Contents
GTG Manifesto
What is GTG?
Getting Things GNOME! (GTG) is a personal tasks and TODO-list items organizer for the GNOME desktop environment inspired by the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. GTG is designed with flexibility, adaptability, and ease of use in mind so it can be used as more than just GTD software.
GTG is intended to help you track everything you need to do and need to know, from small tasks to large projects.
About this document
This document's purpose is to help all GTG contributors to collaborate efficiently. It tries to provide clear definitions of the project's objectives and its most important concepts. It acts therefore as a founding document for the project. Every initiate taken by a member of the GTG community is thus expected to be in agreement with this manifesto.
The content of this manifesto is open to comments and critics. It will be maintained and revised when needed to take into account the outcome of every relevant discussions happening in the community. It can thus be considered at all time as a reference document.
GTG goals
GTG's primary goals are:
1. Relieve stress
- GTG tries to relieve stress by taking care of everything, it makes sure you never forget anything and you never miss a deadline.
2. Focus on what's relevant
- GTG helps you to focus on the most relevant tasks depending on your time, place and deadlines.
3. Make real progress
- GTG helps you to know why you need to perform a task so that you can make sure that you really progress towards your goals.
4. Avoid procrastination
- GTG encourages you to do what needs to be done.
Those goals are listed by order of importance. Every single design decision in GTG should relate to those goals.
What GTG is /What GTG is not
GTG is not a simple todo-list application: it is not made to just handle a bunch of simple lists (groceries, etc.). It is therefore not minimalistic. GTG is a personal task manager: it is a tool that allows people to identify and track down everything they have to do and help them to organize themselves. So, contrary to simple todo list tools, GTG allow to implement an *personal organization system* (like GTD, for instance).
GTG is not a Getting Things Done tool: GTG doesn't implement a specific organization process. However, GTG wants to allow people to build their personal task management process (like: 1. receive task, 2. sort out tasks, 3. identify what to do, 4. do, 5. review). It is our view that nobody quite exactly follow the policy behind a specific organizational system completely, so why bother imposing it? We want the user to be able to build his/her own process so that it fits his/her life and needs.
GTG wants to be simple, yet powerful: Our model is gedit: at its core, it appears as a clean and basic text editor, but when you start to use it, you can customize it quite a lot, so that in the end not 2 people exactly use the same way. We want GTG to feel the same: at its base, you use it to store and organize your tasks, with a very limited number of available mechanisms/features, but it could become much more personal and powerful as you enable additional features (plugins, etc.) and configure it. That means GTG should have a simple/basic core that allows someone to organize himself, and "extension paths" that allows to customize and empower the experience.
GTG is made for the GNOME desktop: It should integrate seamlessly in it. It should be able to 'play ball' with other GNOME technologies, and freedesktop.org technologies. It should respect the GNOME HIG too.
GTG should be "socially aware": In the future, we plan to include collaborative task management in GTG.
Tasks
A task is an action you or someone else can do to change the current situation into another situation.
A task description always starts with a verb. When reading a task description, one should immediately understand what do to to accomplish that task. It is also important that it should be clear to decide if a task has been accomplished or not.
A task has only two authorized relations to its owner: "I need to do it" or "I don't need to do anything about it", without any intermediate point. By default, tasks are in the "I need to do it" relation. This changes in two situations:
The task has been accomplished by you -> task is "I don't need to do anything about it" (marked as Done)
You don't need to accomplish the task for whatever reason -> task is "I don't need to do anything about it" (marked as Dismissed)
Goal
A goal is a specific situation targeted by someone which results of the accomplishment of at least one task. To be useful, a goal should have an observable outcome: you should be able to know precisely when you reach the goal. "Becoming rich" is not a good goal. "Having 1,000,000$ on my saving account" is a good goal because it is observable.
Goals are also tasks. In order to be good goal, it should also starts with a verb (which is often more generic, like "having" or "being").
A goal is also very often a task that lead to something else see comment. Why having 1,000,000$? For the sake of it? Because you want to be an early retired? So the goal should be "being an early retired". Why do you want that after all? To have the time to write a book? Thus, the goal should probably "Write a book". In that case, writing the task "Write a book" will save you the hassle of earning 1,000,000$!
It should be underlined that a goal could be shared by multiple person. Working collaboratively towards a goal is a "project".
Everything is a task
In life, everything is a task. Even the biggest project is only a simple list of tasks. As we said, most goals are also tasks. GTG's vision is that everything is a task.
In order to achieve a task, you may need to achieve some other tasks first.
Implementation directives
This section provides additional considerations that must be taken into account when implementing something in GTG. Its purpose is to provide directives to contributors to help them know how GTG's primary goal can be reached.
Relieve Stress
- Ensure that entering a new task is dead-easy. A user should be able to enter a new task without having to think about the task creation process.
- Whenever possible, directly identify the sources of the new task and connect them to GTG: e-mails, webpages, etc.
- Enable access to your tasks and collect new tasks from anywhere
- Enable other people who share a goal with you to assign you some tasks
Focus On What's Important
- Offer a short list of tasks that are actionable without the noise of all the context. [#impl_focus_workview]_
- Highlight tasks due soon or already overdue.
- Make it easy to create a dependancy between a task (in order to not list irrelevant tasks in the workview).
- Allow to display only tasks related to a specific context .
Make Real Progress
- Make it easy to create a dependancy between two tasks.
- Make it easy to refine a task in several subtasks.
- Allow users to link tasks to a goal and warn when a goal has no task.
- Track progress made towards the goals.
Avoid Procrastination
- Maintain all information related to a task in a single place.
- Encourage the use of an action verb in the title of a task.
- Encourage the user by keeping track of what has been done.
- Allow to assign a task to another person to share the workload.
On-going discussions about the text
Collaborative work
BertrandRousseau, 2012/03/26 - 01:22
By the end of the document, there some direct or indirect mention to a collaborative use of GTG. These aspects should be better defined.
Who's the public?
BertrandRousseau: IMHO, it's GTG's community of contributors. Not users, I don't think they care directly about the GTG's goals, they just use the product of it.
"Never miss deadlines"
BertrandRousseau:_ I think ensuring that you never miss a deadline is actually a requirement of the first goal: lowering stress by making sure you don't miss anything. GTG gives this guarantee. So, I moved it there. However, I still kept a reference to deadline in goal #2.
"Narrow focus"
BertrandRousseau: "narrow focus" is not a goal. I suggest: Focus on what's relevant.
LionelDricot: good suggestion
"Wide focus"
BertrandRousseau: Same comment as for 'narrow focus'. I suggest: Real progress.
LionelDricot: I like it the suggestion. Another idea would be to take the concept of altitude seen in the GTD book.
Form
The document should probably more formal. The text could alternate between a first part where things are first defined formally, then a second part where things are then explained more informally.
Ex:
A task can only accept two types of relation to the user's objectives: it is either required to progress towards these objectives, or not required. Moreover, when a task is not required, it can only be for two reasons: the user either performed the task, or it has been made irrelevant.
Indeed, when a user creates a task, he/she is supposed to accomplish it. There could only be two situation for which the task is no longer to be made: it has been done, or it has became irrelevant. The latter is the case when a situation has changed due to the intervention of something external to the user (e.g. "Buy groceries" when your significant other already did it).
"A goal is also very often a task that lead to something else"
This is a tautology: this is the very definition that's been given to a task earlier.
What is GTG?
BertrandRousseau, 2012/04/22 - 12:47
Added this section to improve the definition of GTG, the view behind the project. It comes from a discussion with A. Day, Alex B., etc.