A few months ago I thought I’d found my Holy Grail of Getting Things Done. A realisation that a wiki solved many of my information handling problems, followed by a later connection with Pimki – Assaph Mehr’s potentially great cross between a wiki and PIM. A series of e-mails led to us developing an idea of how Pimki could become a brilliant framework for GTD.

I’ve been using a mixture of Palm Desktop and Pimki for the past few months, while Assaph develops Pimki 2.

Trouble is, Instiki, Pimki’s underlying wiki, has lost its focus recently. It’s getting a MySQL backend to sort out its Madeleine (sp?) storage problems, or maybe it isn’t. To be honest I’ve lost track of what is going on. Alas, it does seem there’s precious little development-wise happening, and the Instiki mailing list has become a depressing place for me as Instiki seems at best to be moving sideways.

Assaph has said he’s moving Pimki on to another platform, which is great news. But my Palm sync started getting even sicker, I was getting further and further from having even a working GTD system – let alone the one we’d discussed.

I spent a large part of a weekend looking for another wiki that would allow me to do what I wanted – have my projects, reference material and NAs all in one place. No luck. Besides, most wikis are for geeks who love doing arcane things on servers.

For some reason, I looked back at Backpack from 37 Signals and found it had moved on considerably since I had my early-adopter’s play with it some time ago. Over the past month or so, I’ve developed the best implementation of a GTD system I’ve yet had.

I started writing it up as I had a couple of requests for further details after a posted to I mailing list. Watch this space…

I’m feeling really comfortable with Pimki. It’s become as permanent a fixture in my working – and now private – life as any piece of software can be.

I’m now able to spend a huge percentage of my working day in Firefox. Currently, I run the browser first thing in the morning and it logs into Fastmail, my business wiki, our household wiki and Clockwork. And that’s just the start…

Now, all I need to do is to get my To Do lists out of Palm Desktop and into Pimki.

Following on from my posting about Pimki the other day, I’ve been exchanging e-mails with Pimki’s developer, Assaph Mehr.

He’s a very nice chap, keen to listen to users – he’s about to make a feature request from me a reality! – and to squash bugs.

Meanwhile, I seem to be adding a zillion extra pages of content each day – well, maybe just a small exaggeration.

I’m also finding a great way of using Pimki with my existing GTD methods – technically quite separate, of course, but using the ToDos as an Inbox for the rest of the system.

I’ll maybe write some more about it once I’m sure it’s a sensible way of working.

My last post was about a wiki. I was in love with WxWikiServer.

It was a flirtation that lasted a week. I loved what the wiki did, and marvelled at how easy it was to get up and running. But after a week being stared at by that damned bear and a page design that didn’t deserve the name, I said enough’s enough.

All the publicity around Backpack led me to Instiki, and from there I followed the fork to Pimki, a wiki with a PIM flavour.

Installation was almost as easy as with WxWikiServer and the simple, clean interface is something I can live with.

The only downside is that Instiki/Pimki doesn’t seem as solid as WxWikiServer – I’ve had a couple of crashes.

But I’m hooked. A wiki now takes its place alongside my word processor, Web browser, spreadsheet, and text editor as an application I use every day. But it’s not every day you add a new category of application to your arsenal.

My Palm sync went west earlier in the week (now mysteriously fixed), and I very nearly took the plunge and took a paid subscription to Backpack. But then the GTD flavour of TiddlyWiKi is l’application du jour…just Google GTD TiddlyWiki or TiddlyWiki, and you’ll see what I mean.

Between them, Backpack and GTD TiddlyWiki have got me thinking that I need something Wiki-like, whether my Palm woes return or not. But, as I said last week, Backpack is not yet proven to my satisfaction.

What’s more, Wikis need all that server side stuff, and GTD Tiddly Wiki has a very nasty bug that has lost some of my data. GTDTW, in my opinion, is not yet ready for the big time, although Nathan Bowers is working on a fix.

A little Googling during that late-Saturday-night-in-front-of-the-telly-with-a-beer catatonic state, found me WxWikiServer. I’m in love! Even at the dead of night, It took me just minutes to install and configure – in effect, WxWikiServer has its own server and wiki app, and all you do is unzip and run. Then two little configuration tweaks – one to set up the Windows ID of the machine I’m running it on to allow network access, and a second to allow anonymous editing from anywhere on the network, and I was away!

WxWikiServer feels mature and solid. I’m running it on Windows 2K Professional on an old PIII; it will run on just about any flavour of Windows (desktop or server), plus Mac OS-X and Linux. If you’re looking for a Wiki and baulk at all that server-side gubbins, I’d say give it a go.

I mentioned on Monday that my life had cut itself into two halves when my Palm refused to sync with my desktop.

Well, I’ve tried on and off for the past two days to see if would play ball, to no avail.

But just now the Palm has just burst into life in its cradle to do its scheduled 1pm sync. Was it something I said?

What a start to Monday morning. My Palm won’t sync. For reasons that I can’t understand, it has just decided not to sync.

I did my GTD Weekly Review on the Palm yesterday, and have made some diary additions to ACT on the PC, so I don’t have a full view of my life on the desktop or the Palm – GRRRR!

Flipping (I’ll be polite in public) useless technology. At times like this, I hate it.

So now what do I do? Is the world telling me to move to Backpack? (I feel I need more testing before making the jump). Shall I just throw technology and return to paper?

I’ve spent too long this weekend playing with Backpack from 37 Signals. I’m impressed. Very impressed. The more I explore, the more uses I can find. It really is a Web-based application. It feels as if it has the potential depth and flexibility of a word processor or spreadsheet.

While I’m really enthusiastic about Backpack, I do keep having some niggling doubts. For example I don’t like the idea of my information being in the hands of a third party. But how is this different from Plaxo, which I already use?

A bigger worry is the issue of reliability of 37 Signals’ server – how often will I find my information unavailable?

But I can see that I will subscribe to Backpack once it has a few more features that I absolutely need – headed by recurring reminders. It’s another logical step in the evolution of my systems originally characterized by my movement to Fastmail’s e-mail service. Or, even earlier, my use of Movable Type for this blog.

The platform- and device-independence of having my stuff out there on the Net is hugely seductive. As more of my working and personal life moves away from the desktop, I have more choice of platform.

I wonder if I’ll still be using Windows in a year or two’s time? I guess that will be determined by whether Windows is truly the best platform for my needs as my ties to Windows applications decrease.

Popping up in some of the RSS feeds I read has been the news that e-mail harms our IQ more than partaking of a spliff.

Guardian Unlimited

The Register

The posited mechanism – constant distraction – seems OK, but surely phone calls and in-person interruptions are far worse distractions? I know I have far more control over e-mail than phones or people. The more duplex the interaction, the worse impact it has on my productivity, that’s for sure.

So, maybe the the next headline will be Phone Calls harm IQ more than a Smack Habit.