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This is a tool that satisfies both these quotes:

“The workings of an automatic transmission are more complicated than a manual transmission, [t]o simplify a complex event, you need a complex system”

— David Allen

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

— Albert Einstein

After my wife presented me David Allen’s Getting Things Done on my last birthday, I’ve tried finding the right tool to put GTD into practice - I bought a label printer, a bundle of paper, folders, paper trays, post-its and a lot of other stuff to put a system in place but, things dint work out. I tried GTD tools and templates based on mind maps etc. with little success and then accidentally, while looking out for a wiki software, I found mGSD. It has turned out to be a fabulous tool. I’ve used it for a couple of weeks now and I love it.

You just need to download a single HTML file, save it on your computer and there you go… you have a GTD System in place.

Tags: gtd method tools
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Looking for mind mapping software? This site can probably help you find one that suits your taste. (It has a big list, don’t loose your mind ;-)

Tags: tools
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Bugtracking Systems

I quickly evaluated 5 bug tracking systems and picked up BugGenie.

Trac - No multi-project support out of the box, (& I failed to integrate it with Mercurial).

Redmine - Supports multiple projects and looks pretty good. Hard to install & therefore maintain,  I tried the Bitnami Stack but, failed to integrate Mercurial Repositories (Need to revisit this though)

Mantis - Looked as primitive as a dinosaur after looking at Trac/Redmine and there is no ready help any where within, you need to visit external manuals/help pages to actually use it.

Fossil - I love this one, I am impressed, very good to manage a project or 2 with a bunch of people involved (Would be my first choice for personal projects). What’s lacking is the ability to manage multiple projects requiring me to add & manage users separately for each project, Has RSS feeds but I need email notifications, It also doesnt support attaching files to tickets at this point of time (this is needed for attaching logs/screenshots).

BugGenie - Easy to setup, is intutive to use, ajax based UI (doesnt make you hop pages to do things), supports multiple projects and it is easy to manage (Users, Projects, Issues, …). I almost never had to visit an external manual/help pages to get going with this one.