Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Google Notebook for GTD

A while ago Lifehacker suggested that Google's Notebook could be used for GTD. It may work for some, but not for me.

Google Notebook is a nice little app. It has some convenient features and I use it now and then. Most recently Notebook has been integrated with Google Bookmarks which gives it a real purpose in my book.

But I tried to set up Notebook so that I could use it for GTD. For me, Google Notebook eleminated itself as a GTD tool within about 20 minutes of experimentation. Here's why:

  1. I can't drag and drop items from one notebook into a section within another notebook. This seems to me like a really, really poor design, but there you are. I can drag from one notebook to another, but it won't let me see the sections in a second notebook when I'm already in the first notebook. Fail.
  2. No way to do recurring tasks. There's also no way to mark a due date on a task that is Pending. Fail, fail.
  3. Can't email into Notebook. If I were driving down the highway and suddenly remembered something very urgent, I couldn't use Jott to transcribe my voice note and email it to Google Notebook. I'd have to have Jott email it to my mail box and I would have to manually convert the email to an Inbox action item. Fail, fail, fail.
  4. No keyboard shortcuts. I have to take my hands off the keyboard and search for the mouse to do almost anything. Fail, fail, fail, and FAIL.

So I keep looking for the perfect GTD tool . . .

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