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I'm new to GTD, in fact I haven't even finished the book yet. I'm still wading through Allen's (IMHO rather unnecessary) philosophical discussions :)

That said, I "get" the concept completely, and am quite excited by it. I absolutely love the diagram below, and am trying to implement a workflow as close to it as possible. At the same time I don't want my system to be the thing I concentrate on, it should be trusted and thus, as far as possible, transparent.



At the moment though, I'm spending more time thinking about OF than using it intuitively to support the above workflow, and I worry constantly that I'm missing something (hence, it's not "trusted").

Since day one with GTD and OF, I've thought it'd be good to have an app or other tool that literally walked me through the steps of the diagram, almost to the extent of having an interactive version of the diagram there in front of me, to drag and drop to or click around (I hadn't thought about the detail of how it'd work).

I think OF is great when you eventually get to the "Do" stage, but less so at walking me through the other steps.

Yesterday I found Inbox (no link - I don't think it's fair to link to a competitor on OG's forum - go Google it if you need to). This app appears to do a stunningly good job of doing exactly what I describe above, and is very close to holistic.

In practice Inbox is full of bugs and omissions. Just one example; it walks you all the way through collecting, processing, organising and reviewing items, then leaves those items unfiltered when you actually get to "Do", so that you still see actions that are not yet available!!! However, the principal is stunningly good, and there are some features that I think OG should consider for OF:

1) Using Spotlight, it automatically collects new e-mails, files, bookmarks, calendar events, iCal todo's, notes and other "stuff". I.e. it has a comprehensive and above all automatic inbox bucket. You don't feel like the app is only automatically capturing some of your items, and that you have to maintain separate systems for other things (except maybe paper post, though even then you can add a "collection" to at least remind you to empty that bucket at the appropriate stage).

2) Having collected it, it walks you, item by item, through processing your stuff: is it actionable, is it reference, is it trash, do it if less than 2 mins, defer, etc etc etc.

3) It actually helps you review, item by item: is this still current, etc.

4) It files (links to) reference items.

5) It has a next item box to concentrate the mind - it's almost like a slideshow, showing ONLY your next action, with a countdown timer and a big tick box for when it's done. There's also a Yak timer to nag you if you get distracted easily.

6) The whole workflow is laid out for you in the sidebar, in a logical order closely reflecting Allen's diagram.

So overall my question is, is this the kind of behaviour people want from OF, or am I missing something about it that would allow it to walk me through the workflow as I'd like? Have others set OF up to do exactly that? Are there add-ons or other complementary apps I've not found yet, to do much of the above?

If only one of the things above could ever be implemented in OF, I'd vote for the automatic collection and processing of "Stuff". In fact, someone PLEASE write an add-on to do that, and send the results to OF.

Mark