While developing the 1Journal software, I came across the elegant Things application for the Mac, by Cultured Code. From there I was led to the concept of Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen. It employs some simple and elegant concepts for "The Art of Stress Free Productivity", as the book cover suggests. It is based on good mental principles of ridding our mind of clutter and facing one task at a time.

Becoming enamored of the concepts as I read through David Allen's book, I began to incorporate some of these principles into the 1Journal software in a To-Do list. As I began to "eat my own dog food" and use the To-Do list for my own software development, it became interesting how many of the concepts of GTD as included in the To-Do list began to reflect some of the tools used in agile software development, and in particular, those used with the scrum approach. My list of tasks with estimated times for completion and priorities began to look a lot like a backlog. The hierarchical project view could be used to differentiate between a product backlog and a sprint backlog. Analogous to a "Task Board", I had a percentage completion value for a given To-Do item. It would have been straightforward to create a "Burn-down chart" using the graphing capabilities of 1Journal, but I will probably leave that until a future version. (As I eventually looked into other options besides Things for the GTD approach, I also came upon OmniFocus. This, indeed, has been used by some as a scrum tool, e.g., this blog).

This growth in my understanding may just come down to my favorite principle of the Agile Manifesto, namely "Build projects around motivated individuals". If you find people motivated to do a task, and they are competent, reasonable and balanced in their approach, and they have the information available to them (as we usually do now with the web) then they will come up with ways to get it done. And that will often converge on some common principles, whether they are found in an agile approach or a getting things done approach.