Frogplate - GTD with Shadow Plan

Using Shadow Plan

Shadow Plan is an outliner for the Palm platform that provides a very flexible way to organise all the resources associated with a project. Each item in a Shadow Plan has the following information recorded about it:

a title, which can take multiple lines if needed,
a priority (1 to 5 or '-'),
a percentage complete (0%, 10%, 20%, .. 100%)
a target date,
start and finish dates,
a creation date,
a task numbering scheme (such as 1-2-3-4, or i-ii-iii-iv etc).

So far not so very different to any of hundreds of Palm ToDo managers. However you can also set the way that the information is displayed for each item - for example a 'Note' item won't display a completion checkbox, while a tasklist item will have a progress bar that shows the percentage complete.

As you can see in the screenshot, items can be organised into a hierarchical structure to reflect their relationships. My top-level 'Frogplate' item contains all the resources for maintaining this Web site. Clicking on the down arrow beside it would collapse all the child items and show only the parent Frogplate line. The right arrow beside the 'GTD and UIQ' item near the bottom of the screen shows that numerous items have been collapsed to that one summary line.

Note that some of the items, such as 'Outline', have been configured as 'Note' rather than 'Checklist' items and so do not display a completion checkbox or progress bar. Meanwhile the screen shots item is a 'Task' and so has a progress bar showing it is 50% complete.

Opening the screen shots item shows the type of item at the top of the screen, the dates, progress and priority at the bottom. The black rectangle at the bottom right opens a colour picker and the [B] sets the item to bold in the item list.

Shadow Plan items can have notes attached and they can also link to other databases. For example an item could link to an entry in the standard Tasks application, or to an appointment in the Calendar. It could even link to another Shadow Plan if needed. Links to Tasks and Calendar can be dynamic, so that changes in one application affect the entry in the other.

However the single most important Shadow Plan feature in helping to Get Things Done is the Tag. Shadow Plan has a very flexible Tag Manager that allows multiple, custom tags to be associated with each item. You can then filter the plan by those tags. Absolutely perfect for implementing GTD.

The trick is to define a tag for each context in which you need to allocate actions - Home, Office, Shops, Internet etc. Also create a 'Next' tag to indicate that an action is the next to progress a project. A Tag Wizard makes it very quick and easy to tag an item. For GTD purposes its just a matter of adding a tag to indicate context and perhaps another to indicate its the next action to be carried out.

Once all actions are tagged, Shadow Plan's Filter Manager can be used to filter the outline for particular combinations of tags. The standard filters include a 'Next step only' filter which includes only the first child at the lowest level of each hierarchy of items - this assumes that the items are listed in the chronological order needed and just the first item needs to be done next in each sub-project. That is not really flexible enough for GTD use, but the Filter Manager also allows custom filters to be defined.

I set up a filter for each context plus a filter for the combination of each context tag and the 'Next' tag. So the '@Library' filter will list all the actions I plan to do at the library, whilst the '@Library-Next' filter lists just the subset of those actions that have to be done next at the library.

This scheme works well unless you have repeat tasks. The standard Palm Tasks application has particularly flexible repeat task handling, but Shadow Plan doesn't support the concept at all. Unfortunately the nature of many of the projects I wanted to plan meant that I needed to use repeating tasks.

It was time to go back to the drawing board...

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