Nirvana, which is a web based system based on the principles of David Allen's Getting Things Done, came to my attention recently. As a hardcore productivity geek I had to give it a shot. 

Unfortunately it took about three weeks for Nirvana to approve my account (They're still in semi-closed beta) but a couple of days ago my account was finally approved. That said, Kirsty signed up yesterday and had her account approved today, so I presume that's not an average waiting time.

So how do I like it so far? Pretty good actually. The system is broken down into these areas -

• Inbox is an area for collecting stuff that you need to do. Empty all of the stuff that your conscience is nagging you to do into here, entering each task one at a time. When you've decided what to do with the item, drag it to the appropriate list.
• Today is a list of stuff you should do today. If you set items to have a start date, they'll automatically be added here on that date. Items in today are "Starred" (think Gmail) so you can easily add or remove them by clicking the star.
• Next is a list of stuff that you can work on next. This includes single tasks (Take the garbage out) as well as all of the tasks you have defined in active projects.
• Waiting is a list of stuff that you are waiting on other people to do. You can link each item to an email address, so you can easily send reminders.
• Scheduled is a list of stuff you have scheduled for a certain date.
• Later and Someday are lists of stuff that you can't work on now, but will review at a later date.
• Projects contain a list of projects, which in turn contain their own Next list. In GTD terminology, a Project is simply a Task with more than one step.
• Archive is stuff you've removed from active view (such as completed tasks).
• Trash is simply stuff you've deleted.

Which gives you an area for pretty much every kind of task you need to track. Each item (both tasks and projects) can have a title, start date, due date, tags, notes and each list can be manually sorted. Unfortunately, at this early stage Nirvana doesn't support repeating tasks, but this feature will apparently be added soon.

While Nirvana doesn't have the simplicity, powerful keyboard shortcuts and custom searches of Remember The Milk, it does have far superior project management. I'll continue to use Remember the Milk exclusively for my single tasks, but I am already relying on Nirvana for my project tasks.