David Allen in GTD book makes the point that categories are very important to making GTD work successfully and eliminating stress. My trial of Everdo finds some things that could be easily fixed:
Tags consists of 3 predefined headings: areas, labels, contacts. Two of these are the elements of context:
In David Allen’s book the full name for Labels is Location (Where must I be?)
In David Allen’s book the full name for Contacts is Person (Who must I be with?)
The element that is missing is Tool (What must I have on hand?)
I would like to see the headings amended so they read:
Location
Contact/Person
I would also like the missing element Tools to be added as a heading
Everdo also uses Tags for another purposes such as: Horizons. This is where Areas of Focus belongs. Really there should be another group called Horizons which have the subheadings David Allen identifies for the six Horizons. This would include responsibilities and those responsibilities would also involve maintenance but this is best kept separate for ease of identification
Everdo seems to have missing another grouping which allows items to be categorized as say Personal, Family, Relationships, Leisure to allow filtering and focus
This is what the Area tag is for. There is a drop down menu in the top bar where you can choose the area you want to focus on. So you can create different areas for Personal, Family, Work, etc and filter your tasks to only show the tasks in that area.
Contact is used when you’re waiting on someone else before a task can be finished.
Label is kind of a generic tag that can be used for whatever purpose you want and can also be filtered on.
You can also prepend tags with @ to turn them into contexts that will show up in their own group on the left side. This can be used for anything that can only be done in a certain location or with certain resources available. This means any area, contact, or label can be turned into a context.
You can also use color coding on the tags for further organization.
Everdo is set up to keep things simple and yet provide quite a bit of organization for those who want/need it.
Thanks for your reply. My initial post pointed out that Everdo doesnt replicate the David Allen GTD categories. This means for example, that Areas of Focus belongs to the larger category of Horizons. David Allen has 6 of them. Everdo only has one of the six - Areas of Focus. I was pointing out that Everdo should fix these shorcomings so this was really a post for the developer but I appreciate your taking time to reply and confirm my understanding
“Tools” in GTD is a context. David Allen never discusses tools outside of the fact that they are just another context. You can use context for almost anything:
WHERE something is at (@home, @errands, etc)
What TOOLS are available to you (@computer, @desk, etc)
STATE OF MIND you need to be in (@focus, @relaxed, etc)
In Everdo, you make a label and start it with “@” to create a context.
To follow GTD, you only need contexts and areas. Everdo, far from lacking, is actually adding an additional type of label called “Contact”, which is not strictly GTD but helps in the app to give visual cues in the interface and tie the data together better.
You are correct to identify that Everdo only goes up through Horizon 2. But literally all other TODO kind of apps do as well (some not even that far). Horizons 3 through 5 are just lists, effectively. I write them in documents (Google Docs, Word, plain text file) stored outside of my day-to-day app (in this case Everdo). Those horizons are high-level and don’t change that often. David Allen has said in the book and elsewhere that you revisit these every so often, say 6 months or even just once a year. Horizon 3 maybe ever 6 months, depending on how chaotic your life is, and the others maybe once a year. The low churn of these horizons means that your time is spent on reflection and personal introspection and things like that more than it is on actually writing these things out. They’re more about capturing your internal ambitions and direction and the state of the world around you than they are about completing this or that task. It would be far too much overhead to have to tie each action with where it lands in the upper horizons. Nobody should be doing that.
Horizons 0 - 2: Everdo.
Horizons 3 - 5: Document.
I think that’s what pretty much everybody does, AFAICT.