JamesT
0
Hey all — longtime member here (since 2014, mostly lurking), and I'm finally posting again because I have something I want to share with this group specifically, and I want your honest reactions before I take it more public.
Quick disclosure up front: I'm the founder of the thing I'm about to describe. Posting in the tools section because that's what it's for, but if a mod thinks I should pull it, just tell me and I will.
A bit about me first so you can calibrate. I've been doing GTD since the book came out in 2001. Re-read it every couple of years, took the official training when David Co came through Seattle, and ran informal lunch-and-learn sessions for my Microsoft teammates over the years — not because anyone asked me to, but because they kept asking what I was doing in that task manager always open on my second monitor. In 2014, I co-founded GTDNext and ran it with my co-founder for seven years. Sold my share at the end of 2020. Some of you may have used it. Good run, lots of lessons, and by the end I had a long list of things I'd do differently if I were starting over.
That someday / maybe the project is now an app. It's called Mind Like Water.
The thing that drove me to build it: I've used pretty much every tool out there over the last 25 years — Things, OmniFocus, Nirvana, Todoist, Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, plus GTDNext, plus a dozen others. They all do something well. None of them treats tasks and notes as equal partners. Task managers bolt notes on as a textarea. Note tools bolt tasks on as a checkbox. The thinking part of a project and the doing part end up in different worlds, and you spend half your life gluing them together. That's the gap I'm trying to close first.
A few specifics on the GTD plumbing. Capture defaults to Inbox — that's where most things should land before you've decided what they are — but you can promote on the way in if you already know. Weekly Review is a first-class view, not just a piece of advice in the docs; it walks the standard checklist (inbox, stalled projects, overdue, stale next actions, someday/maybe, completed since last review) with an optional AI pass for the "what hasn't moved?" question. Areas of Focus is mode-switching — set your active area and every view narrows to it, not a color-coded tag you have to filter for. Tasks and notes share the same tag tree, the same search, and the same area scope. And there's a deep keyboard shortcut layer for the things you do all day.
And then a few things you won't find in most GTD apps. Notes are actually notes — a real editor with wikilinks, backlinks, and @-mentions; a note can reference a task, and the task shows the note in its "Referenced in" section, so your project's thinking lives next to its doing. There's an opt-in AI triage layer that watches Inbox and proposes the area, project, due date, status, and tags from natural-language entries — you accept what's right and reject what isn't. The point isn't to think for you; it's to make the boring clarification typing disappear. Voice capture (Shift+N) lets you dictate a stream-of-consciousness brain dump that gets transcribed and parsed into structured tasks for you to review before anything saves — reflective bits get appended to your daily page automatically. And every account has a private email address: forward anything to it and it lands in your Inbox as a task (or a note if you prefix the subject with n
.
It's not GTD-inspired-but-loose. It's not a "personal OS." It reads your Google Calendar so today's meetings show up alongside your tasks, but it doesn't try to be your calendar — it can't create or move events. It's a strict take on GTD with notes treated equally.
Here's what I'm actually asking. I'm putting together a small beta — about 10 people from this forum — to try it before I go more public. If you're up for it, you get six months of Pro free, and after that you're locked into founding-member pricing forever ($5/mo instead of the public $8). I've set up a small private Discord where I'm hanging out with the cohort, so you'd have a direct line to me for bugs, ideas, questions, whatever.
What I'd want in return: actually use it for at least two weeks, and tell me when something's wrong. Especially when I've got GTD wrong. That's the feedback I'm most after.
If you want in, DM me with a sentence or two about your current GTD setup and what's frustrating about it. First ten get a spot.
If you'd rather just look at the landing page first, it's at https://mindlikewater.app - But I'd rather have you in the beta.
— James
Quick disclosure up front: I'm the founder of the thing I'm about to describe. Posting in the tools section because that's what it's for, but if a mod thinks I should pull it, just tell me and I will.
A bit about me first so you can calibrate. I've been doing GTD since the book came out in 2001. Re-read it every couple of years, took the official training when David Co came through Seattle, and ran informal lunch-and-learn sessions for my Microsoft teammates over the years — not because anyone asked me to, but because they kept asking what I was doing in that task manager always open on my second monitor. In 2014, I co-founded GTDNext and ran it with my co-founder for seven years. Sold my share at the end of 2020. Some of you may have used it. Good run, lots of lessons, and by the end I had a long list of things I'd do differently if I were starting over.
That someday / maybe the project is now an app. It's called Mind Like Water.
The thing that drove me to build it: I've used pretty much every tool out there over the last 25 years — Things, OmniFocus, Nirvana, Todoist, Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, plus GTDNext, plus a dozen others. They all do something well. None of them treats tasks and notes as equal partners. Task managers bolt notes on as a textarea. Note tools bolt tasks on as a checkbox. The thinking part of a project and the doing part end up in different worlds, and you spend half your life gluing them together. That's the gap I'm trying to close first.
A few specifics on the GTD plumbing. Capture defaults to Inbox — that's where most things should land before you've decided what they are — but you can promote on the way in if you already know. Weekly Review is a first-class view, not just a piece of advice in the docs; it walks the standard checklist (inbox, stalled projects, overdue, stale next actions, someday/maybe, completed since last review) with an optional AI pass for the "what hasn't moved?" question. Areas of Focus is mode-switching — set your active area and every view narrows to it, not a color-coded tag you have to filter for. Tasks and notes share the same tag tree, the same search, and the same area scope. And there's a deep keyboard shortcut layer for the things you do all day.
And then a few things you won't find in most GTD apps. Notes are actually notes — a real editor with wikilinks, backlinks, and @-mentions; a note can reference a task, and the task shows the note in its "Referenced in" section, so your project's thinking lives next to its doing. There's an opt-in AI triage layer that watches Inbox and proposes the area, project, due date, status, and tags from natural-language entries — you accept what's right and reject what isn't. The point isn't to think for you; it's to make the boring clarification typing disappear. Voice capture (Shift+N) lets you dictate a stream-of-consciousness brain dump that gets transcribed and parsed into structured tasks for you to review before anything saves — reflective bits get appended to your daily page automatically. And every account has a private email address: forward anything to it and it lands in your Inbox as a task (or a note if you prefix the subject with n
.It's not GTD-inspired-but-loose. It's not a "personal OS." It reads your Google Calendar so today's meetings show up alongside your tasks, but it doesn't try to be your calendar — it can't create or move events. It's a strict take on GTD with notes treated equally.
Here's what I'm actually asking. I'm putting together a small beta — about 10 people from this forum — to try it before I go more public. If you're up for it, you get six months of Pro free, and after that you're locked into founding-member pricing forever ($5/mo instead of the public $8). I've set up a small private Discord where I'm hanging out with the cohort, so you'd have a direct line to me for bugs, ideas, questions, whatever.
What I'd want in return: actually use it for at least two weeks, and tell me when something's wrong. Especially when I've got GTD wrong. That's the feedback I'm most after.
If you want in, DM me with a sentence or two about your current GTD setup and what's frustrating about it. First ten get a spot.
If you'd rather just look at the landing page first, it's at https://mindlikewater.app - But I'd rather have you in the beta.
— James