What's Next User Guide
Hi! Please make yourself at home.
This guide is designed to help you get the most out of What's Next. We created What's Next to give us an environment in which to be effortlessly productive - it is an application that supports David Allen's GTD (Getting Things Done) system. It has been designed to offer a great user interface and generally be a joy to use. We use it daily to organise every aspect of our lives, including the development of What's Next itself.
We want you to enjoy using What's Next as much as we do.
If you have any feedback, we definitely want to hear from you. We are especially interested in the things that you don't like so we can fix them - after all, we want you to be happy using the application. And if we cannot or will not fix them, we can at least tell you exactly why. Of course, if you do like What's Next, we want to hear from you as well!
Send your gripes to boo@whatsnextapp.com, your praise to yay@whatsnextapp.com and all other business to feedback@whatsnextapp.com (You can really use any or all of those email addresses - it doesn't matter. All email sent to those addresses will reach us, we promise!)
Welcome to What's Next. Please make yourself comfortable and read on.
What's Next Philosophy
We are very particular about the features that we ship. We spend almost as much time removing features as we do building new ones! Using Rails as a development platform allows us to build and test features quickly - which means we don't feel bad ripping them out again if we feel they don't work in practice.
We eat our own dog food - in fact, we can't get enough of it! As heavy What's Next users ourselves, we want every feature in the application to be just right. And we never want you to be annoyed. See the De-feature List for some of the features that we built but that have not worked in practice.
Strictly Need To Know
A word of warning: while you can, of course, use What's Next as a simple todo-list application, this is not what it was designed for. To truly benefit from the features that What's Next offers, you should be familiar with David Allen's GTD methodology. In particular, you should know and use the Next Action concept and be familiar with what "Projects" and "Contexts" mean in the GTD system.
It will make a lot more sense, trust us.
There are some excellent resources on the Net to learn about GTD:
If you think that GTD might be for you, buy David Allen's book. You won't regret the investment.
Ninjas? WTF?
In his book, David Allen talks about "Mind like water", which is a state that Karate masters achieve after many years of training and meditation. The GTD system, when mastered, certainly has an aspect of Zen-like calmness to it. In this manual, the little productivity ninja shows you some advanced techniques to get the most out of the application.
There's one just below - go ahead, read it now.
Ninja Technique - Don't touch that mouse!
Since you have installed What's Next, chances are that you are a person that constantly searches for better ways of doing things. In this case, you probably want to have a look at this list of handy keyboard shortcuts that are available in What's Next.
There are only a few of them, and remembering them will let you whiz through the application effortlessly and almost without thinking - with a mind like water!
On the following pages, we'll give you a quick introduction to the most important features. There aren't too many of them, but we love them all.
