Welcome to What's Next!
What's Next is a personal productivity application that supports David Allen's Getting Things Done system, or GTD. We created What's Next to give us an environment in which to be effortlessly productive - it has been designed to offer a great user interface and generally be a joy to use.
What's Next has been designed and written by Max Muermann.
The application works under Mac OS X, Windows, various Unix- and Linux-variants. It is a browser-based application that comes with a small local web server.
"It is just so easy to use that I was up and running in no time at all and everything made sense." - That's what Scott said.
Have a look at the screenshots below, or head straight over to the download section and grab the latest version!
 The main view |
 Creating a new action - showing smart name filtering (a bit like Quicksilver) |
Features
Some of the coolest features (we think) of What's Next are, in no particular order:
- Smart search for actions, projects, contexts, lists... think Quicksilver or TextMate
- Drag-and-drop sorting of action
- Full of keyboard shortcut goodness
- The user guide has Ninjas!
- Mini-wikis for each project
- A special "Focus Mode" to minimise distractions
You could also have a look at what we've got planned for the future.
 Due dates for actions |
 Focus mode |
What's Next and Getting Things Done
While you can, of course, use What's Next simply as a todo-list application (with a great interface), this is not what it was designed for. It was, after all, conceived as a GTD app. To truly benefit from the features that What's Next offers, you should be familiar with GTD. 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 many excellent resources on the Net to learn about GTD:
Why a Browser-Based Application?
- We wanted an offline app. While internet connectivity is near-permanent these days, the most valuable thinking time we get is when we are not connected.
- We wanted to offer a slick user interface, while at the same time keeping the app cross-platform. Browser based interfaces place the least amount of expectations on how an application should behave, so we gained the freedom of refining the user interface without being constrained by specific OS conventions. Whether this is a good thing or not, we'll let you decide.
- We will be offering a subscription-based online service that works together with the offline application. We didn't want users to learn two different interfaces.
