GTD tools: remind

As you probably seen in one of my last posts, a few days ago, I started David Allen's Getting things done book, and I think I'm starting to grasp the pragmatism of the method. I'm nowhere near fully implementing it in my life (I've only read 1/3 of the book) but googling a bit, I see tools and methods that people use.

Some time ago, I installed remind on my box, and tried (read FAILED) to use it regularly, but now I think it's time to give it another spin in order to manage my timmed 'stuff'.

Remind is a commandline tool (O RLY?, YA RLY) that helps you to manage your schedule/calendar events. One of the big wins of remind is that everything is stored in a plain text file, making it really easy to be parsed or edited from everywhere.

The default file for reminders is ~/.reminders .

Let's see a sample reminder.

REM Oct 09 2009 MSG HAZING CHEEZBURGRS WITH LOLFRIENDS.%

If I run remind command, it will print the MSG line.

Say you want it to mail your friends about your cheezburgr event.

REM Oct 2009 RUN mailfriends.sh

Easy, right?

Now let's go with periodic events. For example, I'd like to know when I have the next smalltalk meeting (every tuesday), and want to be alerted the day before (sometimes the same day is too late)

REM Tue +1 MSG Smalltalk meeting at Citilab %b.

Or Next Perl Mongers Barcelona meeting (last thursday of every month)

REM Thu 1 --7 +1 MSG PerlMongers meeting %b.

I think this deserves some explanation. Thu 1 matches when both Thu and 1st day of the month are true (That is the first tuesday of the month). Then the --7 substracts days to the previous date. That means the last Thursday of a month.

There are ways of setting reminders for a given day AT a given time, and set a duration, but I think that's all I need for this part of the GTD implementation.

Btw, If you want more info on remind, there are some good howtos and tutes online, and remind has a mail-list too (the mail archive is only accesible to subscribers though).