Getting Things Done with GitHub, Markdown, and Visual Studio Code

I am at the beginning stages of trying to focus my work better than I have been able to do while working on my one-month goal of posting consistently on LinkedIn. This posting goal exacerbated some pre-existing issues around the organization of my work.

Those of you who ever read David Allen’s popular productivity guide, Getting Things Done, know that one of the core tenets of his system is the idea of systematically getting things you need to do out of your head and into a trusted system. The problem I was faced with that led me to revisit his work was that my “trusted system” was quite scattered and difficult to organize. It consisted of:

  • LinkedIn articles drafted in Google Docs

  • Preliminary course outlines being managed in Trello.

  • Course materials and other projects scattered throughout Git repositories and other non-committed folders. These were arranged in a “source” directory, which was organized in a haphazard way that bore no logical relationship to my personal and organizational GitHub remote repositories.

  • No real central management for the activities of marketing, course development, and other tasks.

My solution for this is at this point a work in progress, but so far it consists of:

  • Reorganizing local folders to match the remotes, and cleaning up those and other folders as necessary.

  • Creating a getting-things-done repository in the organizational remote, and beginning to track tasks using VS Code’s todo.md plugin.

  • Beginning to draft articles in simple Markdown in a git repository, also Visual Studio Code, instead of Google Docs. This not only frees me from the clunky organization of Google Drive, it also allows me to begin adding metadata to the articles, so I can track what’s published where.

  • Committing to further organizing work, outlines, and other materials, in the same way, using a very small set of tools and iterating as needed to improve the system further.

(Follow-up: I later came across the Dendron plugin for VSCode, which makes this a lot easier. See Getting Things Done with Dendron VSCode. )