smithdoug said:When I first read Getting Things Done a few years ago it seemed to me that Ecco Pro--with it's powerful outlining and list-making features--would be the ideal tool to use to implement David Allen's system. But Ecco Pro--perhaps the most powerful PIM ever produced--was already a software orphan, abandoned by the company Netmanage which had acquired it from Arabesque, and I was reluctant to stake everything on something with such an uncertain future. So I e-mailed David Allen and asked him what he thought of GTD on Ecco Pro. My recollection of his response was that he cautioned against any system that required to much of your "inner Geek" to be fully functioning. Excellent advice, though I don't know if it's necessarily more applicable to the very elegant Ecco Pro than anything else out there. Nevertheless, I now consider Ecco Pro largely irrelevant. I now use Outlook with the GTD add-in. And I also use MindManager, which I find is a better outliner than Ecco Pro and it too can integrate with Outlook. I still have Ecco Pro on my system, with huge outlines of notes for different chapters of a book I was working on when my father passed away, which forced me to set that project aside for another day. But my intention is to eventually update and transfer those notes to MindManager and perhaps OneNote. Now what would really be terrific--and something I've begged both Microsoft and Mindjet for--would be a way to link a sub-topic or branch in MindManager to a specific page in OneNote. But back to GTD on Ecco Pro: I should think it would work great, and is certainly worthy of consideration if you're not already using something else. We have wonderful tools available to us these days. The real key is not so much which specific tool we use, but that we use it intelligently and systematically. You can buy a fancy new piece of exercise equipment, but you still have to pedal!
I also have just created a GTD template using Ultra Recall. This is another program that has piqued my interest as being a nice solution to follow the GTD principles.
Vincent Peppe said:I also have just created a GTD template using Ultra Recall. This is another program that has piqued my interest as being a nice solution to follow the GTD principles.
Ecco Pro is superb. I have not found another program that allows me to outline my tasks, while viewing their attributes in columns - which I can edit without opening each task item. In my view, this outline/detailed columns feature is crucial to how I view project planning and management - and seems crucial for GTD implementation.
Today, I am not willing to rely on Ecco Pro to keep up with Redmond's endless SP's, etc. My company is Outlook based.
However, I am impressed with Ultra Recall. It does not, however, offer much for Project/Task management that I can discern. Your template for GTD would be a welcome addition. How can we try it?
