So having stated my intention to post here once a week I should set out how I'm going to achieve that when my average posting rate in the past has been closer to biannual. I've experimented on and off with incorporating bits of Getting things done into my life. So far this has been mostly about maintaining my list of next actions in a tracks instance. I find that as long as I stick to that it helps me "get things done". Therefore my initial plan for organising this is to simply add a project for my blog to tracks and add the subjects I want to write about as actions.

I don't find tracks to be a perfect solution though which brings me to my first idea: A better time management tool. I've encountered some annoying niggles with tracks like support for exporting data but not importing it and broken sync with Shuffle but there are a lot of tools for time management out there so I had better explain why I think we need another one.

The main strength of tracks and similar time management tools is that is personal but that is also a weakness. It organises my todo list but at the same time it lacks real support for sharing the work with others. I think the ideal time management tool in addition to helping me break down my work into manageable bites would support sharing work with others. In consequence it would be able to do some of the same things as Trac or Redmine but organised from the perspective of the individual and their goals rather than a free floating 'project'. Our tools shape how we think and using collaborative time management as a means of organising our projects helps us focus on what is important in all this - people and their goals. This would hopefully support the same sort of collaborative non-hierarchical organisations as Loomio.

From a technical perspective I think the main thing we need for collaborative time management tool is an open standard protocol for exchanging and sharing tasks and an associated data format so people can pick their own tool. I hope it would be possible to use CalDAV and iCalendar for this but it may not be. My ideal tool would also talk nicely to existing calendaring and project management tools. From a user interface perspective I'd like the tool to prompt me to make time estimates and break down and share large tasks.