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Getting Things Done with 37signals’ Backpack – Why I’m Switching Back

By , on Monday, April 28th, 2008

15F4C3C7-5DE8-4864-9933-EBDC233E2586.jpg

As some of my twitter friends noticed this week, I’ve made the switch back to Backpack as my primary GTD tool. Some found this surprising, given how heavily I’ve pimped Remember the Milk. This post will outline why I left RTM and why Backpack makes so much more sense (for me, anyway).

Let me get one thing out of the way – this post (and my aforementioned switch) is in now way an indictment on RTM as a service. They have an outstanding product and the sheer number of users they have will attest to that. Having said that, here is the main limitation I found with RTM as a digital tool for Getting Things Done:

It was only a list manager for me with no way to easily associate support material. I realize they offer reminders, calendar integration, RSS feeds for days and a rich API, but all of my needs beside lists are met elsewhere (which was part of the problem). If I had a file associated with an action or project, I had to either put it on the web somewhere and link to it from the project/action or print it out and keep it in a corresponding project folder. This was cumbersome for me.

I’m not looking for a one-stop solution to this GTD thing, honestly. For me, it’s all about the mental distance between two aspects of a project. To use the above example, if one of my actions is to read a PDF on animal husbandry, I like knowing that the actual file is only one or two clicks away from that item in my list. That’s not to say that I couldn’t have achieved this with RTM, but with Backpack I can do it simply by uploading the file to the same page where the list lives.

So, what does Backpack bring to the table that makes me so giddy? Well, several things, actually…

  • Polish – Seriously, Backpack looks and acts just like you want it to. One of the driving concepts in the development process at 37signals is that you only include the features that you think most people will need. Obviously, there are tons of people who wish Backpack did [feature] – hell, there are a couple things I wouldn’t mind seeing in the next update – but they choose features to include and make sure they freaking work. And they do.
  • The Free-form nature of pages – My Backpack is made up of many, many pages of lists – but there are also a growing number of pages dedicated to specific projects. For example, I’ve been invited to a special luncheon with the Internal Revenue Service in a couple of weeks, and they’d like me to bring along a few things (financial records and such). Before Backpack, it would’ve ended up with me emailing myself a pantload of PDF bank statements, then aggregating all of those emails under a specific gmail tag. Obviously, that would have gotten extremely unwieldy in short order. Now I have all of those PDFs arranged nicely on a few Backpack pages (where you can actually store the files, not just link to them), as well as notes about specific items, a picture of my daughter and a copy of the Gettysburg Address. You shove stuff on a page, drag it where you want it (including to other pages), there’s very little limitation on how you use it.
  • Pages can be arbitrarily long – From what I can gather, there’s no set limit on the size of a Backpack page (well, except for the amount of data you’re allowed to store based on the plan you’re using). Using the previous example, I’ve got 38 PDF files on a single page as I write this. I’m pretty sure I could add another 50 and be just fine as cherry wine. I’m also not the least bit concerned with how long my lists get or anything like that, so even you mover-and-shaker types out there can rest easy knowing that you’re not going to “break” the Backpack.
  • Each page has an email address – I have one page called “Inbox” where I send random thoughts, new inputs I receive while away from a computer, as well as messages sent from Jott (yep, Jott has built-in support for Backpack through it’s Jott Links service). The magic here is that my new “stuff” is now sitting a click away from the lists that manage the rest of my stuff. Hell, I can even *drag* it to the appropriate list. Freaking sweet.
  • iPhone friendly (sorta) – While the default Backpack doesn’t have a special interface for the iPhone (and I’m sure this is one of the most requested candidate features), there are a couple of super easy tricks that allow you to reformat a Backpack page for easy iPhone viewing (without making it look wonky when viewed through a regular browser) and even change the WebClip icon for Backpack when you add it to the home screen.

I know what you’re thinking, “Alright, fine, you like Backpack enough to want to marry it or some crap – but how do you use it for GTD? Be specific, circus boy!”. At least, that’s what I imagine you’re thinking.

Obviously, the primary component you’ll be using for your lists is the… List. Here’s a quick gander at what a Backpack list looks like:

BP_List.png

Nothing too crazy, as you can see. But you can rearrange items on a list and move items between lists using the super-cool drag-and-drop capabilities that exist across most of Backpack. And when you check items off of your list, they still live right below the original list so it’s easy to recover from errant clicks. Check it out:

BP_List_Checked.png

So, here’s a peek at my sidebar, which contains links to Backpack pages (you can decide which pages appear here and which don’t – I have many more pages than listed here):

BP_Sidebar.png

For the GTD-initiated, this will look pretty straightforward. I don’t have any oddball contexts, except possibly @Mac, which is for things I need to use my home computer for instead of any computer. The non-alpha characters (*, @ and ^) that precede the list items are to force the list to be sorted in a certain way.

Each context (@) page contains a single list. Projects and Someday/Maybe are the same way, but Projects has 2 discrete lists, one for personal projects, one for work. The reason I do it this way is because my work projects typically never number higher than 5-7 and my personal projects number near 30-50 most of the time. I need to be able to see work projects quickly.

As I alluded to before, the real power of a Backpack-based GTD system is in the ability to store many types of information in a Backpack page, not just lists. This brings me to the last three items in the list above, specifically the first two, “Personal Project Index” and “Work Project Index”. Each of these two pages is essentially a list of links to other Backpack pages where project information, support material (including documents, pictures and tasks) and whatnot resides.

So, that’s how I arrange digital information using Backpack. You might notice that I haven’t talked about the Calendar or Reminders services that Backpack offers. Frankly, I don’t really use them. Sandy already handles my reminders (in a much more flexible fashion than the Backpack calendar can) and I use iCal on my Macbook and iPhone to manage hard-landscape stuff (though I do have iCal subscribed to my Backpack calendar, so I can add events there and they will trickle into my iCal calendar fairly quickly). This isn’t to say that I find some sort of flaw in how these tools are implemented – just that I’m extremely happy with how I’ve got calendaring and reminders set up and don’t see a glaring reason to switch (especially because Backpack’s calendar/reminder don’t integrate with pages at all).

Now, a couple tips for really getting the most out of Backpack as a GTD solution:

  • Email things to one page – Your home page is perfect for this. I have a contact called “Backpack” set up anywhere from which I email (Gmail, Mail.app and iPhone), and I email things to this page liberally. Just make sure you check that page often for new stuff to process.
  • “Email me a copy” – You can email any Backpack page to yourself simply by clicking this link in the page footer. A really kickass way to make backups (or even generate a quick lo-fi version of your GTD system if you expect to be away from a computer for an extended period), this is one of my favorite features.

A quick word on pricing. The Backpack plan I use is the “Solo” plan, which costs $7 per month (or, “chump change” around my house) allows for the creation of 100 pages and 1gb of storage for your files (which is ample for me). If you’re just looking for a place to put lists and you don’t need a calendar or anything else like that, you can sign up for the Free plan. You only get 5 pages but you can easily put all of your @ lists in a single page called “Actions” or something. Hell, you could run the whole list-y operation from a single page if you were feeling particularly masochistic. I’d recommend the Solo plan for personal GTD setups, but you can always go bigger if you need more of the collaborative features (multiple users, etc.).

That’s pretty much it – as you’ve probably gathered, I’m a big fan of Backpack. Give it a test run, I think you’ll dig it, too :)

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  • http://blog.scottjelias.net Scott Elias

    Great post, Brett. With summer coming, it’s always time for me to re-evaluate my GTD system. I’ve been an on-and-off, paid-then-unpaid Backpack user since almost the beginning and find their product to be outstanding.

    I’m still digging RTM for now, but am always interested in how others use the tools that are out there.

  • http://www.technotheory.com Jared Goralnick

    Really great review you’ve given here, Brett! My only issue with the 37s products (my company LIVES off Basecamp so no real issue) is their lack of dates features with their To-Do’s, but it sounds like using I Want Sandy is a nice additional tip to complete the loop. Thanks, I’m going to pass this along some other GTD’ers!

  • http://blog.raseczaid.com Cesar Diaz

    I’ve been using IWantSandy for reminders and I love it. I have a basic Basecamp account, but was not using it for much. Now after reading this article, I can see much better ways to use it. Thanks!

  • http://www.twitter.com/wizardelite Chris Rodgers

    Great review. I’ve used Backpack before and I have to say it’s one of the best online applications out there on the web. Which also provides a great testament to the power of Ruby on Rails.

    However, are some features that I wish Backpack did have. I wished that Backpack would allow you to organize your pages within a tree like structure. That way you can properly organize your pages by subject when you have a large amount of pages to sift thru. I ended up switching to OmniFocus, which is another excellent GTD tool.

  • http://longstride.wordpres.com Jason

    Thanks for your perspective. I’ve used Backpack on and off for a year without much success. It’s helpful to know how others use the same tool.

  • http://TheGrowingLife.com Clay Collins | The Growing Life

    Backpack seems awesome. I’m off to check it out.

  • http://techtalk.wrlr.fm Michael Kastler | TechTalk on WRLR 98.3FM

    Backpack is great, though a bit of a sharepoint clone. My biggest beef is that in order to share lists with people in any interactive way you have to minimally step up to the ‘basic’ level where we’re talking $24/mo. That gets out of the ‘chump change’ arena, at least for my household! :)

    I’m hooked into RTM. I’ve spent months with vitalist, then todoist, but now am firmly entrenched in RTM and I think will stay there for some time.

    For sharing documents with the multiple people I have, I simply link in the notes section of RTM to a mediafire storage location. I don’t have the need for all the blogging and project creation pieces that backpack has, so that pretty much solves it for me and total cost is $0.

    Still, I hugely appreciate you reviewing backpack, it’s definitely one tool I’ve been interested in over the past few years.

  • http://www.priacta.com/Articles/Comparison_of_GTD_Software.php Kevin Crenshaw – Productivity Coach

    Hmmm. We’ve really wanted to add Basecamp to our GTD Software Comparison table for some time (Comparison of GTD Software). I hoped your approach would do the trick, but I still see problems.

    - Because Basecamp won’t let you categorize to-dos, “projects” are kept totally separate from @contexts. You can’t designate both a project and a context at once for a task.

    - Your system allows a project in a Projects list, or you can create a special page for it to track next steps, but you have to manually move tasks from the projects list to the context list when they go live, don’t you?

    - Support documents are severed from the task when you move it into the context list. You have to type in the project name to keep them connected or manually maintain a list of projects and click a couple of times to get them, hopefully remembering which project you were dealing with.

    All the 37s products seem to have this glaring shortcoming–not letting you tag or categorize tasks.

    Please tell me I’m missing something here…

  • http://www.vocescuola.it/2008/04/29/gtd-con-backpack/ Vocescuola – GTD con Backpack

    [...] cranking widgets blog trovate un utile tutorial che vi insegna come impostare una progettazione GTD con [...]

  • http://www.nozbe.com Michael (Nozbe.com)

    Did you try Nozbe?

    http://www.nozbe.com

    I created Nozbe because I was frustrated with the inability of Backpack to be a real GTD tool. It’s got all the goodies of Backpack with GTD concepts like “Next Actions”, “Contexts”, etc.

    We also have due dates in actions and sharing/delegating of tasks. I’d encourage you to check it out as I’ve really tried to adopt it more to GTD than the Backpack originally is.

    Anyway, thanks for the great article, explaining your GTD work flow.

  • http://www.keenerliving.com/2008/05/05/techie-links-5-may-2008/ Techie Links, 5 May 2008

    [...] Blog as an in-depth writeup on 37signals’ much-praised Backpack. The review is entitled Getting Things Done with 37signals’ Backpack – Why I’m Switching Back, and discusses why the author has changed from the Remember The Milk application to Backpack. [...]

  • http://www.infinitenil.com Rod Schmidt

    And if you want to be able to access your Backpack when you’re not online, check out Packrat at http://www.infinitenil.com/packrat

  • Victor

    The only thing at this point about backpack is the inability to move items on a list to another page. How do you handle that?

  • http://brettkelly.org brett

    @Victor

    Well, the key idea behind moving elements between pages is that they can exist autonomously on any page (like a list, or a note). If you try to drag a list element to a new page, Backpack has to figure out if there are any lists in that page and, if so, where to put the dragged item. A great deal of work for something I’m sure most people don’t really need/want.

    So, for me, I just copy the list item text, delete the item, go to new page, add item to list, paste. It’s several steps, but works well. The “Fault Tolerant” way would be to mark the item as done on the original list and only delete it after you’ve successfully moved it to the target list.

  • Robert Walker

    I think Backpack’s recent multi-user changes are great and very useful. For individual GTD use however, I would still recommend http://www.vitalist.com

  • http://theweeklyreview.ca Chris

    I love all 37Signals apps – they work and they look great. But I have not made any of them my main GTD tool for one reason – tags. You cannot tag individual items. Sure, you can tag pages in Backpack and contacts in Highrise. But I would love to see the ability to tag individual entries in a to-do list as well as what’s already there.

    From what I’ve seen, this is a feature that seems to be lacking in most web apps in this genre (I Want Sandy, Zoho, RTM etc.).

  • Al

    @ Brett (cf. the May, 8th comment):

    I’ve been trying hard to make Backpack work as a GTD tool, and its inability to move single list items between pages was the big showstopper.

    Victor is absolutely right that this is Backpack’s worst shortcoming.
    And the argument that BP would have to figure out which list to put it in, doesn’t hold. You can email single list items in, after all, and BP will add it to the first list on the page, or create a list on the page if there isn’t any. From the first list you can drag it to where it’s appropriate. I fail to see why dragging to a page couldn’t be handled in the same way.

    I can live without tags, although I agree with Chris that tags at page level only are useless.

    And the way things stand, 37s seem to be targeting corporate users almost exclusively in the future, so might be not a very good bet for your personal organisation.

  • Al

    Oh, and it’s always interesting to see heavily positve blog posts that use affilitate/referrer links without disclosure.

  • http://brettkelly.org brett

    @Al

    With respect to your last comment, I have the following to say:

    If you’d be so kind as to send me an email (brett@brettkelly.org) we can discuss your concerns about the affiliate links contained in the above post. As you may have noticed, this blog is supported by advertisements, some of which are more obvious than others. Now, while I don’t choose to advertise (no pun intended) the presence of affiliate links within my blog posts, I’ve never been anything but honest about them when asked. If that somehow rubs you wrong, well, I’m sorry to hear that.

    If you’re insinuating that I am in any way affiliated with 37signals (other than as a customer), that’s incorrect. And I’d be happy to get a representative from their organization to confirm that for you.

    Thanks for reading!

  • Al

    Brett,

    I admit I was tired and overworked when I wrote this.
    In general, I like your blog and think you do a good job.
    But yes, I still think it’s good form to disclose affiliate links.
    All it takes it one line below the post.
    Advertising is something entirely different IMO. Everyone can spot that easily.

  • gepa

    What happens to all your stored data when you stop using bp?

  • Sanji Fernando

    I love backpack but have had a tough time getting it to work for GTD. I breakdown at the intersection of projects and contexts. If I have a page for a project with a set of to do’s (plus support materials etc.) I can’t assign a specific to do to a context.

    For example, if my next action on the project is “email vendor to confirm price”, i’d like backpack to pull out all my email list items when I am ready to do a bunch of emails. I think backpack will work best for GTD if you can tag individual list items.

  • http://www.productiveflourishing.com/is-backpack-worth-the-time-and-money/ Is Backpack Worth the Time and Money? | Productive Flourishing

    [...] from one page to another, and you can hack out Backpack to be your own Capture and Process Center, GTD [...]

  • http://blog.crankingwidgets.com/2008/11/11/basecamp-or-backback/ How to Use Basecamp and Backback In Perfect Harmony : The Cranking Widgets Blog

    [...] Taken from the Backpack website: “Backpack is a web-based service that makes organizing your information incredibly easy. Backpack lets you make pages which can contain any combination of notes, to-dos, images, files, etc. You can keep these pages to yourself or share them with colleagues, co-workers, friends, or family.” (You can also see how Brett uses Backpack as a general GTD system here) [...]

  • http://www.forceshare.org mp3 indir

    Thank you good articel

  • http://www.didigetthingsdone.com/2009/08/02/productivity-motivation-and-personal-development-links-2nd-august-2009/ Productivity, Motivation, and Personal Development Links – 2nd August 2009 – DIGTD – Making You More Productive

    [...] fourth link is a link to link to a post from CrankingWidgets about using 37Signals BackPack to Get Things Done. The author has switched back from Remember The Milk to BackPack and outlines the reasons for doing [...]

  • http://andyparkinson.org/how-to-use-basecamp-and-backback-in-perfect-harmony-3/401 Andy Parkinson’s World » Blog Archive » How to Use Basecamp and Backback In Perfect Harmony

    [...] Taken from the Backpack website: “Backpack is a web-based service that makes organizing your information incredibly easy. Backpack lets you make pages which can contain any combination of notes, to-dos, images, files, etc. You can keep these pages to yourself or share them with colleagues, co-workers, friends, or family.” (You can also see how Brett uses Backpack as a general GTD system here) [...]

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