Watership Planner Review - It's on bits again, after five long years... But might it simply be another crimpers' toy?

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Posted by 22111
Jan 24, 2014 at 12:24 PM

WP will again be on bits soon; it had been 90 bucks, now it’s 220; on bits it’ll be 50; last time it had been there was 5 years ago.

So we’ll have got to decide if we buy there, or if we let this offer past; considering the price increase, one aspect in our (repective, individual) decision will be that any upgrade in all probability will cost two times the initial price (about 100 bucks vs. 50), and that we probably cannot expect to buy anew on bits (at 50 bucks) instead of upgrading - so these 50 bucks might indeed be called another honeypot.

Second consideration: It’s one of those “optimize your life” sw’s, one of those “spiced-up to do list sw’s”, it’s NOT PM sw.

From what I’ve learned in planning: Even for many things in your personal life, let alone “anything professional”, YOU CANNOT PLAN (realistically, I mean) without deep digging into “given facts”, into “the environment” (or whatever you call it), and any (provisional) decision will force you into digging deep into other contexts, other “problem fields”.

For me, that means that you should do your planning within your “data repository”, more or less, except perhaps for some “visual representation” of “intermediate results/possibilities” in some mind manager or such, but you should certainly NOT divide up your planning into one hierarchical planning sw and one hierarchical data repository: the interconnections are too vulnerable for that, both your updating efforts (on both sides) and your growing “conceptual chaos/errances/positing finding probs” (what do you call it when you’ve got lost?) will become overwhelming… or worse, you try to “hold it simple”, in order to flee these probs, and then you overlook and ignore important factors you should have seen and taken into account.

On the other hand, such “life organizers” (be they called “MLO” or “WP”) do not have the technical foundations in order to switch you material to them, they simply could not “hold” it (all), and so I never ever bought any one of them, but that also means I don’t have real life experience with such a setup, WP plus UR, or whatever, I’m just theorizing here.

So, perhaps in a common effort, we can make this thread a real WP review, in which the curse of which you could convince to buy? And then, yes, that price of 50 bucks, for such a nice-looking program, is rather tempting.

But that temptation is a conditio sine qua non of ALL effective honeypots, isn’t it?

Posted by 22111
Jan 24, 2014 at 01:18 PM

Desoriention. and “convince ME”.

I quickly browsed their (well-made) intro, and I deduct that this prog extraordinarily over-complicates your day-to-day work; it’s quite horrible (to say it’s convoluted would be very nice), so I suppose very few people use this prog day in day out (for which use it’s conceived (, too)).

Best: Its name; “lateral thinking” = (even preconscious) associations: “Wooden Ships”, one of the top ten “pop” songs (CSN, but you remember Jefferson Airplane’s version) - so you see, even without thinking consciously of it, prospects associate ultimate quality with something, by such smart naming which conveys (purely virtual) class.

Watership Planner, a lesson in naming your product. (Ok, in this instance, this only worked for the elderly, and before my Wundting what it did to me.)

Posted by Jon Polish
Jan 24, 2014 at 03:15 PM

I was intrigued by the possibilities it presents. I can get backlogged with my schedule and tasks, and the promise of dynamic restructuring seems like an interesting approach and one worth trying. After spending some time on the WP website, I concluded this was not for me.

1. For my purposes, it is better to have total control over my schedule.
2. Tasks seem to be tied to one day. WP will not automatically schedule the task for the following day, although this is planned.
3. Related to item #1, I can see anxiety over to do lists skyrocketing as WP plans one’s day. We are accountable to people - I don’t want a piece of software becoming my boss.

Jon

Posted by Joshua Cearley
Jan 25, 2014 at 11:42 AM

Jeebus. I actually really like this program (its one of those that I wish there was a good Linux equivalent of, and anything vaguely close to Emacs does not count as “good” to me) but I would never have bought it at the 200$ price point.

I find it useful for throwing in tasks you need to do for today, especially using the color coding to mix up different tasks so you don’t get bored working in the same area all day. Its also really nice being able to press two keys and getting the pop-up window, since you can enter interruptions and mark tasks as complete quickly.

I don’t think that is 200$ nice, especially given the slow pace of updates and poor documentation within the actual program. TimeTo does a very similar job and to my knowledge has not experienced a sudden price spike, though the interface is a little bit less beautiful.

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