Why I Built Mind Like Water

I’ve been obsessed with productivity since my first management role at Microsoft in the early 1990s.

That’s when I realized I needed a system. Team management, group management, and later individual-contributor PM work — it’s a firehose of commitments, half-finished decisions, and context that shifts from week to week. Running that without a system was chaos. I tried everything I could find — TimeSystem, the Franklin Covey planner — and none of it really stuck. Then in 2001, David Allen published Getting Things Done, and I was hooked immediately. GTD gave me the structure and the vocabulary I’d been missing. There were no good digital tools for it yet, so I ran the whole system on paper for years, carrying a notebook everywhere. Then a PalmPilot. Eventually software got good enough that I could put the notebook down for good.

I went deep. I took the official GTD training when the David Allen Company came to Seattle. I put together slides and started informally teaching my Microsoft teammates — not because anyone asked me to, but because they kept asking me what I was doing with that task manager always open on my screen.

Work wasn’t the only place I needed it, either. There was a stretch when I was rehabbing four houses at once while running a 1-800-GOT-JUNK franchise on the side. GTD wasn’t theory for me. It was the thing keeping everything from falling apart.

At the same time, on a parallel track, I was working through every personal knowledge management tool I could find. The first one I bought was InfoSelect, from a little company called MicroLogic in New Jersey — and it still exists today. I spent years in Ecco Pro before it was discontinued. I graduated to The Brain, which I used for many, many years. Along the way I went deep on TiddlyWiki, Evernote, and OneNote — I even tried to run the whole GTD system inside OneNote at one point. Nothing ever quite clicked.

But here’s the thing: I always felt like I was living in two worlds. My task manager held my next actions and projects. My PKM held everything else — notes, reference, ideas, the about of my life. And the connection between them was always broken. The tasks lived in one tool. The thinking and context that produced those tasks lived somewhere else entirely. Every time I tried to link them, I was working around my tools instead of with them.

My first real attempt to solve this problem was GTDNext, a web-based GTD tool I co-founded in 2014. We ran it for seven years. We made a lot of progress and I learned a lot, but I was never happy with where we ended up. I sold my share in late 2020. The design never quite got to the thing I actually wanted: a system that treated tasks and notes as equals.

After I sold GTDNext, I went back to being a user — but I was also quietly doing research. I tried everything I could get my hands on. When the PKM wave hit I went through Roam, Logseq, Tana, Capacities, Reflect, Bear, Craft, RemNote — most of them. When outliners had their moment, I was a heavy Workflowy user, with stints in Dynalist and OmniOutliner. On the task side I cycled through Vitalist, Nozbe, Remember The Milk, Wunderlist, TickTick, Amazing Marvin, and a handful more. Being the good note-taker that I am, I wrote it all down. Pages and pages of what worked, what didn’t, and what I would build if I ever got the chance to do it again.

Well, here we are. After 20 years at Microsoft and another 10 as a consultant — in software the whole time, across support management, shipping products, program management, and operations — I finally have the time to build the tool I’ve been sketching for three decades. It’s a somewhat unusual vantage point: three decades in software — managing support teams, shipping products, running programs — and all of it spent as the user who needed a system like this to do his job. I’m building for a customer I know intimately, because I’ve been that customer the whole time.

What Mind Like Water is

Mind Like Water is a GTD-based productivity system that treats tasks and notes as equally first-class citizens. Not tasks with notes bolted on the side. Not notes with task checkboxes bolted on the side. Both, designed from the ground up as peers.

There are plenty of great task managers out there. NirvanaHQ, Todoist, OmniFocus — I’ve used and respected all of them. There are plenty of great note tools too: Obsidian, Notion, Roam. But none of them do the other side well. Task managers treat notes as an afterthought. Note tools treat tasks as a sideshow. That gap — the one I’ve been bumping into since the mid-90s — is what Mind Like Water exists to close.

Who it’s for

My hope is that Mind Like Water finds an immediate home with the GTD community. If you’ve read Allen’s book, if you run a weekly review, if “horizons of focus” means something to you — this tool is built for the way your brain already works.

But I also think it will land with people who’ve never heard of GTD and are just looking for a calmer, more capable way to manage their work and their thinking. You don’t have to know the method to benefit from the system. You just have to want one place for the things you’re doing and the things you’re thinking about.

That’s the tool I always wanted. I’m finally getting to build it.

If you’ve been living in two worlds like I was — tasks over here, notes over there, nothing connecting them — give it a try. Fourteen days free, no credit card required. If you want the short version of the pitch first, it’s right here. Either way, I’d love to hear what you think.