Two years ago I wrote up how I use Emacs for Getting Things Done, and how I maintain my GTD lists with the version control system Git. Here are my last twenty commit messages (in chronological order; the final one is from a half an hour ago) on my lists of next actions, waiting fors, projects, and so on:
- Various updates; plus mobile footer updated
- Mobile updates done, I think
- makehours.sh
- Some minor notes
- Various stuff today
- One more day until vacation
- Vacation
- Back to work
- A note
- Midday checkin
- Going home
- Leaving early; will work from home later
- Om mani padme hum
- Going home
- Going home
- Friday going home
- Decent day
- Working on laptop
- I fear a merge a-coming
- Yeah, had to merge
Nowhere near as exciting as Cory Doctorow's checkin messages with Flashbake:
Every 15 minutes, Flashbake looks at any files that you ask it to check (I have it looking at all my fiction-in-progress, my todo list, my file of useful bits of information, and the completed electronic versions of my recent books), and records any changes made since the last check, annotating them with the current timezone on the system-clock, the weather in that timezone as fetched from Google, and the last three headlines with your by-line under them in your blog's RSS feed (I've been characterizing this as "Where am I, what's it like there, and what am I thinking about?"). It also records your computer's uptime. For a future version, I think it'd be fun to have the most recent three songs played by your music player.
The effect of this is to thoroughly -- exhaustively -- annotate the entire creative process.