How to make a GTD Wordpress blog

UPDATE: Put your WordPress GTD into a Zoho Notebook, along with your Bloglines and most everything else you need at your fingertips.

I spent a lot of time this week trying out different online and server-side apps to help me get into GTD mode. Nothing was quite right for me, and eventually I decided I needed to just pick something and be done.

That’s when I came up with the idea of turning a Wordpress install into a GTD app. Here’s how I did it:

• Install Wordpress
• I created the following categories:
  • GTD: Inbox
  • GTD: Next Action
  • GTD: Reference
  • GTD: Projects
  • GTD: Someday/Maybe
  • GTPD: Project 1
  • GTPD: Project 2 (and so on)
  • Abandoned
  • Done

The logic of my categories might not suit your needs, but I’ll explain it so you can get ideas from it. First, the GTD element: in GTD you have an Inbox for brand new tasks you’ve just thought of. Every day you’ll process the inbox and stick things into more specific sections. Next Action is where you stick the ones you’re going to do something about immediately. Someday/Maybe is the stuff you may do someday, but not immediately. Reference is just what it sounds like. Projects are the various projects that each of your tasks belong to. I added “Abandoned” and “Done” to keep track of stuff I’ve decided not to do and stuff I’ve completed, for future reference.

I made a separate category for each Project. I could’ve made a sub-category, but that didn’t work too well in the tag cloud (more on that later). By sticking the “GTD” and “GPTD” in front of certain things, I kept them grouped alphabetically. Then I made a tag-cloud style “heatmap” with a plugin called catcloud and put that in my sidebar. Now I can glance at the cloud and the categories that have the most stuff piling up immediately catch my eye and get priority treatment. (Alternately, you could use a regular category list and set it to show the numbers of posts in each category).

Here’s how I use it. I open a new post. The title is the task, i.e. “Pick up juice.” I leave the post empty unless I have notes on that – say, “Safeway’s having a sale on that.” I put it in the Inbox category. Later, when I process everything in the Inbox, I change each item’s categories to move them where they should be. When I complete or abandon them, I move them to the Done or Abandoned categories.

Also, with Cat Cloud, you can have it exclude certain categories from the cloud. I set my install to exclude GTD: Reference, Abandoned and Done because those are just going to pile way up with posts over time. I created links to those categories in the blogroll so they’re still easy to access from the sidebar.

If you want to keep the install private even from prying bots, you can put it in a protected folder on your domain or use this wonderful plugin: Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin. It prevents anyone from seeing the blog unless they’ve logged in (making it very nice for private blogs or blogs people pay to read, too).