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Task Management Interfaces: Outlines, "Contexts", Tags, and Areas
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Posted by Ike Washington
Jan 24, 2009 at 12:13 AM
Steve
I think you give a good description of some of Natara Bonsai’s features. Yep, it’s an outliner with columns in which the data can be shown either in a flat or hierarchical view and then sorted as required.
What I particularly like, find useful for GTD, is that filters can be saved and then accessed directly from the keyboard. In my day-to-day work file, I can see with a click what’s due this week, next week, my next actions, completed projects, what I’ve done this week, last week, what I’ve tagged (“keyworded”) with “To Research"or whatever and so on. The columns can stay the same or change according to the filter. And each filter can show either a flat or hierarchical view. I can set the sort when I define the filter. I can then sort using different criteria when I’m looking at the data.
It’s really a great personal task/project application. No Gantt charts or collaborative features, but fine for managing day-to-day work. I bought it because I wanted to plan my projects both on my desktop and on my palm pda. But I’d use it even without the sync to the pda. The desktop version is polished. And I think the pda version is far better than ListPro - as I’ve said earlier: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/3091.
Ike
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>... an outliner with columns, which can
>have a “flat view”—that is, the hierarchy revmoved—and then be able to sort and sub
>sort on the various columns. So, for instance, you can build your task list in the
>outline, with the headers being higher level projects, then you can assign due dates
>in one column, priority in another, and—if you’re into GTD—context in another.
>Then you can flatten the list, and sort on context and priority. ...
>
>Steve Z.
Posted by Chris Thompson
Jan 24, 2009 at 08:55 AM
I think most outliners and task-management systems that have column support also support sorting by column and flattening… it’s hard to think of ones that don’t. One feature that isn’t nearly as universally well-supported is displaying outline context parents (or some other contextual representation) in column views. InfoQube deserves a lot of credit for making this an option everywhere.
—Chris
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 24, 2009 at 12:02 PM
Chris Thompson wrote:
>I think most outliners and task-management systems that have column support also
>support sorting by column and flattening… it’s hard to think of ones that don’t. One
>feature that isn’t nearly as universally well-supported is displaying outline
>context parents (or some other contextual representation) in column views.
>InfoQube deserves a lot of credit for making this an option everywhere.
Hi, Chris,
It has not been my experience that most outliners with column support also have flattening. Two notable examples: OmniOutliner for the Mac, and MyInfo for the PC. Unless I’m missing it (possible, though I’ve looked), neither of those two outliners with column support have a flatten feature. OmniOutline allows for flattening during printing, but not viewing. I’d love to hear that I’m wrong about this, because these are two of my favorite outliners.
Steve Z.
Posted by Randall Shinn
Jan 24, 2009 at 02:22 PM
Ike Washington wrote:
>Steve
>
>I think you give a good description of some of Natara Bonsai’s features.
When I was using a Palm I thought Bonsai was one of the best designed task management programs I had ever seen. I especially liked the option of mixing check boxes and progress bars within the same outline.
Sorry my original post was filled with question marks. I transferred my note from Journler, and it uses smart quotes. Lesson learned.
And one correction to my original post. It seems the area folders in Things are not smart folders. They assign any task you drag to them a tag, but they won’t search for tags and place all those tasks with them in the folder, which I think makes them much less useful.
Zoot was the first software I used with “smart” folders, and the Admiral understood how helpful having the software search for words and placing those items in folders could be. I suppose that one sign of progress in info management software is that this feature is becoming more common.
Randall
Posted by Ike Washington
Jan 24, 2009 at 02:35 PM
Chris Thompson wrote:
>One
>feature that isn’t nearly as universally well-supported is displaying outline
>context parents (or some other contextual representation) in column views.
Yeah, this is a definite shortcoming in Bonsai. In a flat view, without making it explicit in the task header, I can’t tell what project it belongs to. But it’s easy to go via the keyboard from flat to unfiltered and back again so it’s not too much of a problem. And I tend to add the project’s name in the header.
I’m surprised at the lack of interest in Bonsai. Doesn’t anybody else use it? Doesn’t it fit your requirements, Steve?
Ike