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The Perils of CRIMPing
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Posted by Ken
Jun 6, 2015 at 04:49 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
Hi Ken,
>
>That sounds like a pretty good IT department you have there… Regarding
>the infection, maybe that’s one more argument for using a web-based task
>management tool.
>
>If you don’t mind me saying so, it seems to me that your search for a
>solution is a bit too focused on the tools, rather than on the problem
>to be solved. I’d suggest to approach it the other way round.
>
>Work out your preferred workflow first, and then look for the tools that
>best fit the steps in the workflow. Chances are that you might need to
>assemble two or three different tools to accomplish your workflow.
>
>There is a danger that if you choose the tool first and try to fit it
>around your workflow, then it’s someone else’s idea of a workflow that
>is being forced on yours, and inevitably there won’t be a perfect
>overlap.
>
>I realise that finding one perfect tool might sound preferable to having
>to work across three tools, but it might not be as onerous as it sounds.
>Sometimes it’s just a question of switching between two or three tabs in
>a browser, and sometimes they may even allow direct links to each other.
>
>If you absolutely need to use a local PIM database of some kind, you
>could also look for a portable one on a USB drive (if your IT system
>allows it).
I work for a large municipal government and IT is taken pretty seriously, but that also limits any type of flexibility regarding the use of software, and we are mostly a MS shop that is slowly migrating our data over to Office 365. I would concur with your recommendation of outlining a solution first before choosing a tool and have mostly done so, albeit I have not shared much of that process with the forum. In the past few years since leaving Ecco and finding myself with a number of mobile devices in addition to PC at home and work, I have found that I have different needs that now seem to require different solutions, and I am OK with that. The one pressing need I have been trying to solve revolves around managing a number of large projects with a variety of tasks and subtasks that are often tied into documents attached to mail messages. So, I seem to need both a task manager and a note system that allow quick entry and easy access. Asana and Todoist are somewhat close given my software restrictions, but both seem to be missing some key items in one area or another, usually a feature or UI issue. I need to find some quiet time to review my needs and look at my possible choices and see if I can find a workable solution that does not get in my way. I am sure I will be posting more in another thread if I find anything useful. Thank you again for the advice and support. It is much appreciated and always helpful.
—Ken
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jun 6, 2015 at 08:00 PM
Ken wrote:
>The one pressing need I have been trying to solve
>revolves around managing a number of large projects with a variety of
>tasks and subtasks that are often tied into documents attached to mail
>messages.
Being in a similar situation I’ve followed this advice
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/4925
posted some time ago by the good Jack Crawford. While I still haven’t completed my ideal software setup, I am much closer to achieving a task management approach which is well integrated with my actual work situation.
I would assume that being MS-based, you may be able to follow a similar route as proposed by Jack. For my part, I work on a Google Apps-based environment so I am trying to setup the system on cloud services and related apps—not always ideal as I often need to work offline.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 7, 2015 at 01:37 AM
Ken wrote:
>The one pressing need I have been trying to solve
>revolves around managing a number of large projects with a variety of
>tasks and subtasks that are often tied into documents attached to mail
>messages. So, I seem to need both a task manager and a note system that
>allow quick entry and easy access.
As Alexander says, if you’re in the MS Office environment, figuring out an Outlook workflow for it might be one sensible and handy solution (though I don’t know what the Linenberger method entails).
But since I’m a CT enthusiast, let me describe how CT could be used to deal with the above type of problem (partly also for my own amusement at the end of a long week, but also if anyone else might be interested in this).
This might not satisfy your “quick entry” requirement, as there is a bit of setting up involved, but after a while a lot of it can be automated by using keyboard shortcuts and templates (and even more so with AutoHotkey scripts).
There would be many different ways to do it, but here is the simplest scenario (using either the desktop or USB portable version), and the benefits:
1. create a new CT database (“project”) for managing your work projects.
2. when you get an email with attachments that you need to do something about,
2a) create a new “date and time topic” (a new document with temporal features) in CT and give it a descriptive title (can have up to 256 characters),
2b) select all relevant text in the email,
2c) drag and drop it into the CT topic,
2d) if the attachments are important, save them on the hard drive in a folder, and then drag and drop the files into CT from your file explorer, which would create links to the files (clicking on which would launch them in their respective applications, such as Word, PDF reader etc.).
Benefits so far:
Moving the email and the attachments over into CT will identify them as important (a todo), and they won’t disappear as more emails arrive in the Outlook inbox.
Keeping such tasks in “time and date topics” will automatically order them chronologically, and can be also sorted in reverse chronological order, and viewed as a list in the Topic List pane. They can also be navigated through a Calendar interface.
Links to topics created on the same day will be displayed at the bottom of each “date topic”, as “tasks”.
Having the contents of the email and the links to attachments in the same topic will serve as a mini dashboard for that task. More content and files can be added to it, and it can be linked (using wiki links) to other tasks in the CT database.
It can also be split into smaller, linked topics, as a task grows (which can be visualised as a mind map or outline in the graphical Navigator pane).
It is also possible to open and view multiple topics as floating (repositionable) windows, which helps when you need to refer to other tasks in other topics.
3) In order to identify this task as part of one of your larger projects, add a “Category” label to the topic, denoting the project. This will help filter tasks belonging to the same project, e.g. by ticking that category in the Category pane. Alternatively, a separate CT “project” (database) could be created for each real world project, if we are talking about huge projects. But normally it’s better to work from one database initially.
4) Add a red warning type icon to the topic in the Topic List pane to signify it requires attention. Topics can be filtered according to their icons in the Topic List.
Now, let’s say that you’d want to reorder these tasks according to their priority/urgency, which currently are listed in chronological (or reverse) order. For this, you can create an “outline” file in the Outline Pane (or multiple outline files, one per each project, i.e. category). Then,
5) Drag and drop selected tasks (i.e. “time and date topics”) from the Topic List pane into the Outline pane. This will create new outline items with links to the topics.
The benefits are that you can now quickly reorder the various tasks in a hierarchical tree, and it only takes a click to launch any of the linked topics. The Outline Pane has other useful features such as checkboxes (that cross out the done tasks), icons, hoisting etc.
When a task is done, then you can also change the topic icon from a red warning sign to a green tick. The benefit of using CT and date and time topics is that a permanent record of the task and all its contents and linked files will remain in the database and will be easy to find in the future (through search, or the dates, or other parameters).
This would already work as a basic task management system. The above assumes that you have the Topic List, Category, and Outline panes docked in the CT desktop, so it’s easy to see everything and drag and drop stuff from one to the other.
But CT also has a host of other features that make it possible to make the task management system more sophisticated.
This is a long enough post, so I don’t want to go into the details, but there are commands that one can add to templates that can be automatically inserted when a new topic is being created, and they enable you to add “attributes” or “properties” to each topic easily, e.g. to display a pulldown list to choose whether the task’s importance is “very important, important, medium, low, or none,” or a checkbox that, when ticked, adds the “Done” property.
Other options could include adding start and due dates to a topic (task).
The key benefit of using such attributes/properties is that now you can create a summary page (e.g. the Home page of the wiki database or “project”, that is easy to click on or call up with a hotkey), which will automatically populate and update a table of todos with the dates ordered according to a selected parameter (such as start or due dates or importance), another table for actions that are done but you’re waiting for others (this requires adding a “waiting” property, and the name of the person responsible), and another table with the Completed tasks, just for the record.
Here is a link to a CT forum discussion with some templates and more details on this approach:
http://connectedtext.com/forum/index.php/topic,3139.msg15299.html#msg15299
Posted by Ken
Jun 7, 2015 at 07:37 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Being in a similar situation I’ve followed this advice
>http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/4925
>posted some time ago by the good Jack Crawford. While I still haven’t
>completed my ideal software setup, I am much closer to achieving a task
>management approach which is well integrated with my actual work
>situation.
>
>I would assume that being MS-based, you may be able to follow a similar
>route as proposed by Jack. For my part, I work on a Google Apps-based
>environment so I am trying to setup the system on cloud services and
>related apps—not always ideal as I often need to work offline.
I have heard Linenberger mentioned before, but I will now have to see what he says about Outlook. Thanks for the link to that old thread, and the recommendation.
—Ken
Posted by Ken
Jun 7, 2015 at 08:07 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>As Alexander says, if you’re in the MS Office environment, figuring out
>an Outlook workflow for it might be one sensible and handy solution
>(though I don’t know what the Linenberger method entails).
>
>But since I’m a CT enthusiast, let me describe how CT could be used to
>deal with the above type of problem (partly also for my own amusement at
>the end of a long week, but also if anyone else might be interested in
>this).
Thank you very much for such a detailed post. Even though I have not used CT, and probably cannot use it at work, reading your work flow was extremely helpful, as it sounds very similar to what I tried to do with OneNote recently. To date, this has not quite worked as I had planned, mostly I suspect because I am still on a learning curve with OneNote. It looks like such a simple program, but it has a great amount of resources under the hood, but you need to tap into them to really get the program to perform. Right now, I have a lot of Outlook messages on a large number of tabs, and I am not able to pull the data that I need in any reasonable and repeatable form. I am not sure if there are any books or web sites that really unlock the power of OneNote for task management, but that might be an option.
What I think I would find helpful is a system that allows me to quickly and easily review tasks, subtasks and/or notes for projects in a number of views. Sometimes I just want a list of critical tasks in front or me, and other times I want to look at all of a project’s tasks, subtasks and and notes. Many programs offer most of these features in one form or another, but most have terrible UI which means I am not always able to see what I want without having to wrestle with the program. Take Asana, for example, it offers many useful views, but the layout is horrible. Tags (and project labels which are esentially tags) are displayed as an afterthought and squished at the end of a line. And if there is no room, they are just truncated ans squished together. And there is no way to quickly see what the tags/projects say. And the marker they use to identify the presence of subtasks and/or comments is also an afterthought. I realize the three-pane set-up is quite popular these days, but they just have too much stuff crammed into too little space. I have asked them to reconsider their layout and to incorporate some negative space to make it easier to see information, but I just keep getting the standard response that they will pass along my comments.
Todoist, on the other hand, gets negative space, but they do not understand how to sum up or display information. Every project gets flattened in the main pane, and this is not helpful when trying to review a large number of projects and subprojects (yes, they offer subprojects as well as sub tasks which is a nice feature). Their comments box is a popup window, so you cannot see anything else while looking at comments. Not useful if you need to move back and forth between tasks and notes.
One of the things that I liked about Ecco was that you could have the same data, or a mix of different data, displayed in a variety of tabs so you could quickly see things as you wanted to see them. It sounds like CT may offer this, and I suspect that OneNote may as well, but I have not been able to master it to the point that I can both trust it and use it regularly with any speed and efficiency. To date I have stuck with Asana despite it shortcomings and it is certainly better than nothing, but short of this forum, I feel as though I am on my own in my quest to get myself up and running as I would like. Our attorneys handle the same type of work flow as I do (since we work on the smae projects), but they are so busy that we can never really discuss workflow. And most of my colleagues do not do project management, so I sometimes feel as though I am chief cook and bottle washer with respect to my work assignments. Nonetheless, I keep plugging away while I try to improve my workflow. Hopefully some day I will hit stride and post about it. Until then, I suspect a bit more CRIMPing will occur.
Thanks,
—Ken