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Task managers - what should they be able to do?
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Posted by Chris Thompson
Apr 1, 2008 at 06:30 PM
Graham, your impressions of the book are similar to mine. I found it quite a slog to get through, meandering and ponderously written, though there are a few useful ideas.
I think it’s interesting that when Allen wrote the book he was using a Palm Pilot, which only had very crude support for his ideas… all you could do with a todo on the Palm was put it into a single category, so you could either categorize by context or project, but not both (and using Palm categories for projects was pretty crummy since there was a maximum number of categories you could create). This suggests to me that the fancy software support for GTD that many people are seeking is basically “CRIMPing on steroids”. The core task management ideas in the book are common sense and could be implemented with any system.
—Chris
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Apr 1, 2008 at 08:19 PM
Chris, you are right. GTD can be done with, or adapted to many kinds of software and/or paper planners.
And it is all mostly common sense stuff—one common sense idea after another. But the problem with common sense is that it is not always all that common!
Daly
Chris Thompson wrote:
>Graham, your impressions of the book are similar to mine. I found it quite a slog to get
>through, meandering and ponderously written, though there are a few useful ideas.
>
>
>I think it’s interesting that when Allen wrote the book he was using a Palm Pilot,
>which only had very crude support for his ideas… all you could do with a todo on the
>Palm was put it into a single category, so you could either categorize by context or
>project, but not both (and using Palm categories for projects was pretty crummy since
>there was a maximum number of categories you could create). This suggests to me that
>the fancy software support for GTD that many people are seeking is basically
>“CRIMPing on steroids”. The core task management ideas in the book are common sense
>and could be implemented with any system.
>
>—Chris
Posted by Jack Crawford
Apr 5, 2008 at 03:44 AM
Just to get back to Graham’s original post and comprehensive list.
My only refinement would be to move email syncing from important to critical.
For many of us in corporate environments, most tasks and projects are linked to (and often start off from) emails. A task manager which doesn’t have easy import of emails is not much use for me as it requires double handling.
As a complement to the current GTD conversation, I was looking at some GTD-inspired task software. An interesting solution (and suprisingly high quality given that it is freeware) is ThinkingRock which, like me, comes from Down Under. The problem is that as far as I can see it has no email import at all. You would have to cut and paste emails manually to create the links.
Too many good task managers are effectively standalone applications.
Jack
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 5, 2008 at 10:20 AM
Jack, Graham,
I am not sure what has happened, but I am unable to view Jack’s answer (to which Graham responded as below) on the website. I can on the RSS feed though. I tried it with Opera, IE7 and K-Meleon (Mozzila based) and each time the two posts appear merged.
alx
Graham Rhind wrote:
>You’re right Jack, and I see that views can be filtered so as not to show completed
>tasks.
Posted by Graham Rhind
Apr 5, 2008 at 10:41 AM
Same for me Alexander. I cut and paste from the RSS feed when I responded.
Graham
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Jack, Graham,
>
>I am not sure what has happened, but I am unable to view Jack’s answer
>(to which Graham responded as below) on the website. I can on the RSS feed though. I
>tried it with Opera, IE7 and K-Meleon (Mozzila based) and each time the two posts
>appear merged.
>
>alx
>
>Graham Rhind wrote:
>>You’re right Jack, and I see that views
>can be filtered so as not to show completed
>>tasks.
>
>