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Nice review of MLO (v.4)
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Posted by Ken
Sep 24, 2018 at 05:35 AM
Ran across this detailed review of MLO and thought that anybody who was interested in the program might find the review helpful - https://www.productived.net/review-mylifeorganized/ . I use the program at work and have a love hate relationship with it. I mostly have it customized the way I want to use it, but making changes does require that you RTFM, often several times. For those that like to dive deep into customization, it is probably a slice of heaven.
—Ken
Posted by Pixelpunker
Sep 24, 2018 at 04:07 PM
Used it for years as a replacement for LifeBalance on the Palm PDA and the Mac when I switched to Windows.
Took a quick look at the new version and only see superficial change. I think it still suffers from database / programmer guy think. Every task has about a hundred different properties in a dozen tabbed subpanels you can set, many of them redundant.
I noticed for LifeBalance as well that I’m only digging two features. One, flexible repeats for repeating errands. And two the fuzzy logic for calculating the relative importance of a task considering the importance of its parent task.
I don’t need an endless level of subtasks. This is not project management software, at least I don’t need that for my personal planning.
What I also don’t understand about all these custom views and filters. I do, on average, about 3 tasks a day. If I would plan ahead for a whole year we’re talking a thousand tasks. For at maximum 1000 tasks I don’t need elaborate filtering, tagging, searching and customizing. Total overkill.
One positive I have to add, for those who feel uncomfortable with cloud services the phone app offers local and free wifi syncing to the desktop app. This you won’t find anywhere else.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 24, 2018 at 07:21 PM
Pixelpunker wrote:
>I do, on average, about 3 tasks a day.
Lucky you!
My guess is that most people who turn to a tool like MLO have a much large number of tasks to manage, else a paper solution would probably suffice.
Posted by nathanb
Sep 26, 2018 at 10:44 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
Pixelpunker wrote:
>>I do, on average, about 3 tasks a day.
>
>Lucky you!
>
>My guess is that most people who turn to a tool like MLO have a much
>large number of tasks to manage, else a paper solution would probably
>suffice.
We all do, it’s just a matter of how granular we want to be with what we define as a task. Unfortunately, there’s a fuzzy boundary about what meets that threshold. I doubt anyone has ‘put on pants’ as a daily task, but ‘file taxes’ could be one task or a few dozen, depending on your personal definition of ‘task’.
I don’t use MLO right now but it’s one of my favorites to go back to. It’s one of the best infinite nesters out there. Though it has one feature that makes it truly unique outside of big project management software, it handles dependent tasks. This makes it fantastic for largish personal projects and helps with prioritization when you just feel overwhelmed and need to explicitly lay out all your sub-tasks and RELATED tasks as a brainstorming/planning exercise.
For example, I used it last year for building a little backyard workshop. I had several main project categories with subtasks with a mix of dependencies (concrete, framing, roof, mechanical, electrical, machine refurbishing (these were old rusty auction finds), etc. Like ‘get permit’ would be a sub-project (which MLO lets you explicitly define for any task in any place in the hierarchy). It’d have it’s expected 5 sub-tasks or so (some as @errand/@business-hours context). There would be several tasks within other parts of adjacent sub-project trees that would depend on that permit project. That’s really dang helpful when you find yourself thinking in circles about what the highest priorities need to be next. I even put in very rough time estimates for every subtask and it actually came out pretty close in terms of how many hours the entire project took to do over the span of a few months. I’m not sure there’s another task manager out there that allows you to go WAY into the project management weeds for some chosen battles while still allowing you to be messy and loose with your ‘regular’ tasks. Like I could have used MS Project or whatever for something this complex but not while also using it as my daily random task manager.
The one thing I don’t like about MLO is it’s inability to do attachments, which honestly is one thing that enables it to remain so lightweight-yet-complex. Referencing documents and folders is no big deal but for daily task stuff it’s really nice to be able to snap pics on the go and keep minor reference stuff right there with the task.
For such a nerdy platform, the mobile app is surprisingly well-designed and I still miss how it does recurring tasks compared to Todoist.
Posted by Pixelpunker
Sep 27, 2018 at 02:25 PM
As far as I know it’s the only program for Windows with accompanying Phone App that completely matches the functionality of OmniFocus. It doesn’t have the visual polish though.
Too bad my tasks got lost in the depths of it’s outline. (I don’t mean a bug but usability wise)