Good Will Blogging
How do you like them apples...

After Metalab made collaboration with non-members free, it suddenly became feasible to use Flow as both my main GTD system in anger, and as a team management tool. I signed up for $10/month and have been using it for the past couple of weeks.

All I can say is “wow.” I never expected it to be so good. It’s very subtle, but there is something about Flow that makes it the first really successful GTD system I’ve ever had.

I have used many many GTD apps in the past, with varying degrees of success, but the most important thing about maintaining a GTD system is to keep it up-to-date and fresh. The problem with all the iPhone apps I have used until now is the lack of a strong desktop solution.

It doesn’t matter how good the iPhone app is, when I’m at my desk processing email, stopping to capture an action in my iPhone is too disruptive to the workflow, so it doesn’t happen.

I’ve tried apps that also have a desktop companion product, like Things and OmniFocus, but they are Mac-only which means I can’t use them at work. And to be honest, both are pretty terrible desktop apps.

So the first and biggest benefit of Flow is that the web app looks and feels like a desktop app, but I can use it exactly the same way on Mac or Windows.

I don’t know what is taking the Cultured Code guys so long to implement cloud sync for Things — judging from their blog they seem to be really over-thinking and over- engineering it. OmniFocus had a reasonably good cloud sync over 2 years ago, and Metalab seem to have perfected it in Flow.

Flow’s sync has all the properties you would want in a cloud-based sync solution: it’s fast, automatic, and reliable.

And man is it fast! It happens in the background in the iPhone app, so you probably wouldn’t even notice if it was slow, but it is usually finished in a few seconds.

I don’t know for sure, but it seems they have achieved this by making the sync incremental in such a way that it doesn’t need to sync its entire database every time, just the particular list or task that you are viewing.

I have sat in meetings with people in my team, and assigned a task to them on my iPhone, and a few seconds later it shows up on their iPhone. There is a palpable sense of transfer of responsibility when I do that, which has made a noticeable difference to productivity.

Flow has a very simple, bare-bones approach to GTD — in fact, it is not specific to GTD at all. They even renamed “projects” to “lists” to erase any trace of the app imposing a particular methodology on the user. I am a GTD guy, and it works perfectly as a GTD app.

I think the only “pure” GTD feature missing is the “tickler”, which was implemented in Things as “scheduled tasks.” But, to be honest, even as a GTD purist, the tickler is too often an invitation to procrastinate. I don’t miss it.

As I’ve noted before, sometimes just changing my GTD system is enough to motivate a period of great effectiveness, so I must acknowledge that this could be just another case of “a change is as good as a holiday.” We’ll see.