Could this Productivity System be “The One”?!
Posted by Qrystal on October 10, 2007 at 14:24.
Category: Tools. Tags: GTD, task-management, web 2.0.
I’ll be the first to admit that I understand all the danger of mucking around with my productivity system, because I really should just be using it to Get Things Done. But when it just ain’t working, it just ain’t working.
I know my mindset has been improving, and I really am trying to just lean on my system and let it support me… but I had a bit of a freakout recently, and it was just because I spent so much time setting up ThinkingRock to actually do what I want… and the dang settings weren’t stored in the same file as the contents of the tasks. I know there’s some way to export settings, or they’re working on it or something, and so I wouldn’t suggest that this should dissuade people from using it… but it sure as heck dissuaded me. I simply can’t wait for them to get their product finished, because I need to already be using it.
This realization also shocked me into realizing that I’ve had enough forgetting to copy the data file from my PC to my USB and back — I need to get with the Web 2.0 stuff and find myself a decent web app for productivity. Besides, anytime I’m not on a computer, I’ll have my index-card hPDA handy — and I know that as soon as I have a good digital system to sync with my analog hPDA, I’ll definitely get better at using that part of my system too. I just want a way to keep track of progress on projects and tasks, and to be able to see only what I want to see, when I want to see it — so that I can easily “download” info to my hPDA if I’m going somewhere, or easily “upload” from my hPDA when I’ve got a list of ideas collected.
I had already looked into a bunch of online apps before eventually finding ThinkingRock, but that was months ago, and many of the options have evolved immensely since then. Take Remember the Milk, for example: it’s got some awesome tagging features that almost suckered me in! but I really didn’t like the interface at all — and for an online app with so many fans raving about its interface, I knew that it couldn’t be right for me unless I loved it immediately. So I dumped it immediately.
I decided to resort to one of the best ways to find productivity tools: reading blog articles where people talk about their favourites, then reading all the comments to figure out what the article “missed” or what new stuff came out since it was written. I got fairly good at quickly determining whether an app is what I want, then browsing for more opinions on each app before signing up and trying it out. Throughout all this, I was keeping in mind that I am looking for something that suits my needs, fits my lifestyle, and doesn’t bog me down in the learning curve and doesn’t trick me into spending more time “fiddling” than doing.
Amazingly, it wasn’t long before I found something with so much promise, that I am now (less than 24 hours later) already in the process of moving all of my To Do items into it. It’s called Todoist … and it may be the most beautiful blend of simplicity, flexibility, power and convenience that I’ve ever seen. And it’s free (or cheap if you want to get email or txt reminders, which I might want someday, but first, I get to try out for free the stuff that’s most important to me!) It has projects and sub-projects, tasks and sub-tasks, an easy way to make headers and notes, and it allows tagging with contexts and priorities. It seems like it will work best if I set dates for things, but that’s something I wanted to work on anyways… and I love the fact that I can plan something for “next Tuesday” without having to figure out what date that is. Yes, Remember the Milk did that too, but I didn’t like the rest of it enough to consider it a selling point. At Todoist, it’s like a delicately sweet drizzle of icing on an already scrumptious cake. Yum!
One thing that would really, really add to this app would be the ability to customize the view just a tiny bit more than it already can — and what it CAN do is already so powerful, it’s incredible! I just want to be able to use AND, OR, and NOT at times. That’s it! Then I might be a little quicker at getting portable, and use the Print option rather than hand-writing into my hPDA. But I don’t have a huge volume of tasks anyways, except for those things ToDo @Home, near or @Computer, which means I’d have Todoist open anyways.
Anyways, I’ve babbled enough, and I want to get back to my transition to Todoist. Woohoo!