Review of Nozbe, an Online GTD Tool

For the last few weeks I've been looking at alternatives to my "classic" GTD implementation. This implementation has definitely been old school, being totally paper based in a large black notebook that I carried to and from work. I started paper-based because at the time I started GTD, I was in kind of an anti-computer mood. I seem to go through these moods every five years or so, and then become friends with computers again. I am now in one of my pro-computer moods, but that is a different subject.

In 2005 I began using a straightforward GTD based purely on paper. I had lists for @work, @home, @computer, and so on. I had project lists, project notes, someday/maybe lists, the whole package on 8.5" by 11" loose leaf notebook paper. There were a couple of problems with that system though. The principal one was the management of project tasks. Most tasks have two aspects to them, one a context in which the task should occur, and two a project, or a relationship among tasks that will foster a particular outcome. The classic paper based GTD will emphasize context over projects, and that is what happened in my classic implementation. I say that context trumps projects, because that is a crucial insight of GTD, you are most effective if you are doing work related to where you are.

Consequently, my tasks were all context related and lost most of their connection to projects, or complex outcomes. I still maintained some task relationship to projects, but not to the point that my weekly review was project-based. Rather, my weekly review consisted of checking off things that I happened to have accomplished during the week that happened to have been listed as a task.

So, once my anti-computer mood was finished late last year, I began to cast about for alternatives to the paper based method. In the last two weeks I stumbled on three solutions that were online to varying degrees, but all of which solved the problem of projects and contexts. Each of these solves the problems by realizing that there are two views of a set of tasks: a view by projects and a view by context. The first solution I tried used Google Gears to save the data to local hard drive, which has the advantage of having the data at hand, but no easy way of transferring the data to and from the various computers that one may use in the course of the day. The first solution suffered some bugs as well. The second solution was similar to the first, but a more solid, popular implementation that seemed to have some relationship to Google itself, continuing as the first solution did in storing the data locally through Google Gears. This was a better implementation, but inconvenient because of the data file transfer issue.

The third solution is the one I'm going to give a go to, even if it comes with a monetary cost. The solution is called Nozbe, and it is the best GTD implementation that I've seen. It clearly provides the two views of your task list, context oriented and project oriented. It emphasizes the notion of "next action" by allowing tasks to be designated as a "next action", which is important in keeping projects alive. It has an email and a Google calendar interface, all of which work well. It is completely online, and https based, so I am comfortable to some extent using it at work. It allows the attachment of notes or files to either contexts or to projects. It will make the weekly review a breeze as it will be straightforward to review each task and designate what the next action of the project should be. It allows for the printing of various views--next action, project, or context, which will be useful when moving a way from the PC.

Some weaknesses are the lack of an obvious backup, no published API to the task data, and the cost, which is currently $14 per month for me. My plan is to evaluate until about November, paying monthly. If I am still as enthusiastic in November, I will upgrade to a plan with more obligations but with a lower price. But so far, so good.