Re: Achieve Planner in Rapid Development

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4776

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-12-19 19:11:12

In say Brainstorm, your opinion changed. With Achieve Planner, it the product is changing. I wouldn’t find the current released version particularly helpful. For me the critical feature is the Task Chooser, which is in beta. (Only a few weeks old there.) The Task Chooser tells me what it thinks I should be doing at the moment. It offers the flat list we have discussed. I don’t always the TC, but it provides a critical perspective on tasks. I use it strictly to calculate the importance of tasks, although it can be configured to modify that calculations in various significant ways.

The importance calculations of the Task Chooser come from multiplicative prioritizion, something I’ve advocated in posts here. Although I initially believed that no programs actually did this, actually three applications today have this feature: Life Balance, My Life Organized, and Achieve Planner. (The evaluative presuppositions of the names just struck me. Kind of sounds like the ego, super-ego, and id, respectively.)

Life Balance won’t let you modify the algorithm and what it is remains a secret. You can modify weightings, but precisely what the result is must be left to trial and error.

MLO is essentially a Life Balance clone without balancing, _with_ greater openness about the calculus and with certain device capabilities some Life Balancers crave.

What sets Achieve Apart, in addition to its greater comprehensiveness, is the strength of its outlining. There are various outlines that are now separate but inter-connected, basically taking the model to all levels of abstractness and concreteness, from Results areas at the apex through Projects, Tasks, and Task Notes at the execution side and Dreams, Wishes, and Plans on the conative end, which I haven’t done much with. Soon the outlines will come together into an additional one big outline, every True Outliner’s dream.

More important though is the outlining infra-structure. Hoisting is in the immediate future. At present there’s a mark and gather equivalent “pick up rows,” and the appeal to hide or reveal specific levels, from 1 through 9 or there about. The outlines are grids with columns.

This is a tremendous amount of outlining functionality in a product that doesn’t even claim to be an ‘outliner.’ And I don’t think it is misplaced. Organizing tasks into the right categories so that the priorities you assign will be meaningful is, to my mind, the key to the effective use of this kind of instrument. Just last weekend I turned my outline inside out, reconceiving the purposes the various tasks serve to facilitate assessing their real importance. Doing so was as easy as if I were working in NoteMap.

Achieve has a notes section, which is graphically austere but has more functionality than the average two-pane notebook outliner.

Stephen R. Diamond

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