The Cranking Widgets Blog

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:

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:

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):

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

Technorati Tags: gtd, productivity, software, backpack, 37signals, sandy, rememberthemilk