Every now and again, I fall down the rabbit hole and find myself
\nexploring “to do” software again. This dates back to when I first
\nhad an Apple Newton and worked with basic list applications (oooh, the
\nthrill of having a “done” item disappear from view! so much more
\nsatisfying than a simple strikeout on a piece of paper).<\/p>\n
Some of the traditional “To Do” support programs aim to give you For myself, I find that I don’t want software that will tell me what to Or — I would like a tool that collects and manages the data about the My current “To Do” management tool is an Excel spreadsheet. Over The big difference seems to be — the GTD software tools are much Tools like Cultured Code’s Ideally, I’d like have the ability to map out the next weeks or Of the tools I looked at today, “Thinking Every now and again, I fall down the rabbit hole and find myself exploring “to do” software again. This dates back to when I first had an Apple Newton and worked with basic list applications (oooh, the thrill of having … Continue reading
\nguidance on what you should be doing next — calculated by priorities
\nand due dates, and whatever else. Llamagraphi’cs LifeBalance
\n<\/a>(which I did try even as long ago as on those Newton platforms)
\naims to provide you with the insight of what you should be doing in
\norder to meet your stated goals of balance between different aspects of
\nyour life. <\/p>\n
\ndo next. Instead, I just want to capture the salient features of
\nthe things I need to keep track of, and then have software that is
\nflexible enough to give me different views on that — what is due now,
\nwhat did I say I wanted to revisit now, what is the collection of
\nthings I’m supposed to look at or do over the work week, the whole
\nweek, the next 4 weeks, or the next 4 months (in
\naggregate). Then, I’ll use those perspectives to lay
\nout my gameplan for the day, week, etc. <\/p>\n
\nitems to be done, is flexible in presenting the collected information,
\nand supports (not supplants) my own planning<\/span>
\nprocess. A tool that organizes my “To Do” data, and I’ll take
\ncare of organizing myself.<\/p>\n
\nthe
\nyears, I have refined my techniques so that I don’t bother with things
\nlike “priority” (which varies by context and is largely equated to
\nguilt) and the types of things I track have evolved to look
\nsuspiciously like those for David
\nAllen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD)<\/a>.
\nSo, I looked at the various software applications available that tout
\nGTD
\ncapabilities, and compare their functionality to my Excel spreadsheets.<\/p>\n
\nbetter at supporting groupings of activities (e.g., projects, areas,
\ncontexts) than Excel. However, they mostly have a few pre-set
\nways to look at the collected tasks — much less flexibility than you
\ncan achieve in a more general purpose tool (like Excel). I
\nwouldn’t dare suggest which is better than the other — it’s all a
\nquestion of tradeoffs and priorities.<\/p>\n
\n“Things”<\/a>, and Omni’s
\n“OmniFocus”<\/a> seem to focus on facilitating the process of capturing
\nactivities (e.g., drag and drop from e-mail) and organizing them into
\nprojects. Then you can look at all the things that are to be done
\n“as soon as possible” in a given project or context. But, as many
\nof us live in a world where everything has to be done “as soon as
\npossible”, the fine art of personal planning seems to be in building
\nnuance into how one handles “possible.”<\/p>\n
\nweekends based on what focus I intend to give them. For
\nexample, there’s no point in expecting I’ll get a lot of
\ncreative thinking done if I’m out of the office and on the road for 2
\nweeks. It’s not okay to just say “I’ll get to those when
\nI’m back in my office context”, because deadlines will have
\npassed: I need to prioritize which bits of creative thinking are
\ngoing to have to be tackled in the bleary eyed state of jet lag, even
\nas I am pushing off certain other thinking\/writing
\nactivities. On the personal side, I can set any number of
\ngoals or targets for getting machine knitted projects done, but there’s
\nnot a lot of point in doing that without looking at the number of
\nweekends I’m going to be in the same building as the knitting machines
\nbetween now and the end of the year. Or, when I have a weekend at
\nhome, will I swap in the knitting machine project or focus on all
\nthe household chores that have backed up over weeks away? (It
\nshould be clear which I would prefer \ud83d\ude09 ).<\/p>\n
\nRock”<\/a> seems to be the most promising, from my perspective.
\nIt’s a little less glitzy than some, as it is a cross-platform
\nJava-based application. On the other hand — it is cross
\nplatform, and knows how to save out an individual data
\nfile! The big thing it seems to have going for it is that
\nit includes a number of “report” perspectives — all open actions, all
\nactions for a project, all deferred actions, etc. I haven’t quite
\nfigured out how I would include the perspective of the kind of “focus”
\ntimes (or distracting events) as described above — but I would
\nreally like to let go of this hacked up Excel spreadsheet
\napproach. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of glory to be claimed
\nfrom having figured out how to make Excel produce GANTTs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"