I’m a big fan of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. When it comes to effective organization you could probably read this book and be done, it really is that good.
One issue I have with the book though is that it’s very paper centric. As a Yard-O-Led fountain pen and Rhodia notebook loving scribbler I have to say I can dig that. I really can.
But the thing that irks me with a paper based workflow is that eventually, at some point, I know I’m going to have to type my paper notes up!
To that end I need some good software to organize my TODO lists.
For years I’ve turned to Cultured Code’s Things. It’s a beautifully designed application but has not been without its problems. In the early days of productivity software Things was relatively alone in the marketplace. Today things are very different with Asana, Todoist, Wunderlist, TaskPaper and a whole myriad of other entrants crowding up the productivity suite market.
Things hasn’t kept up and it’s high time I switched. Unfortunately Cultured Code hasn’t seen fit to put any sort of decent export functionality into Things. Thankfully however they do offer AppleScript functionality so an evening of hacking led me to produce a script which pulls the data out of their database and sticks it into a nice CSV.
From there you can copy and paste it into the task app of your choice or alternatively import it using your own script-fu.