When the GTD system I’m using at any particular time gets out of whack, I start feeling like a passel of ants whose chemical trail has been interrupted by a finger-swath of spit from some gigantic trickster-observer on high. Purpose becomes muddled. Motivation wavers. What had been clicking begins grinding.

It is very disconcerting, but having gone through this a number of times, I’m all too familiar with the problem.

The basic issue, as I talked about in my last post, “kGTD not GTD well enough“, is the unreliability of the kGTD system itself when it comes to recurring tasks, and general wonkiness as the number of tasks has risen.

iCal would be desirable but can’t be relied on either, due to poor performance. I may revisit that when Leopard comes out.

iGTD looks attractive, but as I said before: a moving target. Merlin has picked up on iGTD now, so it’ll be interesting to see if the extra attention affects development.

My other viable option is what I’ve been reacquainting myself with the past day or so: Remind. What’s key about Remind, as I’ve come to realize over the different periods I’ve used it, is insuring the CLI beastie is brought into the GUI realm, like Square being lifted out of his 2D Flatland world by the Sphere.

GeekTool, the last way I accomplished that, isn’t very useful for me nowadays. I so rarely see my Desktop anymore, thanks to all the windows oozing productivity all over the place. :) And while I’m usually in a terminal window, I’m not always there to get notices.

There are a couple of methods to make it happen. Well, three if you count the various scripts to make iCal and Remind talk to each other back and forth. All of these most likely will rely on Remind’s daemon mode (the -z flag) or some combination of periodic and cron. What I’ll probably do is try out the Remind-to-mail script tidbits to start with.

So, focusing in on next steps. More later.