti-neutral tendencies are distracting. For too long have people misguidedly assumed that the reason most English speakers remove the correct apostrophe between the t and s of it’s (neutral possessive) is because only it’s (contraction of it and is) is in the right. The real reason the apostrophe is removed, is by a bigoted and domineering class of the universe known as proper nouns. Proper noun’s think that only they can have possession of other objects (i.e. Greg’s Post). In this modern world, we can cast away the class distinctions between sentient beings and the “neutral” objects we create and interact with. (The offending line in question “Each project will have it’s own Stikkit…”. In a non-bigoted world, we can correctly bestow the proper noun possession apostrophe to project owning stikkit. In Georges world, neutral objects are second class).
To further, George has fallen victim to a simple test given to us by Second Grade teachers everywhere. They have instilled in all of their students a conditional. If the student’s brain is filled with malady and misconstruction, they will latch on and try to ruthlessly enforce all of the rules they see in second grade. You can spot this behavior whenever someone needlessly corrects your grammar, arithmetic, logic, or actions. This is a psychological construct given to us to learn who among us is mentally ill, that we may avoid their aggravations in the future. This mental illness goes hand in hand with Georges perceived superiority to inanimate objects.
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog (tags: gtd productivity stikkit lifehacks) [...]
[...] I’ve said in the past, I was an analog GTDer (but have since converted to a kick-ass digital solution). I used paper products for absolutely every aspect of GTD when I started and found the experience [...]
I too love Stikkit. But I think that it’s too buggy to use at the moment. And I have a nasty feeling that no bugs are being fixed right now; it’s certainly true that none of the developers have posted to the support forum for a month now.
Also, you are right - maintaining all those links between projects and actions is a pain. IMO GTD by design must not be a pain, or it will not get done. My GTD implementation is staying on paper for the time being….
All the theory in the world is fine and good, but have you actually implemented this and if so, how has it been working out?
You may also try wrike. Nice feature about it is that you don’t need to track follow-ups, Wrike does it for you. Having less things to track is always good. And we’ve been transparently integrated with e-mail right from the start, so you don’t need to change your habbits assuming that you use e-mail.
[...] tweaking, broken down into different sections. Turns out it is pretty close to what I read recently here linked from Lifehacker. Actually you’d probably want to run there and read that, because it [...]
Hi,
Great post! I have also changed my GTD-system to be based around stikkit. For the time being, I still keep the full projects in a single multi-todo-stikkit, unlike what you describe. Also, I tag my contexts as ‘@@home’ - which results in the tag being ‘@home’ in the tag-view. In that way, I can distinguish between context tags and normal tags. Then I work mostly out of my RSS-viewer (WizzRSS in firefox), to get undone todos, tagged with @office,@online, …
For my offline tasks, I rely on pmStikkit (http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2007/01/24/bacon/#pocketnet, hacked to support A4 paper and high-bit characters) to give me a new pocketmod-book every day - which I also use as my text-based inbox.
Oh, and by the way: I import my stikkit-calendar into Evolution (on linux) using the iCal-feed. Goto calendar view and press the up-arrow in the top right corner, then click subscribe as iCal…
Re: Associating stikkits
I’m pretty new to GTD but I think it has promise. Like many, I think the theory is great, but implementation is difficult and overly-individualized. This post is a great suggestion for leveraging a neat technology.
I really like the @@whatever and see:{whatever} methods. When I assemble a project I simply associate each action and “nerve center” post with the same tag, the same thing I used for my project name. Below is my example.
-Clean the car
@project car
aka car
-Wash exterior
@car
-Vacuum interior
@car
This way only my “nerve center” shows up under the project tag.
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog (tags: GTD Tutorial Web_Service Blog) [...]
My joy with Stikkit is tempered by the lack of a way to access via a mobile device.
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse · The Cranking Widgets Blog [...]
[...] How to Make Stikkit into Your Personal GTD Powerhouse [Cranking Widgets] (link) [] Google map your road trip real-time http://localhost/home/sal/bin/rss.cgi/2007/03/13#Google_map_your…_time [...]
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I ran across this great compile on ZenHabits blog . Below is a snipit of what you will find there. The…
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Cheap Custom Built Computers…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
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I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
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[...] Using Stikkit with GTD (via the cranking widgets blog) [...]
[...] How to Make Stikkit Your Personal GTD Powerhouse [...]