By
Gina Trapani,
1:30 PM on Thu Oct 26 2006, 41,820 views
by Jason Thomas
Everyone has to find their own killer personal organizational app, and for me, it's a single, free HTML document calledGTDTiddlyWiki. The self-contained standalone mini-wiki is packed with features but it doesn't dictate how you work - it provides a canvas on which you can design your own process improvements and workflows.
Don't let GTDTiddlyWiki's unusual name put you off. It's one of the best organization apps available, and in fact it beats the pants off all the commercial organizational software I've tried.
If you're looking for your killer app, today I've got a primer on how I've put GTDTiddlyWiki to work for me.
What's GTDTiddlyWiki?
GTDTW is an HTML document that you save to your local hard drive and edit there using your web browser. When you save information, it edits itself, and stores what you've written in an internal data format. This is very convenient for people who are into portable apps on USB keys, because it's completely self-contained, always with you and only requires a web browser to edit. It's also very easy to back it up: just send it up to your Gmail account every few days, or better yet schedule a job to do it for you.
To download GTDTW, right-click this GTDTiddlyWiki link and save it to a folder on your desktop. Don't save it to your desktop if you intend to keep it there; I'll explain why in a minute. In fact, you don't even need to save it at all: you can follow through most of this tutorial with the one that's up there on the site.
Now that you've saved it, load it up in Firefox. You're going to see something like this (click to enlarge):
Over there on the left is a menu. That's all editable, and it's one way you can get around in GTDTW.
Over on the right are what they call "tiddlers." These are analogous to pages in a traditional wiki. You could also say that they're like notecards in a Hipster PDA, and that's no accident: GTDTW was designed from the get-go to work like index card stacks. You can even print tiddlers to index cards, so you have a nice way of dumping out lists and so on for when you're on the go.
Editing GTDTiddlyWiki
There's a button on the menu to the left that says "CreateNewTiddler." Click it. On the right, you'll see a new card appear. Double-click it, enter a title — for now, call it Lists — and type in some text. When you're finished, click "done" or just hit Ctrl-Enter. Your tiddler's finished now. But it's not saved permanently yet. To do so, click "save changes" on the menu. Your first time it will trigger a Firefox warning telling you that the Javascript wants to save something on your local hard drive. Click the "Allow" button and check off "Remember this decision" so you don't get asked every time. You're good to go now, and next time you load up GTDTW your new tiddler will show up in the system.
Note: If you've never done much with wikis before, the formatting involved can seem daunting at first. GTDTW syntax is a simplified version of the highly evolved app that runs Wikipedia, but it does take getting used to. Bear with me; after a little practice it becomes automatic.
Building your GTDTiddlyWiki
You've probably evolved a number of organizational methods of your own that fit your own work style. You're probably going to want to edit the menu to reflect your own process. To do that, click on the "MainMenu" button in the menu. It pops up a tiddler. That's right — the menu itself lives on a tiddler, and you can edit it just like any other card. Click the yellow "edit" button on the MainMenu tiddler. You'll see a number of entries in brackets. Add a new one: type "[[Lists]]" and close the card. Now, over on the left, you should see the item appear in the menu. Click the menu item Lists and the new card you made earlier should appear. Snazzy.
You might want to call it something more descriptive than that. I have one called "Ideas" that I use to reference other cards containing ideas for articles, projects, etc. Here's how to link to other cards from within a tiddler:
Say you're going on vacation and you need to remember to bring everything with you. That would be a new list, so you want it to be referenced from your "Lists" card.
Open up "Lists" from the menu, or if you already have it open, just double-click it to edit the card. On it, you have whatever you typed earlier. Now, type "VacationList" and close the tiddler. It's important that you make it one single word with two capitals ("camel case"). That's a WikiWord, and it's how wiki's indicate links to other pages. Alternatively, you can just enclose the word in double brackets like we did above.
You'll see that VacationList link is on there, and it's in italics. The italics mean that the tiddler hasn't been created yet. Click that link and it'll create a new tiddler called VacationList. You can edit that tiddler to indicate everything you need to bring with you. You can make it a bulleted list by typing an asterisk ahead of each word.
If you want, just paste the following text into your new card:
!Packing
*Into Suitcase
**Scarf
**Gloves
**iPod
!Shopping
*Sporting Goods Store
**New Boots
**Trail Mix
**Pocket Heaters
When you click "Done," here's what it should look like:
Here's a tip for things like shopping or packing lists you might print out to index cards: If you use a double asterisk, it'll result in an empty circle instead of a solid bullet. That way, when you finish each item on the list, just fill in the corresponding circle. Make sure to use a sharp number 2 pencil! That and numerous other tips are on the FormattingInstructions menu item.
Configuring GTDTiddlyWiki
There are a few little usability issues with GTDTW, but they're easy to get around. Firstly, you should go into "options" on the menu and click "AutoSave." I also uncheck "EnableAnimations," because sometimes the animations can result in slowness, especially if you're running from remote over X or through something like VMWare.
The reason AutoSave is so important is because GTDTW lives in Firefox. More specifically, it lives in a Firefox tab. It's real easy to forget and start up multiple instances of GTDTW, making you run into version control issues. You also might just accidentally close the tab GTDTW is on, and even though it'll ask you to confirm, you don't want to be adding a lot of cards to the system, switch to another tab and forget to save it.
In Options, you'll also notice a checkbox labeled "Save Backup." That button is the reason why you don't want to throw GTDTW onto your desktop. It saves incremental backups every time you make a change, each one in its own new file. This is nice in case you make a mistake or need to revert, but it can result in clutter that you don't really need, so you want to place GTDTW in its own separate folder. Once your GTDTW file grows to a few megs or so, you'll also want to go into its folder and clear out some of the older backup files occasionally to save disk space, because it can add up.
When I want to back up my GTDTW, I just send it to a Gmail account I've set up for handling backups. I have a Linux cron job that sends it up there every day. That way, you keep running incremental backups of your work over time. It's not good to use Gmail as a primary file storage, but it's great for backups like this because it keeps everything nicely organized by date. You could also just use your "Gmail This" bookmarklet and add your saved GTDTW file as an attachment. Here's a previous Lifehacker feature on emailing yourself backups on Windows.
External links to your other capture tools
For a while, I was adding everything under the sun into GTDTW. Now, not so much. The file will get big, bloated and unwieldy. For a while, I was linking to files on my local hard drive (see the LinktoFolders tiddler under FormattingInstructions), but that's unwieldy too if you move from computer to computer.
Better to link to your Google Notebooks and store information there. Just add an external link to a tiddler like so:[[MyNotebook|http://www.google.com/notebook/]]. If you're logged into Google Notebook, it'll bring up your full page view. In Firefox, you can just middle-click the link and it will open in a new tab.
Ready to print something to notecards? Just hit "Print" from your browser and the tiddlers you have open will print just as nice as could be.
You'll find that your methods for using GTDTW will evolve over time. For a while, I was using GTDTW for my monthly planner. Now, under my "Agenda" menu item, I have a link to my Google calendar. You guessed it— it's just the same as above, except the link looks like this: [[http://www.google.com/calendar/]].
GTDTW is a great tool for research, organizing different clippings, images and whatnot into an format that's easy to navigate and search. In fact, you might want to save Google searches to look at later. Just link to them:[[Lifehacker|http://www.google.com/search?q=lifehacker]]
I could go on for probably twenty more pages about all the ways I've used GTDTW. I'm not even touching on how to use tags, or the search utility, or the full-featured regular expression searching that it offers.
GTDTiddlyWiki took getting used to, but now I use it every day. But in its customizability lies a pitfall: it has the potential to be an incredible distraction and time-waster. Don't just play with it like a new toy and then discard it. Work up a system and stick with it for a while, actually use it. Then, after you've integrated it into your workflow, start refactoring: look at the way you're using it and figure out how you can streamline your process. That's how you get continual improvement over time.
For more ideas of what you can do with these great apps, check tiddlywiki.com. Also, thank the developers. They deserve it.
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