Calvetica is a great calendar app

I wrote a piece about Calvetica, a great calendar app for the iPhone, at my design blog.

The short version is this: it's a near-perfect calendar app, clean and minimal, with a fantastic user interface.  If you're looking for a new calendar app, you really need to consider calvetica.

New comparison of task manager apps

On the companion Google Site to this blog, I kept a list of short descriptions of various iPhone task manager apps.  The list was getting a little long and not, I thought, very useful.  In DFW speak, it was neither effective nor efficient.

The idea was to capture all the salient features of a number of iPhone task manager apps in one place such that people could make more informed decisions about which task manager app might be best suited for them.  The single long list just didn't seem to make sense anymore.

So I've reconstructed it as a Google spreadsheet, a read-only version of which is now available where the list of apps used to be.  I've also significantly updated the list of characteristics that I evaluate for each task manager app.

I will be adding to that chart over the next couple of months, so stay tuned for more.

Mash up GTD and Autofocus with Toodledo

GTD is David Allen's all-encompassing live-organizing goliath of personal task management methods. Mark Forster's Autofocus, on the other hand, is a supreme example of minimalism. I've written before about the two, and while - being a minimalist myself - I lean toward Autofocus, I find that it suffers from being designed to work with pen and paper rather than digital tools. My personal way of doing things is a middle road - Autofocus plus some features of GTD. And being a computery kind of guy, I find that taking advantage of the power of my iPhone is an undeniable temptation. The problem is that the ideal task manager app that fits exactly how I like to do things doesn't exist.




But there are some that come close. I've already written about using Appigo ToDo to implement an "Action List." This time, I'm going to write about stripping down Toodledo to implement a combination - a mashup, if you will - of Autofocus's simplicity and GTD's structure. The example I'll use is how I do things with Toodledo, but I'll explain why I made the decisions that I made, and what the alternatives are, so that you can decide for yourself what's best for you. Remember: your mileage will vary.

To make sure we're keeping our system as simple as possible, we start with Autofocus (AF). The key principle of AF is, I think, that your brain is fully capable of deciding what you should do next, and that all you need is a way to quickly survey what all your tasks are. Your next task depends on your current situation, and that's something you can't predict. Yet that's exactly what I think GTD would have you do by describing so many different facets of each task. Forget the meta-work needed to maintain an accurate and so-finely-multifaceted description of your tasks, which just eats into the time you could spend actually doing stuff. The real problem is that adding a task to your list is leaving yourself a direction for the future. And we suck at predicting the future. Yet specifying too much information about a task requires you to commit to a prediction of your future self. Even a science geek with a PhD in engineering like me can't predict my own situation for spit.

AF, on the other hand, is more about just leaving yourself prompts or cues, and then letting your future self decide, in the moment of choosing to complete a task, which is the best or most important thing to do.

The basic tool in AF is a simple list. You add new tasks to the end of the list. You review your tasks from beginning to end, one chunk at a time (where, if you're working with pen and paper, a chuck is a page). Breaking your list into chunks is important because your brain's ability to choose well drops dramatically as the number of alternatives to choose from increases. AF has no due dates, no contexts, no projects, and no tags.

Once we move to a digital platform, however, we can change the rules. Chunking things is still important - that's just how the human brain works. But in the digital world, we can edit and rearrange tasks very easily, and that changes everything.

Enter Toodledo.

(I note here that I'll be writing exclusively about the features of Toodledo that are supported by the free Toodledo sync service. Syncing with Toodledo's servers is useful because it (a) ensures you have a backup of your tasks, and (b) lets you use Toodledo's web interface if you're so inclined. Toodledo also offers a premium service for which you have to pay, and that provides added functionality.)

Somewhat ironically, Toodledo is targeted at GTD users, but it can easily be used to implement something very close to AF. It has one (among many) truly fascinating features: you can configure which of the many available fields you actually use. The ones you don't want to use will be completely hidden. As of version 2.1.2 of Toodledo, you can find this under Settings > Fields & Defaults. You are presented with two lists; the first is an ordered list of the fields you want to use, and the second list is of the fields you don't need. I say that the first list is ordered because the fields will be shown in whatever order you put them in the Fields & Defaults settings. You can just touch and drag the fields around into whatever order you want, and pull them from one list to the other. You can also define default values for any of the active fields. As you'll see, this is very useful.

I should mention here what I see as one of the shortcomings of Toodledo: you can't manually reorder tasks. Toodledo comes with a number of interesting built-in methods to sort tasks, but manual sorting isn't one of them. The most interesting of these is sorting by "importance," which is a value calculated internally by Toodledo based on due date, priority, and whether a task is starred. This technique is quite clever because it allows you to focus on very specific task attributes (like due dates) that are easy to set values to, and then the app combines these into a single value of importance. It's not perfect (for me, anyways), but I can see the attraction.

The problem with sorting by importance is, again, that it requires you to know when you create the task what will be important to your future self when you're looking at your task list for something to do. I vastly prefer the AF approach of giving the user more choice so that you can respond to the specifics of your current situation without having to add all those attributes to each task when you create them.

Toodledo's developers have indicated that they may add manual sorting, but apparently this will require a significant rewrite, so I wouldn't expect it anytime soon. Lack of manual sorting is a shortcoming because I don't think there's any single way to comprehensively order a whole collection of tasks that will be suitable for everyone under every circumstance. This is one area in which Appigo ToDo really shines: it has a very powerful manual reordering capacity that includes tweaking due dates depending on where you drop a task in a list of other tasks. Still, as we'll see in a few paragraphs, there can be merit to Toodledo's approach. In the end, users will have to decide for themselves which way is best for them.

Toodledo has a special list, the Hotlist, that gathers only those tasks that need to be done, based on certain criteria that depend on the various fields. The Hotlist can be a very good friend, as we'll see below.

If you put all the fields into the unused list, all you'll have is a list of tasks with no other fields at all (except the ability to add a note to a task). Combined with the lack of manual reordering, you've just turned Toodledo into a pretty good version of classic AF. The Hotlist will be useless because there are no criteria to identify the most important tasks. You can use the All Tasks list in this case, and it works fine in this role.

Now we can start adding fields, one at a time, based on the features we want. Again, I can't guess which fields will work best for you, so all I can suggest is ways of deciding and showing you how I decided. The one piece of advice I would urge you to take is to add new fields slowly. You might think that you really need one field or another, but you won't actually know until you add it and use it for a while, and reflect on whether the addition of that field is making you more effective, or more efficient, or both. If you add multiple fields at once, you will only cloud the issue and you're less likely to be able to tell if one or the other or all the fields you added are good for you. So, adding one field at a time is the way to go.

The first and most obvious field to add is Due Date. Setting a due date means that Toodledo will push that task into your Hotlist. How exactly it does that depends on how you define the due date. Toodledo supports four kinds of due dates: Due On (the task will appear in your Hotlist only on the day it's due), Due By (the default, the task appears immediately but moves towards the top of the list as you approach the due date), Due After (for tasks you can't complete until at least a given date, the task appears in the Hotlist on that date but is never overdue), and Optionally Due On (especially useful for repeating tasks, the task will be removed, and advanced to its next occurrence, after the due date). I've had trouble using Due After and Optionally Due On, on the iPhone, in that they don't really seem to do anything. However, even just having the choice of Due On or Due By is very useful.

You can then set a default value for the due date. I set it to "today" thus forcing me to make the time to either do it, or spend a few minutes deciding what exactly the due date should be.

Depending too much on due dates can be a problem. I use them only for tasks that really have a hard deadline, not just for scheduling when I would like to do them. This allows me to easily distinguish between the things I really must do today and tasks that I would just prefer to do today. It's very easy to set due dates for every task, especially if you set a default date for the field, but I would discourage you from this practise since you can (or, at least, I can) get wrapped up in doing things that really aren't due just because I prefer doing them to those other tasks that have harder deadlines.

Enabling the Due Date field in Toodledo also adds a new list to the home screen. This list orders all your tasks by due date, so you can switch to that list to see only tasks that have due dates, sorted just as one would expect. I personally don't like switching between lists because I tend to forget what list I'm actually looking at, which confuses me. But that's just me; I know there are many people who find it very useful to switch between different "views" of their tasks. If you're one of them, then the Due Date list could be very useful to you.

A second field that I find infinitely useful in any task manager app is the repetition rate for repeating tasks. When you complete a repeating task, the next occurrence is immediately scheduled. Toodledo can set the next occurrence to be due either a fixed period from the initial due date, or from the date you actually complete the task, which can be two very different things. Repeating tasks are great for things like remembering to pay certain bills, putting out the garbage, and checking certain websites, to name a few.

Another field that Toodledo supports is Start Date. Any task with a Start Date set in the future will not appear in your Hotlist until that date. You can set start dates independently of due dates, so you can have tasks that have a start date but no due date. This is a great way to put tasks off for a time, but know that sooner or later they'll pop up so that you won't forget about them.

A fourth very useful field to use is the Folder field. This allows you to create folders to contain tasks. You can use folders to group tasks any way you want. I have folders for each of the courses I teach, for each of my graduate students, and for key projects that each might have many tasks associated with them. Because I dislike contexts (more on them later), I also have folders for Home, Work, Computer, and so on. The usefulness of folders is when I'm looking through undated tasks for ones that I want to do next.

This too is an important feature of AF: that you choose what to do and work on it as long as you like. The choosing is greatly facilitated by grouping tasks into logical chunks. If all you have is pen and paper, then a page is a logical chunk. In a digital world, however, one is not so constrained, so a logical grouping by subject makes sense. Hence, the usefulness of Toodledo folders.

So far, the fields I've suggested are pretty conventional. The reason for adding them is to take advantage of the inherent abilities of a digital platform while remaining true to the intent of AF.

There are other fields in Toodledo that can be useful. Again, remember that you should only add one field at a time and the use it for a while to evaluate whether it is adding to your effectiveness and efficiency.

If you use folders, you might end up with a large number of them. This can become a meta-work problem: if there's lots of folders, then finding the right folder for a given task can become more of a distraction than an aide. If you prefer single, long lists of tasks - and if you already use AF, this could very well describe you - then you might prefer using Toodledo's Contexts.

A context, per GTD, is a classification of tasks based on circumstance - usually a location. Some apps actually connect contexts to GPS locations using the iPhone's location services. Toodledo doesn't do that. Still, with the Context field active, you get a top level list of contexts and can choose which context best describes your current situation. I'm not fond of this approach myself, but given Toodledo's popularit, many other users are quite happy. As an alternative, Appigo ToDo treats contexts as filters that modify other task lists. If I used contexts, I would prefer ToDo's approach.

In any case, contexts let you hide tasks that aren't pertinent to you current situation, so you can use it as another way to chunk tasks in a meaningful way.

One word of warning: I am not fond of using both contexts and folders. These two fields are supposed to be orthogonal - entirely disconnected from one another, but it's very easy to fall into a trap of having both folders and contexts for the same thing. And that just complicates the matters of deciding how to classify new tasks and finding out what tasks are relevant at a given moment. For instance, I could easily see myself using a folder for tasks relating to general teaching stuff, and a context for making sure those tasks only show up when I'm in "teaching mode." So the question is, where do I add a new teaching task? To the Teaching folder, the Teaching context, or both? I just can't see how having to make those kinds of decisions can improve effectiveness or efficiency; as far as I can tell, doing this just adds to your meta-work, which just ain't a good idea.

Another field in Toodledo can be useful: stars. Stars are especially useful because you can arrange your Hotlist to automatically show a starred task regardless of any other field. What I do is:

• activate the Star field in Fields & Defaults settings;
• set the default value of the Star field to Yes - this will automatically turn on the star for all new tasks; and
• in the Hotlist settings, at the bottom, check the Has A Star option.

Now any new task you create, even in fast entry mode, will have a star and will appear in your Hotlist immediately.

I often find that I add tasks that I can't do now but will do later today. This is a great way to quickly and easily enter such tasks - no due date or other data is required. They'll be there in the Hotlist so I can quickly move on to other things, till I have a chance to do them. If you also happen to set a default due date of today, and sort your tasks by Importance, those starred tasks will appear quite high in your Hotlist, so it's less likely that you'll overlook them.

There's one more technique available in Toodledo that can be quite useful, if you're so inclined: tags. Indeed, you can use tags as a replacement for nearly everything else. Say you create a tag "Now" that you assign to any task you want to do as soon as possible. You just add that tag to any tasks you want to do today and, regardless of any other fields, you call easily pull all those tasks into a single screen with Toodledo.

You can also replace Folders and Contexts and even Stars with tags. By adding many tags to a task, you can make a single task appear in any number of tag-based views.  Indeed, there's a task manager app called Voodo that only supports tags (and I like it's design).

Once you enable the Tags field in the Fields & Defaults, you'll have a special list for tags on the Toodledo home screen, from which you can select any tag and see all the tasks with that tag. You can even set a default tag of Now in Fields & Defaults, so that all new tasks will immediately appear in your Now tag view - which is why tags can replace the use of stars as I described it above.

The problem I find with this approach is that you can quickly end up with many, many tags. Since all the tags are arranged in alphabetic order, you'll end up with folder tags mixed up with context tags, priority tags, and any other tags you think of. Because of this, the Now tag will likely end up somewhere in the middle of the list of tags. But you can make it appear first in the list by adding a zero (as in "0Now"). Or you can even just name the tag "0." Since numbers come before letters lexically, the 0 tag will be the first tag in the tag list.

So there you have it. A whole gaggle of things you can do with Toodledo to streamline its use in keeping with Autofocus, without getting too mired in all the different options and capabilities of Toodledo. Of course, if you use all the things I've suggested here at once - due dates, start dates, repetitions, folders, contexts, stars, and tags - then you've pretty much got GTD again.

The point is that you don't need them all. Remember: try one at a time and actually use it for a few days before deciding if you want to make it a permanent part of your task management system. That way, you'll be sure to use the fewest number of fields, which will keep the whole process as lightweight and easy as possible.

Simulating an Action List with ToDo

I really like action lists - these are integrative lists that show you, in one place, all your current tasks.  Not all task manager apps use action lists.  In this post, I'll describe how you can set up Appigo ToDo's focus list to act like an action list.

Most task manager apps let you organize your tasks into a variety of groups: contexts, projects, lists, etc.  They'll also try to arrange your tasks so that you'll find it easy to see just what you have to do next.  But different people have different ideas of what "easy" means.

I've found that task manager apps can be grouped by how they handle "easy" presentation of tasks.  One group defines a fixed set of views on your tasks on the basis of some rationale that tells them their way is best.  This approach, taken by apps like OmniFocus and Task PRO, usually gives you separate views for tasks that are overdue, tasks due today, tasks due soon, and so on.

Another group of apps, including Taska and Things, are built on action lists.  These are user-constructed views of your tasks.  You pick which tasks should be in the list based on what you think is important.  Most of these apps will automatically compile some tasks (e.g. those with due dates) into the action list.

Then there's a third group of apps, like ToDo and Toodledo, that give you some flexibility.  There's an optional list that is configurable, and that you can set up in a variety of different ways.

I really like action lists.  I want all my current tasks in one place; I don't want, for instance, to have to navigate to another list just to see my overdue tasks.  And I like to control what goes into the action list.  Some of my tasks have to be done, but don't strictly have to be done by a given date - they're just whatever's next in a given project.  Those kinds of tasks are nigh-impossible to bring to the fore with apps of the first type.

But what do you do if you prefer an app that doesn't directly support action lists?  Well, it depends on the app, but if you like ToDo, you can rig up a pretty good action list in just a few minutes.

ToDo has a focus list that can be configured in a variety of ways.  Here's how to make the focus list into an action list.

1. In the in-app settings for ToDo, go to the Focus List settings.
2. Under Show Tasks:
• Set No Due Date off.
• Set both Starred and Subtasks to on.
• Set Completed to None.
3. Under Hide Tasks:
• Set Due After to Today.
• Set Priority to -.

That's all there is to it.

All dated tasks will appear in the Focus List, on their due date.  And any task with a star will also appear in the Focus List.  This includes a regular task, a project, a task in a project, a whole checklist, or single checklist items.

ToDo has a really easy way to star tasks.  Choose the reordering icon (the one with three horizontal lines at the top right of the screen).  This lets you reorder tasks, but it also lets you star or un-star tasks.  Just tap the star beside a task to toggle its state.  You can also do this within the Focus List itself, so it's easy to un-star your starred tasks and get them out of the Focus List immediately.

I think this is a very nicely balanced way of managing your current tasks; it's both highly effective (giving you complete control) and efficient (it doesn't require much work to set up or use).  If you like the Action List approach and are willing to try ToDo, then you should give this technique a try.

If you come up with any variations that work better for you, please do leave a comment and share with the rest of us.

[Read my other posts about ToDo.]

iPad still cool, but Air wins for me

I've written a couple of posts about my iPad.  This will probably be my last post about it, because, unfortunately, it hasn't turned out as well as I would have liked.  And there's a much better, existent solution, which I've now adopted - the Macbook Air.

Over the past few months, I've struggled to find ways to take advantage of my iPad for productivity.  Struggled is the right word.  Not because the iPad is somehow bad or insufficient.  Rather, because it just doesn't fit my needs.

The iPad is, as others have noted, primarily for content consumption.  There's all manner of apps for finding and using information.  Whether it's playing games, or online books and newspapers, or reading blogs, or finding great recipes, or viewing MRI images, or buying things on eBay, or any of a hundred other things - the iPad is wonderful.  It's light; it lasts forever on a charge; now with iOS 4.2, it does fast task-switching and supports folders.  And it's oh-so cool.

On the consumption side, I really enjoy the iPad, and think it's quite brilliant.

The problem is that I'm not about consumption, but rather about content creation.  Whether it's saving links to interesting sites and blogs, or writing my own blog entries, or uploading photos, or just managing my research notes and articles, I use computers to create things.  I'm not passing judgment on content consumers; the only reason I have so much content to create is that content I consume is stimulating that creativity.  But, for me, consumption is useless except that it helps me create.  So a device that can't do both isn't going to help me much.

And I've found the iPad is rather weak on the creation side.  I know I've written to the contrary, but I thought I'd find more apps that would help than I actually did.  And let's face it, these days it's all about software.  Thanks to the Web, Java, Javascript, Perl, and other programming platforms, it's quite easy to write software that will run well on any platform.  This makes the platform irrelevant.

Or mostly so.  The iPad suffers the curse of iOS, which is a good and robust operating system for mobile devices, but the iPad could be so much more than "just" an iPod Touch on steroids.  Unfortunately, many Web-based apps still consider the iPad as a small device rather than a real computer.  And Apple's decision to not support Flash on iOS doesn't help.  I know what their thinking is, and in principle I agree with it.  HTML5 seems to be the way of the future, in that HTML5 is an integrated solution, whereas Flash is always going to be an add on.  There's an interesting post in ReadWriteWeb that suggests the race is still on.  And while Flash has a huge installed base, HTML is the heart and soul of the Web; all previous versions of HTML were adopted rather quickly, and I don't see HTML5 being any different in that regard.  Still, today, the problem remains, no Flash support in iOS is game-limiting for content creators like me.

Sure, I can create documents in Word-compatible format and sync them to Google Docs or Dropbox or any number of other services.  But I still can't pull those documents into, say, most blogging platforms because the rich text editing features of services like WordPress don't work on the iPad.  And I hate the notion of adding all the formatting tags myself.

I can read news and blogs very well on the iPad.  Indeed, many of the feed-based reading apps (like GoodReader, Pulse, and Reeder) are among the best apps I've seen.  And G-Whizz works around the limitations of iOS to give you the full desktop version of Google Reader (albeit with some occasional weird behaviour) as well as access to most every other Google service.  But there are still some things I can't do.  Like finding a good link and adding it quickly to Diigo, the bookmarking service I use.  Which is something I do a lot.

The lobotomized version of Safari on the iPad is also rather limited compared to the desktop version, and even more so compared to Chrome or Firefox - neither of which run on iOS.  Something I often do is tag, or bookmark, or save, or whatever certain web sites I run across.  Can't do that with iOS's browser.

So while things are still possible, and there's always the hope that things will improve in the future, I really need to get things done now.  Put another way, the iPad doesn't hit the right balance of function and form that I need.

Enter the Macbook Air.  It's unnervingly thin and light, and packs a truck-load of flash memory in place of a hard-drive.  The small ones weigh about as much as an iPad.  It doesn't have a touch screen, but it's large trackpad does support the same multi-touch interface as iOS.  It doesn't last as long on a charge as an iPad, but it does last longer than a regular laptop. (It's rated at between five and seven hours, which I've found to be a pretty accurate measure.)  It needs a regular, laptop-sized charger, which is a dead-weight to lug around when I've travelling, but because it lasts so much longer on a charge, I don't have to worry about bringing the charger with me everywhere.

And the Air runs full Mac OS X.  Indeed, I've even installed the dreaded Microsoft Office on it, and it runs just fine (well, as fine as any MS product runs...).  With full OS X, I can run all the apps I run on any other of my computers.  I have total compatibility, and the interface is exactly what I'm used to.  I can blog, and surf, and tag, and bookmark, and edit, and link everything.

All in a package just as wide, slightly longer, and only a smidge thicker than the iPad.  Sure, it costs more than an iPad, but you do get what you pay for.  And what I've paid for is a frighteningly light and powerful computer.

So in the end, if you're looking for a simple, light, long-lasting device that will do exactly everything that a larger, more expensive, and heavier laptop will do, I would urge you to take a very close look at the Macbook Air.

(In case you're wondering, I've regifted the iPad for my wife.)

Dropbox: totally transparent file sharing and backup

Dropbox is a great service.  It allows you to sync files between an assortment of computers in an entirely transparent way.  Since my perspective on it is more designerly, I blogged about it at my other blog.  Having tried a few other services, I'm perfectly happy to say Dropbox is the pick of the litter.

App face-off: Taska versus ToDo

Taska and ToDo, two of my favorite task managers for the iPhone and iPad, recently came out with updates. Since the updates came out pretty at the same time, I thought it would make sense to mini-review them together.



ToDo version 4 includes better support for iOS 4, fast task-switching, sync with Appigo's own sync servers, local alerts, better robustness, and a few other minor features.

Taska version 1.0.8 constitutes a significant update and includes a new look and feel, tweaked fonts and icons, simplified interface, accommodating new functions in iOS 4, alerts, and a whole lot of bug fixes. I should also note that Taska's look and feel is remarkably similar to that of Things for iPhone, by Cultured Code. However, having used both apps, I can say that there are significant functional differences between them, and to read more than this into the matter is, in my opinion, unwarranted. Cultured Code may beg to differ, but it's a free country and that's my opinion.

While Taska shows the greatest improvement and has superior functionality, I find it still needs more work.

ToDo supports all the key functions one would expect from a GTD-oriented task manager: folders, priorities, stars, due dates, task repetition, tags, contexts, and search. It's quite customizable, it syncs with toodledo, and it's very robust. It also has a pretty good fast-entry mode and push alerts thanks to iOS 4. ToDo has a fairly configurable Focus list that let's you gather key tasks in one place for easy reference. It also supports projects and checklists, but can't sync them with toodledo unless you subscribe to toodledo's premium service. Appigo has also introduced it's own fee-based sync service for ToDo.

Taska does pretty much everything ToDo does, and then some. Its Action list is an even more flexible version of ToDo's Focus list. It can sync checklists and projects to toodledo without requiring users to have a premium toodledo account. It manages this by embedding information in other task fields. While this is an interesting way of doing things, it also means that toodledo's browser interface doesn't understand Taska's notion of projects and checklists. This is only a problem if you expect to use toodledo's browser interface, or if you expect to use toodledo as a medium to transfer your tasks from Taska to some other app.

Taska also supports location services for its contexts, which ToDo doesn't do so far. This means Taska can change the content of your Action list depending on where you are - which is pretty cool. (Taska isn't the only app that does this, but it is one of the most affordable.)

Another really cool feature of Taska is it's support for horizons. Setting the horizon of a task tells Taska to pop that task into the Action list before its due date. This is great for tasks that require some advance warning. It's a feature I don't use often, but it's screamingly useful when I do need it.

On the face of it, Taska seems far superior to ToDo. However, Taska does have some shortcomings that, for me at least, are substantive enough to make choosing one app over the other a hard choice.

Taska still requires more "taps" to get things done than does ToDo. This is especially evident when quickly entering a task the details of which you'll add later. I can see why Taska's developers did it this way: to integrate fast task entry with detailed task entry. It's a noble goal, but not if it ends up costing the user extra taps. ToDo's developers forsook that integration for the sake of speed, and I think that it has worked well for them.

Searching is also easier in ToDo. In Taska, you can only search one list at a time; to search all your tasks, you have to navigate to the "All" list, which I find distracting. In ToDo, there's a search icon in the toolbar which let's you search all tasks from almost any screen. It makes sense: if you need to search for a task, you're probably not sure which list it's in, so a global search would seem to be the most useful thing to do.

While Taska's Action list is a wonderful thing, it remains rather hard to reorder tasks in an arbitrary way. It was even more confusing in older versions, so again there is certainly a big improvement, but it's still not quite there. And a proper action list can be simulated quite well in ToDo.

The other odd thing that I noticed is that changing the sorting of tasks in Taska tends to cause unexpected changes in order. For instance, say you have your Action list sorted by due date, and you want to change to a manual sort. As soon as you select manual sorting, but before you actually do the manual sorting, all your tasks get rearranged in some way that I still can't figure out. This is unexpected and distracting. It should instead keep whatever order was there, then let you adjust it by manual reordering. (Again, ToDo does this right.)

Taska also sorts things oddly when you create a new list (Taska lists are like toodledo folders); it seems to sort tasks in the new list in reverse alphabetic order. While this might seem like a minor thing, it's unexpected. And unexpected things are jarring to the user and raise the spectre that something has gone wrong.

These differences are perfectly understandable: Taska is quite new, but ToDo has been around for a long time (by app standards). And I don't mean to rag on Taska; it has a number of great features, like horizons rather than start dates, and contexts that use your current location. Even though I don't use contexts myself, I can certainly understand how others could find this very useful.

So which would I recommend? I don't know, really. It depends on which features you really need, and whether you're willing to put up with a few rough edges. Since I use my task app for seriously important work-related stuff, I tend to use ToDo because it's just more robust and efficient. Taska is more effective in that it offers an excellent range of functions without being a bloated software monster. I would rather use Taska, but I'm worried that I'll lose important information due to its occasionally odd behaviour. I am a patient man and I will keep an eye on how Taska evolves; all else being equal, if Taska's development continues at its current brisk pace, it will surpass ToDo.

One word of caution: if you expect to be able to switch between Taska and ToDo easily, be ready for a disappointment. While both apps sync with toodledo's task management web service, they don't use comaptible data formats; don't be surprised if tasks are synced between the apps via toodledo imperfectly and incompletely. (I note that this isn't anyone's fault - there are no standards for task app data storage and representation, so the kinds of incompatibilities are entirely expected.)

The iPad: pretty darned good for content creation

There's been a number of posts to various blogs and tech sites that diss the iPad.  I think most of them are really unfounded.



One of the more sensible one's is by Jason Hiner at TechRepublic.  He wraps up his article quite correctly, identifying a number of aspects of the iPad that give reason to be optimistic of its future.  The biggest one being that it's still a "1.0 device;" that is, it's the first version.  Apple has a tendency of using its introductory devices, such as the original iPod and even the iPhone, as testbeds that are improved upon quite dramatically within a few years of introduction.

Still, there's a slant in Hiner's opinion - most evident in the title of his article - "The truth about iPad: It's only good for two things" - that tends to give one pause.  I don't like that, because if you bother to read the article, you'll see just how broadly Hiner defines those two "things."

One shortcoming Hiner describes is that the iPad isn't very good for content creation.  And in particular he points to the difficulty in inserting images and links as an example.  Well, of course, it isn't.  Duh!  While the glossy propaganda from Apple repeats like a matra that the iPad is good for "everything," you will note that none of the adds give examples of content creation under that rubric.  This is a danger of the sound-bite.  If you have sufficient attention span to observe Apple's ads in their entirety, using both your eyes as well as your ears, you do get a good sense of what the iPad is all about.

Just on this one point, let me offer an alternative view: I think the iPad is really great for content creation.

I do a fair amount of writing, both professionally and otherwise.  Most of this stuff is largely based on text.  While I love diagrams and graphics, they're a pain to develop - even on my laptop or desktop - compared to the ease with which I can churn out plain ol' linear text.  One might ask when we'll see some really usable and useful apps and software for communicating graphically, but that's not an iPad thing - that's a general software thing.

When I write, there's two phases to it: creation and editing.  When I create, I use plain text.  I just need to get my thoughts down, choose the right words, get my ideas in the right order, and make sure the underlying logic of my argument is as good as I can make it.  There's no great need at this point for images and links.  Indeed, adding them during context creation breaks my concentration on the text.  I might leave myself notes, like embed image of a fleebnorb here, but to do more than that is disruptive to the creative mode of thinking.

Once I've got the basic text in order, I go back through it all, in editing mode.  At this point, I'm correcting the language, trying to make sure that readers will understand me, tweak the odd bit here and there, and augment the text with appropriate images and links.  This is not a creative mode of thinking, but an analytic mode.  I'm dissecting my own writing for the sake of clarifying it for others.

How does the iPad figure in this?  I do the creative text writing on the iPad.  Since it's so light, I can carry it pretty much anywhere.  It's size is ideal (for me) to use on the subway (sitting down), or on my lap during an otherwise meaningless meeting, etc.  Once the text is in order, I use DropBox or Google Docs to make the text available on my other computers.  Then I sit down in peace and quite, at my laptop or desktop, and do the analytic part of the operation, including adding images and links.

As far as I can tell, the iPad fits perfectly into this two-mode way of turning stuff out, making it a very effective tool.  So sure, it's not a silver bullet solution.  Big deal: there's no such thing as a silver bullet.  But it sure can play an important role in getting stuff done.

Being productive with the iPad: setting up

I recently picked up an iPad, and I'm loving it.  Not because it's "cool," and not because it's one if the It Toys of the summer, but because it seems to me to be (potentially) quite a great tool for productivity.  Of course, I'm new to the iPad (and so is everyone else), so I'm still getting my sea legs.  But if the early returns are a good indication, then it's got great potential.



In some ways, the iPad is just a really big iPod Touch: no camera, no phone.  But just the "really big" part is enough to change the rules of the game, and Apple's sometimes subtle changes to the interface to take advantage of the "really big" part open up lots of possibilities.

You can read about my first impressions of the iPad at my other blog, where I wrote about it more from a design point-of-view.  Here, I will focus on the productivity side.

What drew me to the iPad is it's power, which is significant, and it's weight, which is anything but.  I used to tote a 13" MacBook Pro with me when I travelled for work.  It was the smallest, and therefore the lightest, Mac laptop.  It was also the cheapest, which didn't hurt.  But it was still too heavy to lug around at research conferences (once you add the charger and other indispensable extras, and not big enough to give me useful screen real-estate when I was just using it at home.

The iPad changed things up for me.  I can bring the iPad with me when I travel, and it weighs next to nothing (compared to my laptop).  Indeed, it's even more portable than a laptop, and I bring it with me to more places because of that than I ever did my laptop.  While it isn't as powerful as a laptop, it's good enough to do the important things - thanks to some impressive apps.  Given the iPad, I can get a bigger laptop, with a better screen, for home use.  So I went from a 13" MacBook Pro to an iPad plus a 17" MacBook Pro.  Obviously more costly, but also 'way more effective.  I got a laptop instead of something like an iMac because I can move the laptop around the house and even hide quite quickly when guests are around.  Indeed, in a pinch I once just closed it and put it on a bookshelf amongst a bunch of large picture books.  No one even knew there was a computer in the room.

Now, since the iPad and the iPhone (which I also have and adore) are basically the same kind of device, one might be tempted to run the same apps on both.  But that isn't a good idea, for three reasons.

1. You'll need to sync both your devices regularly, if not often.  Say you add an appointment on the iPhone using one of the better known task managers, such as Pocket Informant.  To make sure your iPad knows about the appointment, you have to sync the iPhone app to whatever service you're using, then sync the iPad to those same services.  Of course, you could use Mobile Me to push sync to all you Apple devices, but that will cost you $109 a year (in Canada at least), and it would limit you to apps that sync with Mobile Me.  I prefer to use free stuff, like Google Calendar and Toodledo.  In any case, all this syncing around is a recipe for disaster (when, not if, you forget to sync something) and it's also a meta burden on your time.
2. That app you love on the iPhone because of it's sweet interface may not have such a sweet interface on the iPad.  Some developers have really tried to keep a certain integrity between the iPad and iPhone variants of their software (Pocket Informant and Taska are good examples); others have not.
3. There are price differences between the iPad and iPhone versions of some apps.  The iPad versions tend to cost more.  Even worse, some apps will download for free on the iPad if you already have them on your iPhone, but others will ding you again - and you won't find out about it till you've already committed to the purchase.

So, my advice is this: if you have an iPhone and an iPad, try to keep each app on only one of the two devices.  And if you have both, you'll want to consider each app separately to decide on which of the two devices it should live.

First of all, check to see if that app is even available for the iPad.  iPhone apps will run on the iPad, but they will only use one iPhone-screen's worth of the iPad's screen.  Not much fun.  Fortunately, the App Store clearly distinguishes between iPad apps and iPhone apps.

Then, if the app does have an iPad variant, read over its description and look carefully at the screen-shots; you really can't tell what the interface will feel like till you download (i.e. buy) it, but sometimes you can get a sense of it.  If there is no iPad variant, then you need to decide how important it is.  You might consider switching to a related app for the iPad.

The key here is to weigh the importance of keeping the app on the iPhone versus using a different app on the iPad.  Remember, you don't want to have the same apps on both devices - not for "productivity" purposes anyways.

Take your time deciding.  It's better to be slow than wrong.  Sleep on it; ask a colleague or friend; let it swirl in your brainpan for a while - maybe a few hours, maybe a few days.  Don't dwell on it or you'll just tie yourself up in cognitive knots; think about it hard for 15-20 minutes, then try to forget about it for a while.  Your brain will keep working on the problem even if you yourself don't.  Consciousness is funny that way.  After a time, the answer will become clear to you.

Of course, given how economical apps are, you might also download a few alternatives and play around with them a bit.  If you can afford to do that, it's certainly the way to go.  Nothing like taking them out for test drives to really let you understand what each app has to offer.

So far, I've decided to keep my task manager only on my iPhone (currently I use Taska).  That's to avoid the whole sync problem that I mentioned above.  My iPhone is almost always with me because it's pocket-sized, so it's the logical candidate for that.

I've moved my iBooks library to the iPad - it''s just easier to read on the iPad's screen.  (That happened when I first synced the iPad with iTunes.)

I've also moved reading email and news/blogs to the iPad.  While it's good to be able to fire off a quick email from my iPhone, I can actually get quite a bit of real work done on the iPad.  This is highly dependent on your email and RSS reader apps.  Since the iPad is essentially a big iPod Touch, it suffers from many of its shortcomings - the biggest one, I think, is that it runs the mobile version of Safari.  Seriously, there's 64 GB of memory in my iPad - isn't that more than enough to run a real browser?

Fortunately, as far as  email and RSS goes, salvation has come in the form of a wonderful app called G-Whizz!  It is a "front end" for a number of the Google services, including Reader, Gmail, and Calendar.  What's particularly good about G-Whizz! is that it can run the "desktop" versions, rather than the somewhat lobotomized mobile versions, of these three services.  This means that I get pretty much every function out of Gmail, and Calendar, and Reader on the iPad as I do on my desktop.  (Gmail Labs seems to be missing as of this writing.) I've found G-Whizz! to be quite robust, and subject to very little weirdness on the iPad.  One example of a little thing that had me going for a while: I couldn't figure out how to scroll a news article in Reader, or an email message in Gmail.  I posted to the G-Whizz! Google Group, and got a response literally within minutes.  Turns out that to make a pane scroll, the standard iPad interface is to swipe vertically with two fingers instead of one.  To quote Johnny Carson, I did not know that!

I find reading news with Google Reader via G-Whizz! especially gratifying because I can tag and share just as I would at my desk, but I can do it anywhere and in greater comfort with the iPad than with my laptop.  Since I got G-Whizz! on my iPad, it hasn't even occurred to me to read news on either my laptop or desktop.

Another fairly obvious use of an iPad is to take notes.  The biggest reason to move note-taking from my iPhone to my iPad is the bigger keyboard.  Granted that the iPad's keyboard is only virtual, but it took me only a few minutes to get  used to it.  Even though the key layout isn't exactly standard, I found that I can type pretty darned fast.  This is, for me, a huge selling point.  And if you type a lot, it should be for you too.

The Land of Notes Apps for the iPad is rather like the mythological Wild West at the moment, with a wide variety of generally crappy software, with tremendous repetition of function, and only a few really interesting exemplars that are both usable and robust.

These apps generally fall into three categories:

1. Scrapbooks & journals.  These apps let you track your own life for your own benefit, usually let you include images (though often only one image per entry), and emphasize their aesthetic appeal (use of colour, font, background images, etc)
2. Handrwriting apps.  These apps are based on letting you use your thumb or a capacitive display stylus to "write" on the screen.  This includes handwriting recognition apps.
3. Document preparation apps.  These apps are basically stripped down versions of iWork (or [cough] MS Office).

I haven't yet had time to look too deeply into these apps, and my primary concern is document preparation, because I need it for work.  Also, I need to be able to sync my documents with Google Docs, which is the de facto document sharing and collaborative editing medium for most of my colleagues and students.

Given these constraints, there are two iPad apps that seem to be at the front of the pack: Office² HD, and Documents To Go (Premium).  Documents To Go supports Word, Excel, and (that's why the Premium version) Powerpoint; however, it has quite a clumsy interface and the process of syncing with Google Docs is, quite frankly, bizarrely complicated.  Also, it's default font is far too small, and I can't figure out how to change it.  For a guy like me, who needs reading glasses, this is an unnecessary inconvenience.  Office² HD has a much cleaner interface, and syncing with Google Docs is easier.  But it doesn't support Powerpoint (and what academic doesn't just looove Powerpoint?)

If your needs are anywhere near mine, go with Office² HD; it's not perfect, but you'll likely spend less time futzing around with the app and more time getting stuff done.

So, I've only had my iPad a couple of weeks, but I have sorted out that it's great for email, reading news, and pretty darned good for document preparation, and I've found some apps that are quite satisfying if not wonderful.

There's other things I want to look into - handwriting recognition and drawing tools in the near term - and I'll have something to write about those soon.  And, of course, I will consider a few of the available task managers.

Action Lists and Listmaker: unremarkable

Daze End Software has recently released new versions of two iPhone apps: Action Lists, a GTD-oriented task manager, and Listmaker, a stripped down version of Action Lists for simpler listing and todo needs. Unfortunately, neither of them is really remarkable in any way.



Action Lists ($9.99) offers a simple interface that's very consistent with iPhone standards, but it seems to need more taps than other apps to do relatively simple editing tasks.  It has smart lists for projects, contexts, and for tasks marked as "waiting" and "someday," and it syncs with toodledo.com.  It is simple and appears quite robust.  It has a fast task entry mode, start dates and due dates, and a pretty good assortment of options for repeating tasks.

However, the options for setting due dates are not particularly flexible. There's no master action list, which means, for instance, if you're looking at tasks due today, you have to manually switch lists to see overdue tasks.  I find that amazingly annoying.  Horizons are not supported either, which means due tasks only show up on the day their due - you can't have the app give you any warning that a task is coming due.

And there's at least one bug I've found.  If you create a task, save it without assigning a due date, then edit it again, give it a due date and save it again, the badge count of how many tasks are due/outstanding isn't updated.

Listmaker ($4.99) lets one create nested lists (lists that contain other lists to arbitrary depth - which can be very useful) of items.  It too syncs with toodledo.com.  You can assign due dates to items, but it doesn't handle recurring tasks.  Since it shares much of its interface with Action Lists, it's very consistent with iPhone interface standards, and has the same issues, primarily there are too many taps required (I believe) to get things done.  Listmaker has a fast entry mode too, but one must save each item separately, as opposed to other apps, like Appigo ToDo, in which one can enter an item in fast entry mode with a single tap.  For what Listmaster does, I think Geetasks, at only $2.99, is actually much better.

In the end, while these apps seem quite robust and typical by iPhone standards, I find them unremarkable and rather pricey for what they do.  Quite frankly, I think you'd be better off using some other, cheaper apps, like Appigo ToDo and Geetasks.

Three styles of task manager apps

There seem to be 3 styles of task app emerging on the iPhone app market.  The distinguishing characteristic of these styles is how each app handles the grouping of tasks that are considered "current."

It has come to me recently that only one approach is my most favourite, and only one other approach is my least favourite. So far, I've looked at over 30 different task management apps, and this three-part classification has matched exactly with my preferences.

So it may be that this classification can help you filter through all the different task managers too. All you have to do is decide which of the three types you prefer, then ignore apps of the other two types.



Action lists

The action list approach is based on a single list that includes tasks dated today, plus any other tasks the user adds manually. Apps that use this approach generally let you choose which tasks should be next by letting you easily add tasks to or remove tasks from the action list, including quickly adding tasks from any other list into the action list. Most apps of this type will automatically add tasks due "today" to the action list as well.

The advantage of this approach is that the user is in full control of choosing what tasks are to be the action items. Its disadvantage is that the user must invest the time to choose and manage the action item tasks.

Some apps of this type include Taska, Things, Nozbe, Voodo, PTO, ToDo, SlimTasks, FocusTodo, and Geetasks.

Multiple views in multiple lists

In this approach, a set of specialized lists are hardwired into the app, each serving a particular purpose. This approach automatically sorts tasks in different ways and makes each such "view" available to the user. Typical views include: overdue tasks, tasks due today, high priority tasks, upcoming tasks, and so on.

This approach is good for people who want to switch quickly between different perspectives on their tasks, and find single overall action lists confusing. The advantage of this approach is that individual lists are generally shorter than single action lists. The disadvantage is that one can focus too much on one list and forget to check the others.

Some apps that follow this scheme include Pocket Informant, TapDo, List n Do, Taskedit, WoolyTasks, Doit.im, Taskly, Task PRO, and TouchTodo.

Single, structured overviews

Some apps define a specific approach for gathering "current" tasks based on some presumably rational principles, over which the user has relatively little control.

The advantage of this approach is that you have virtually no maintenance work; the app decides for you, based on your description of things like due date, priority, location, etc. which tasks you should work on next.  The disadvantage is that you basically abdicate all control over choosing what to work on next.

Some apps that follow this approach include 2Do, Toodledo, TaskThis, Nubi Do, and MyTasks Pro.

...And other things

Of course, this doesn't cover every app. There are some truly innovative and even bizarre examples of task managers that present entirely different ways of getting things done.

The most impressive of these is SmartTime, which fills your schedule automatically based on how much time you allocate to each task, and can automatically bump tasks into the next available slot if you don't get to it in time.  The downside of this is that it will fill your day to the brim unless you bother to actually book off lunches and coffee breaks.  Still, it's quite a fascinating way to do things.

Todo Map is a task manager that creates a visual representation of your tasks. Larger blocks are of higher priority than smaller blocks, and each category is denoted by a different colour.  This probably works better on the iPad's larger screen.

There are other apps too, like ViziiTask, that I still can't figure out.

So, if you're trying to choose an iPhone task manager, you might decide which of the three different types appeals best to you, and then focus you attention on apps of that type. I hope it helps.

Keeping your monthly documents organized

It's important to keep some records: bank statements, bills, tax information, etc.  One can never tell when one will need those documents.  Like most people, I had for most of my life used hanging file folders in an old filing cabinet.  The thing got to be full to bursting, and mostly full of crap.  And the chore of de-cluttering it became so onerous that I just kept putting it off, which only made matters worse.

Then my dad died.  And while I was clearing out the family house, I discovered his way of tracking things, and was surprised to see how effective and efficient it was.  Since I was already in clearing-away-the-crap mode, I took some time to rearrange my own files and apply his approach.  Works like gangbusters.  So I thought I'd share it.



My dad's method is based on two things: using envelopes instead of folders, and distinguishing groups of items by date.  I've tweaked things a bit to accommodate the occasional weird items, but the basics remain.

Simple envelopes go far to stay organized.

I bought 500 No. 10 (i.e. standard business size) envelopes; they're quite cheap, especially in bulk.  Then I keep each year's bills/statements/etc for each source in its own envelope.  One for the phone, another for water, a third for TV, and so on.  I write the source and year on the short edge of each envelope.

I also keep one year's stuff, just in case.  At the end of each year, I toss stuff that's more than a year old.  This takes less than an hour, which is definitely not an onerous chore.  Because of the information involved, I shred the old stuff.  But a fireplace or wood-burning stove works just as well.  Since I keep a year's worth of stuff, I use elastics to pair up last year's and this year's envelopes for each source.

Some organizations use larger envelopes when they send stuff and they just fold the paperwork twice.  And some organizations - like insurance companies - send 'way more paper for even the slightest change than they really should.  That's why I also have the larger brown envelopes.

All these envelopes fit easily in one of my desk drawers, so they're out of the way and I can live free of hanging files and folders.  And it takes, I've found, just a few seconds to track down whatever envelope I need.

Simple cardboard boxes hold the big stuff.

Now, of course this doesn't cover everything.  Some things are just too voluminous to fold up into an envelope.  For those very few things, I just bought a few, thin Kassett cardboard file boxes from Ikea. They have fold-over lids and elastics to keep them closed.  I got them all in black cuz, like, I'm cool.  Those yellow tabs at the bottom of each are 2"x0.5" post-its on which I wrote what stuff goes in that box.  Again, remembering that I now purge old stuff religiously every year, these boxes are big enough to do the job, much safer than hanging files, and more discrete too.

One box is for our new house, another is for financial stuff and insurance, and so on.

How you decide to partition your records is up to you.  I would advise you to keep track of how your using the envelopes for a while.  Take note of situations in which this method is slowing you down or adding to your meta work.  Those would be bad things.  If you notice that this is happening, schedule some time to play around with how you use the envelopes.  Try to identify exactly what it is that's slowing you down, then focus on finding a way to fix it.

All I know is that this envelope trick of my dad's has really been great for me.  Your mileage may vary.

Diigo V5 takes another step forward

On 1 July 2010, Diigo rolled out version 5 of their bookmarking service, and again they've added some pretty useful features.

You can read all the gory details at their blog, but there's two improvements in particular that are especially noteworthy.



The first is their continued work to refine usability.  Diigo has a very usable toolbar for your browser that you can configure to have as few or as many tools as you need.  To this they've really only added one new item, which I'll write about below.  Still, the toolbar is fast and easy - just what one wants to bookmark things without getting distracted.

Also on the usability front, Diigo has refined its website interface, cleaning it up even further.  I've written before about the relative clumsiness of Diigo's interface compared to what I think is the world leader in page layout - Delicious.  With V5, Diigo pretty much pulls up even with Delicious.  The sidebar has moved from the right side to the left, and has been cleaned up even further: the sidebar is basically for tags and finding things - they've moved all the other functions, which would typically be used far less often, down to the footer.

The second major improvement in V5 is the ability to clip portions of pages (as images) and store them in your Diigo library.  Not only that, but you can annotate the image with shapes, arrows, and text.  I would have preferred they actually captured the page content in HTML/XML, but I can see that images are still easier to deal with.

This clipping feature can very useful because if you just save a link to a page - and the page changes over time - you may forget exactly why you'd bookmarked it.  Now you can clip the particular spot that interests you, and refresh your memory about it with annotations.  The new functionality seems to work well, and is as easy to use as the rest of Diigo.

Since I'd've rather had clippings of content and not just snapshots, I'm giving this upgrade just 4 of 5 stars.  But still, Diigo V5 is a definite step forward and well worth looking into.

One way to use Geetasks for the iPhone

In my last post, I reviewed Geetasks, a portable version of Google Tasks for the iPhone, and I promised an example of how one can use Geetasks to organize one's tasks. That's what I'll do now. I should note that there are other iPhone apps that can accommodate this method with few, if any, changes. I'll mention some of them at the end of this post.



Google Tasks and Geetasks are so simple that they impose virtually no structure on how you organize things. This is both a benefit and a problem. It's a benefit because they're very flexible as a result, and able to accommodate a wide assortment of task management systems. It's a problem because users have to take the time to figure out their own way to manage tasks, which is something not everyone wants to undertake (which explains the popularity of websites and services offering complete predefined systems for task management). While I'm the sort of person who likes to work our my own way of doing things, I'm also the sort of person who likes to share those sort of things (which explains why I do what I do). Hence the DFW blog and website.

So here's how I use Geetasks. Your mileage may vary. I note that this method is inspired largely by Mark Forster's AutoFocus system and, to a smaller degree, GTD.

I think of lists as contexts, which are logical groupings of tasks. I created a Geetasks list for each context. Then I created one special list, which I called "Action," that holds the tasks I want to do next.

When using apps as simple as Geetasks, it's important to limit the number of lists you keep. A single long list is as unmanageable as dozens of very short ones, but having multiple lists can make it easier to search for tasks to do next. Since Geetasks doesn't (yet) have an integrated view of multiple lists, I prefer to err on the side of fewer longer lists than many shorter ones. This is why thinking of them as contexts rather than projects (in GTD-speak) makes sense.

Obvious lists include: work, home, personal, and someday - the latter being for storing things that you just want to think about rather than tasks you'll actually have to do anytime soon. You might add extra lists if you have other, particularly intensive projects. For example, we're renovating our house, so I have a separate list just for tasks relating to the reno.

At the start of the day (in my case, usually while I'm riding the subway to work, or while I'm reading the morning paper), I go through each context list, choose tasks I want to do next, and move them to Action. I pay particular attention to tasks that are actually due that day. It's better to do this at the start of the end rather than the night before, so that you can catch any tasks that have due dates of that day.

During the day, I keep working on the Action list. Whenever a new task comes up, I just add it quickly to Action. Since new tasks are added at the top of the list, they're front and centre. If I know I can't get to them, I manually push them down the list, out of the way. If I run out of things to do in Action, I take a few minutes to pull some more items from other lists into Action (or, sometimes, I just take a rest).

Then, at the end of the day, during commercial breaks, or before turning in for the night, I go through the Action list, which now has the day's leftovers in it. For each task, I decide if the task is really worth doing. If it is, and if I want to do it the next day, I just leave it in Action. If I don't expect to do it soon, I move it to some other list, or delete it altogether.

Finally, I make sure I sync Geetasks with Google Tasks at least once a day, preferably first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

While this is a standard pattern for me, I'm not fixed to it. Sometimes, for example, if I'm waiting in line at the supermarket, or in a really boring meeting, I'll take a few minutes to review one list or another. Most of the time, I find nothing that needs tweaking - and then I go back to playing Sudoku. Sometimes, though, I'll find reason to reorder some items or add notes or delete some once-brilliant idea that I now realize is utterly stupid.

The greatest shortcoming of the current version of Geetasks and Google Tasks is that tasks that are overdue or due "now" and not pushed anywhere that will attract my attention. So I have to pay particular attention to make sure those tasks are in the Action list. I'm also disappointed that Google Tasks (and therefore Geetasks) doesn't yet support repeating tasks; still, I find this not more than a minor inconvenience.

I find this process very lightweight and effective. It does take a little more hand-holding than more structured processes like GTD, but it's also far more flexible, which means I have the freedom to explore different ways of staying organized, and adapting to circumstance. And that's just fine by me. Another thing this method does is force me to reflect upon my tasks - and that helps me sort out, in the cognitive background, whether tasks are really worth doing and how they connect together.

Hopefully, it may be helpful to you too.

POSTSCRIPT: I should mention that there are other apps that implement similar functionality to Geetasks.

Voodo is one interesting app that uses tags for everything and has no notion of folder, list, project, or context - you can "fake" them all with tags; and it syncs with Google Calendar. One can easily simulate lists and moving tasks between lists with tags. Voodo's developer says that repeating tasks will be added in a future version.

Toodledo for the iPhone is another useable app because you can hide task fields that you don't care about, so you can strip it down to the bare minimum and get something pretty close to Geetasks. (This particular trick will be the subject of a separate post.) The benefit of Toodledo is that it can provide an integrated view of multiple lists, implements repeating tasks, and supports different and useful ways of ordering tasks. And it syncs with the Toodledo web service. The problem with Toodledo is that it doesn't support subtasks like Geetasks does (unless you get a premiumToodledo account).

Slimtasks is another very nice and simple app. Its interface is perhaps the nicest and most usable of all the simple apps, but it doesn't sync with other services. It would be trivial to adapt the method sketched above to work on Slimtasks. But if your iPhone is damaged or stolen, your tasks are all history.

The very well regarded Things for Mac comes very close to this, with only slightly greater overhead. Things certainly has a better look and feel than Geetasks, but it's not quite as simple to use either. And it can only sync with your desktop version of Things, not with a web service. I find that problematic because web services are universally available whereas your desktop/laptop is not necessarily so.

What's wrong with Google Bookmarks

I love Google, both as a company and as a series of products.  I use many of their services and prefer them to the "competition."  But their bookmarks service is not something I use (at the moment) because of one simple thing.



Google Bookmarks is a rather impressive tool for bookmarking web resources.  You can set it up so that you can instantly bookmark anything that Google Search can find.  Your existent bookmarks are also indicated in Google Search results.  You can add labels (rather like "tags") to your bookmarks, and you can create lists of bookmarks that you can share with others or even make entirely public.

But there's one thing Bookmarks doesn't do: it doesn't let you get a list of bookmarks that contain more than one label.  Let me give you an example to explain.

I use Diigo for bookmarking because it offers, IMHO, greater and more robust services than pretty much any other bookmarking service.  If you go to my Diigo links, you will see, in the right sidebar, my Top Tags.  Click on the first one.  Diigo will give you a list of all my links that have that tag.  Now look at the right sidebar.  The Related Tags are an exhaustive list of all the other tags that appear in the resources that have that one Top Tag.  Click on the orange + sign in front of any of the Related Tags.  Now you will have a list of the resources that contain two tags.  In geek-speak, you've got the intersection of the set of resources that have the first tag and the set of resources that have the second tag.

This is a great way to very quickly prune a huge list of links down to a very manageable and specific few.  In fact, the more bookmarks you have, the more essential fast pruning methods become.

And Google Bookmarks doesn't do this.

In Google Bookmarks, you can only choose one label at a time.  You can choose, for example, article or sustainability, but you cannot choose both (and therefore get a list of articles about sustainability).

I'm seriously perplexed by this weird behaviour of Google Bookmarks, because the venerable Gmail does it right.  In Gmail, there are no folders to store email messages.  Instead you assign labels to messages.  With this approach, you can have a single message appear in multiple pseudo-folders without duplicating the message.  This is exactly the functionality needed by Bookmarks.  If Google can do it in Gmail, why can't they do it in Bookmarks?  I honestly don't know.

I like my tools as simple as possible; I find most fancy functionality is really unnecessary.  And Google Bookmarks sure is simple.  And clean.  And functional.  And fast.  But without supporting multiple label browsing, then there's no point in even considering Bookmarks.

But mark my words: if they ever implement this sorely missing and immensely useful functionality, I'll migrate to Google Bookmarks so fast it'll leave a mark on my keyboard.

UPDATE 1 July 2010
One more thing about which you should be aware regarding Google Bookmarks: it doesn't provide feeds of your bookmarks (except in a roundabout way) and your lists.  So you can't just publish the feed on something like a wordpress blog.  You can follow other people's lists, but only within the Google realm.  And that's not good enough for me, because you can get reasonable feeds from, say Google Reader....

There will be a slight delay...

My family and I are moving to a new house, and the billions and billions of boxes need to be unpacked, sorted, and their contents put into their new and permanent resting places.  This means my "spare time" - a joke to begin with - is utterly non-existent.  So there will be a slight pause in my writing till I can get a handle on the new place.  Wish me luck.

Geetasks: Google Tasks for the iPhone

Geetasks (currently at version 1.15) is a non-Google iPhone app version of Google Tasks. It's like having a self-contained, portable version of Google Tasks in your iPhone, that you can sync with real Google Tasks at your convenience, which is good for people like me, with meagre data plans on their iPhones. And because Geetasks syncs with Google Tasks, you can access your tasks from any browser on any computer. Living within the limits of its progenitor, geetasks is an easy and useful tool that has lots of room to grow, but is quite usable as is.

Caveat Emptor: I should preface this by being clear that, as of this writing, Google has not released its API for Tasks. The API is the description of the interface that programmers need to write apps. Releasing the API would imply a bit of a commitment by Google to preserve the interface during upgrades to Tasks, so that third party apps can continue to function, and to give suitable advance warning of changes to the API, so that developers can upgrade their apps in a timely manner. By not releasing the API, Google is basically saying they are free to change the Tasks interface whenever and however they want, without concern for what will happen to third party apps like Geetasks. So it is possible that Geetasks will unexpectedly break someday, and no one will be responsible.

However, this kind of behaviour is not a common occurence at Google, as far as I can tell. Since their apps are generally free, and since Google knows where its bread is buttered, and since response from Geetasks developer seems quote timely and professional, I would expect any problems arising from this to be relatively minor. But don't quote me on that.

Geetasks implements all the current functions in Google Tasks. You can create and manage multiple lists, assign due dates, and add notes. You can nest tasks, thereby implementing subtasks; operating (i.e. moving, checking off, deleting, etc) on the top-level task of a sublist applies the operation to all subtasks. Google Tasks can connect tasks to Gmail messages; Geetasks can't do that, but it does understand those links and shows them to you. You can sort tasks by date, title, and status (active or complete), and of course manually. And you can purge (delete) completed tasks in a list with one tap. Unsynced tasks are marked in red, and the title bar will tell you how many tasks are unsynced. It's also very easy to move an item from one list to another.

Both Geetasks and Google Tasks adds new tasks to the top of a list. Most other apps add new tasks to the bottom of a list. I must admit I was a little put off by this at first, because I was so used to other apps. But I did get used to it very quickly, and found I rather liked having new tasks pushed onto the top of lists. This let me add items that I knew I could do later that day, and they'd be right there at the top of the list. I found this useful in that I tended to add all kinds of tasks, knowing that I could take care of them quickly once I found a free moment.

From the point of view of GTD, this is like combining the Inbox and Action lists. Some GTD devotees might cringe at this, but for me at least, and probably also for people who prefer AutoFocus, it makes sense.

Geetasks (and Google Tasks too) currently lacks the intelligence to bring tasks that are due to your attention, but this could be added to Geetasks without having to wait for Google Tasks support.

Similarly, completed tasks are also left in place, which ends up leading to more scrolling because any one given screenful of tasks can have several completed tasks on it. Given that new tasks are added to the top of a list, moving completed items to the bottom of the list would make sense.

While some people have complained that Google Tasks (and therefore Geetasks) is too simple, I think it depends on why you want to use it - that is, it depends on how you want to manage your tasks. If you like things simple, then Geetasks is a real contender.

Indeed, if you prefer minimal task management - like AutoFocus rather than GTD - then I would urge you to consider Geetasks.

I'll give an example of how one can organize one's tasks with Geetasks in my next post.

Taska: an iPhone task manager with class

Updated 9 June 2010

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Taska (version 1.0.6 as of this writing) is a new GTD oriented task manager for the iPhone and I must say I'm impressed. Indeed, I'd say that of the task manager apps I've tried (including Pocket Informant, ToDo, ToodleDo, GeeTasks, FocusTodo, SmartTime, Things, Nozbe, 2do, and at least a dozen others), Taska takes the cake for combining great interface design, broad functionality and flexibility.


Taska implements all the fundamentals of GTD in a clean and appealing package. But its real power comes from the range of functions it offers and the clarity of it's interface. And it throws in some very pleasant extras. All for a reasonable $4.99 CAD.  You can see screenshots of the app at its makers' website.


Here's a list of my favourite features of Taska, in no particular order.

Smart task creation. Tasks are filed intelligently no matter where you are in the app. If you're in a project or context, the task is associated with the project or context; if not (e.g. at the home screen) then it goes into the Inbox. And if it has today as a due date, it also gets added to the Action list. Upcoming tasks are automatically added to the Next list.

Repeating tasks. Many task managers implement repeating tasks, but Taska offers some novel ways of setting the repeat interval: every X days, X days of the month, and days of the week, measured either from the task's due date or actual completion date. This offers surprising variety from a very few unconfusing alternatives, which is a sign of superior design.

Task horizons. Taska let's you set a "horizon" on when a task will appear in your Action list. Unset by default, this is a useful feature for some kinds of tasks that need a bit of lead time, like taking out the garbage, something I do first thing in the morning before checking my tasks for the day (and sometimes before I'm fully conscious).

Repeatable due dates on projects. Some of my projects have no particular deadline - ditto for the tasks in that project - but I want to work on them regularly, say once a week or so. In Taska, you can put a repeating due date (see above) on the project itself. This means I can be reminded of having to work on specific projects without having to manage due dates for each of its tasks individually.

Checklists. Sometimes, a group of items are best represented by a checklist, which is much easier to manage than a list of tasks. In Taska, you can add named checklists to both projects and contexts.

Superior sync. Taska syncs with the free Toodledo service and with your desktop Mac. Of particular interest is that checklists will sync with a free Toodledo account (Toodledo's own checklists feature requires a premium Toodledo account).

Geolocation for contexts. Taska can use your iphone's GPS to associate a location with a context, so that you can use contexts to sort your tasks according to where you are. While this feature really doesn't do much for me personally, I can see how others might find it immensely useful.

Tags and filtering. While tagging and filtering by tag (and contexts too) is a fairly common feature, Taska has a very clean and easy to use interface for tagging and filtering.

Batch edit. This is a power-user feature. You can select a collection of tasks and perform certain operations on the lot with just one or two taps. Very useful when you're reorganizing your tasks.

Really nice look and feel. While this doesn't really affect it's functionality, good look and feel is important to useability. Taska uses colours judiciously, and it's icons are crisp and not faddish. Generally, Taska goes for a minimalist look (which I personally prefer) that keeps your attention focused on the tasks and not on all the pretty bits.

Lists as well as projects and contexts.  (UPDATED) I'm still not sure why the lists are there, but I assume if I plated with the app enough, I'd figure out why they're there.  Besides contexts and projects, Taska has lists.  These are displayed on the main screen, whereas projects are all kept in the Projects list and contexts are accessed by a special menu button on the home screen.  It took me a while to figure out what lists were for, but I finally got it: they're arbitrary containers for projects, tasks, and checklists.  This turns out to be quite useful for me.  Instead of having a regular project just for those one-off work-related tasks that don't really belong in any project, I can just put them in a list called Work, along with all my work projects and checklists.  And having these master lists visible on the home screen is also quite convenient.

This isn't a complete list of what it can do; it's just the stuff I think is particularly useful.

Of course, no app is perfect. Taska has a couple of rather obvious shortcomings that could be easily addressed and would increase its useability substantially.

There should be a universal Home button on every screen. Sometimes, I've found I have to tap the Back button far too often to get to the home screen, which is a pain.

There's no rapid-add function to quickly add several tasks or checklist items. To add multiple items, you have to tap +, then enter the task, then Done, for each task entered. It should be possible to add several tasks in succession once you've hit +.

And my personal pet peeve is the lack of support for events (calendaring). This one would be a major change, but I just can't understand why one would use a task manager and not be interested in having events also managed in the same app.

(UPDATED) There are also some quirks in Taska that feel more like bugs (some more obvious than others).

• There is an option to hide completed tasks immediately.  Sometimes this works; other times it doesn't.
• Some items in the Action list have a little Next icon by them, while others have the name of the project.  I think items marked Next are marked that way because they do not have due dates.  This means that, for such tasks, you can't tell what project they're part of.  It would be better if that little marker always showed the name of the task's project or list.  That way, things marked Next would be obviously items not associated with any other project or list.
• The Next list seems to contain all tasks not in Someday (including Action tasks).  This isn't very useful.  I think Next should contain only the first task in each project or other "collection" that isn't already in Action or Someday.  Perhaps there could be a setting that let's users set how many "next tasks" from each collection should be shown.
• Manually ordering tasks in lists or projects doesn't always work.  And sometimes, the app crashes when trying to reorder tasks.  This isn't a very big deal because reordering isn't an operation that should cause data loss.  Still, any crash is annoying if not stressful.
• Also, you can only partially reorder the Next list manually.  I haven't figured out what the criteria are that define if a task can be reordered and, if so, where else in the list it can be moved to.  The Next list should be reorderable completely.
• You can attach a note to a project, task, or checklist.  But with checklists, the note isn't visible when looking at the checklist contents.  To see the note, you have to tap the checklist itself (as if to edit it).  It makes much more sense to show the note at the top of the checklist, followed by the checklist contents.

Still, as task managers go, Taska is, by my reckoning, the cream of the current crop. And seeing as it's only at version 1.0.6, there's reason to be hopeful for lots more interesting stuff in future versions.