Getting Things Done with Somethings

Somethings is a very attractive web application that can help you get things done. It was inspired by the popular Mac OS X application Things by Cultured Code, but doesn’t require any download or installation and works on any platform.

What It Does

The system you choose for getting things done has to be something your comfortable using or you won’t bother using it. You’ll never get anything done. Somethings provides yet another option for keeping up with projects and tasks. If you haven’t found or created a system that works for you, this could be the one.

Somethings makes it easy to capture everything you need to do or that might be knocking around in your brain. Once you’ve done that, it’s easy to tag, set due dates, prioritize, and even group tasks into projects using simple drag and drop.

Getting Started

Once you’ve signed into Somethings, you can start creating new tasks by hitting the “+” button at the top. I’d recomend doing a complete brain dump. Create tasks for whatever comes to mind, even if it doesn’t really make sense right now.

Now that you’ve done that, you can go through and see which items might be better suited as projects or areas of responsibility. For instance, “Make New Mixtape” is not a task. It requires multiple steps to complete and those steps take time. You may need to select tracks for the album, find artists to collab with, write new material, and then actually hit the studio and record. So “Make New Mixtape” is better suited as a project

If you wrote something like “My Blog”, you might need to get a little more specific. What about your blog? Do you need to write a post? Tweak your theme? Add a widget to your sidebar? Don’t make things hard on yourself. Get specific and make sure you’re giving yourself a clear path to a goal. Something as general as “My Blog”  or “Home Business” might be better suited as an Area of Responsibility so that you could simply associate actionable items with those areas.

Create whatever Projects and Areas you need. Use drag and drop to put individual tasks where they need to go. You can also add tags and notes to further organize your tasks so that you can easily find them later. Things that you can’t really start taking action on right now, but you may get around to in the future go into Someday. This would be stuff like “Write a novel”, “Climb Everest”, or “Take over the world”.

Somethings is definitely interesting to me. Probably one of the very very few applications for GTD that interest me besides Remember The Milk. There are a few things it could do better, but it’s solid overall and I’ll be playing with it to see what it can really do for me. You probably should too. Let me know what you think.

Follow Somethings on Twitter to provide feedback and get updates about what’s going on.