I’m cursed with being both obses­sive com­pul­sive and dan­ger­ously apa­thetic, so I’m drawn to things like per­sonal orga­niz­ers, but never actu­ally use them, even though I, of all peo­ple, should. The truth is that none of them really appealed to me; writ­ing on paper is so bulky and dif­fi­cult to edit, and because so much of my life is spent online, I really should use some kind of soft­ware. But most pro­grams I’ve found have way too many fea­tures and/or cost money and/or take up too much mem­ory to be able to run all the time, which would be nec­es­sary if I’m ever going to pay atten­tion to the details of my life.

I played around with a sim­ple html to do list that I kept as my home page, but lit­er­ally for months I would just ignore it on my way to All­Mu­sic or wher­ever. It was too inflexible.

Then wikis were cre­ated, and they seemed to be the ideal plat­form for per­sonal orga­ni­za­tion. Unfor­tu­nately I lacked the knowl­edge it would require to imple­ment wiki archi­tec­ture in that way. But finally somebody’s done this for me with GTDTid­dly­Wiki. This is noth­ing more than a mod­i­fied ver­sion of Tid­dly­Wiki, but I use it because it looks nicer. It’s a lit­tle hard to under­stand how to use it ini­tially, but it’s quickly become clear that it’s both flex­i­ble and light enough for my pur­poses. It resides as a sin­gle html file on your hard drive, your thumb drive, or wher­ever, and runs on CSS and JavaScript. It’s really beautiful.