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Tasktop - Managing the Contex related to a Task
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Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 23, 2008 at 09:03 AM
I’m also still using Tasktop, and agree entirely about the level and quality of the support.
The integration of the browser with the tasks is a real boon (I don’t use the context files feature very much because it doesn’t fit with my own work pattern).
My criticisms of the program focus on its weakness as a task manager. It needs to be able to handle all tasks, not just those requiring browsing/file contexts, so that users don’t have to use two or more programs for task management. The whole task setup is based on assumptions made by the developers which don’t fit in with how their users may be. For example, the user can’t specify the default schedule date of a new task (in one edition it defaulted to “today”, in the current incarnation it defaults to “this week”, so if the user isn’t awake enough to change that it causes the task to “disappear” to an unexpected place). On Sunday the day folders run out and don’t reappear until Monday, because the developers assume we all work Monday to Friday and cannot conceive that we don’t; so one can no longer see the tasks one needs to do the next day. I hope these irritants can be ironed out, because it really could be a real winner. At the current time the weaknesses in the task management are pushing me back towards Zoot, which has the flexibility that the developers are wary about putting into Tasktop.
In my telephone call with Tasktop I pointed them to this group, so hopefully they will read, and act upon, ann comments posted!
Graham
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 23, 2008 at 02:29 PM
Hi Graham,
Graham Rhind wrote:
>On Sunday the day folders run out and don’t
>reappear until Monday, because the developers assume we all work Monday to Friday and
>cannot conceive that we don’t; so one can no longer see the tasks one needs to do the next
>day.
You obviously use the Focus on Workweek mode for your task list. For my part I have chosen to ignore this kind of auto-hiding of potentially important tasks. I have simply gathered my tasks within certain categories (work, family, personal etc.) and maintain the category relevant to my situation expanded. I am still weary of letting the computer decide what is important or not, that’s why I never quite got automatic schedulers such as TimeTo.
Your note on Tasktop being limited to what one can do through a browser is right on spot. Tasktop especially can’t deal with whatever one does within an external program such as the all-encompassing PIMs we discuss here. For example, to Tasktop an UltraRecall database is a single file, even though it may represent the totality of one’s project information.
In theory, one should be able to create hyperlinks to specific records within such a database if the PIM supports these and UltraRecall, Surfulater, Evernote (2) and several others do. In fact I have tested this kind of linking from Tasktop to databases and it works, though it’s not as easy as I’d like it to.
Last but not least, I tried working with Tiddlywiki from within the Tasktop browser and it works fine, as I imagine many other wikis will. If I didn’t work with Brainstorm as my main note taking application, I would have a separate Tiddlywiki file for each of my projects (listed as tasks within Tasktop) and would do most of my work from there. In fact, I might even do that for new projects, if I find a powerful enough browser-based wiki.
Alexander
Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 23, 2008 at 03:02 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>You obviously use the Focus on Workweek mode for your task list.
No I don’t, which makes the annoyance more irritating. Tasktop admit it was designed that way - they have good support but aren’t very open to the way other people work - a common problem amongst designers of task managers - and they are technical 9 to 5 Monday to Fridayers. Which shows.
Graham
Posted by Mik Kersten
Sep 18, 2008 at 03:08 AM
Great to see this discussion, and thank you Alexander Deliyannis for bringing it to my attention by posting on my blog. I replied many of the points that have come up on this thread, see: http://tasktop.com/blog/?p=39#comment-29159
Graham: You will be able to set the default scheduled date in the fall release of Tasktop. To see additional bins, such as Next Week, when in the Scheduled presentation, just unfocus the Task List. Also, note that as far as I know nobody in the Tasktop office has ever worked a typical 9 to 5 workday ;) And we do take these kinds of flexibility concerns very seriously.
The trickiness is always between adding so much flexibility that a UI becomes too cumbersome (e.g., Microsoft Project) or erring too far on the side of simplicity, as with many of the very basic task managers that don’t scale to thousands of tasks. Also, note that since we make the Task List an inbox, we need to gracefully support users working with thousands of tasks (I’ have ten thousand tasks in mine).
So we’ve been trying to carefully mix flexibility with usability. The scheduling facilities have been particularly tricky in that respect. For example, like other tools, on Mylyn (the open source underpinnings of Tasktop) we used to use hard dates for scheduling, since there was considerable demand for that at the start. This resulted in too much manaual management of dates, and we ended up taking this feature away from the estimated hundreds of thousands of Mylyn users, which has been a very clear benefit: http://tasktop.com/blog/?p=21
On the flipside, for a long time we pushed back against the need for subtasks, with similar arguments to the Microsoft Outlook team’s who again decided to exclude that highly-demanded feature from Outlook 2007 (i.e., complexity and the presence of similar mechanism that can be used for groupings). But we had enough feedback on why this was necessary to allow arbitrary nesting of subtasks.
Dialogues like this one help us prioritize those features, especially when use cases are listed along with the requests, since the notion of focus that we have introduced changes the game by automating manual filtering and sorting activities. So please make sure to let us know on one of the Tasktop community channels if this thread grows again and it’s time for us to take another pass through your feature requests :)
Posted by Graham Rhind
Sep 18, 2008 at 06:58 AM
>Graham: You will be able to set the default scheduled date in the fall release of Tasktop. To see additional bins, such as >Next Week, when in the Scheduled presentation, just unfocus the Task List. Also, note that as far as I know nobody in the >Tasktop office has ever worked a typical 9 to 5 workday ;) And we do take these kinds of flexibility concerns very seriously
Hi Mik,
You missed my point with this one. On Sunday I don’t want to see Next Week. I want to see Monday. Again, I never work in focus mode.
In the meantime I’ve admitted defeat on trying to get Tasktop to work for me as a task manager. I’m using it now only to group related webpages in different “tasks” (such as all e-mail pages, all news webpages, all blogs that I regularly view etc.) so that I don’t need to keep all web pages I use open in tabs in my browser.
Graham