For the last year or so I’ve been trying to follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, with varying levels of success. One reason for the less-than-stellar progress is a lack of a “trusted system” into which all my projects, tasks and “next actions” go.

Sure, I carry around my trusty Moleskine notebook and a Tul pen everywhere to do the “ubiquitous capture” that’s so important in GTD, but transferring those captured ideas, reminders and notes into something permanent has ben missing. I need a system on my computer into which I stuff these written items, along with those I think of when I’m at my computer (most of the time).

I’ve tried a bunch of stuff. Kinkless GTD (kGTD), iGTD, Actiontastic, and on and on. Each has some killer feature and, more importantly, some fatal flaw.

Today I may have found my holy grail, and I’m ready to plunk down my credit card. Two problems: I haven’t used it and it’s not shipping yet.

So why am I ready to part with my plastic? Because I saw a video of it in use, and it does everything I want. From capturing information to making tasks into projects (“bake a cake” isn’t a single task, it’s a project with a series of tasks) to showing only the “next action” in a series of actions (I can’t “buy ingredients” until I “find a recipe”).

The application is OmniFocus, from The Omni Group, creators of OmniOutliner, one of the better outliners on the Mac, and other fine Mac-only apps. Kinkless GTD is based on OmniOutliner. It’s a bunch of AppleScripts that drive OmniOutliner in a GTD-like manner. It works, but it’s clunky: for example, you have to press a “sync” button whenever you make changes to your list of tasks.

Ethan Schoonover, the creator of kGTD, worked with The Omni Group to rework the kGTD idea into a real application, and the results, even in early alpha, had me slapping my hands and shouting in delight. I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on the product and give it a spin.

Whether I’d become more organized is debatable, but I’d have one less excuse for it.

Technorati Tags: Actiontastic, Apple, GTD, iGTD, Macintosh, Moleskine, Tul, Omni Group, OmniFocus