Do Fast and Well

De-cluttering is de-lightful

2012-01-18T20:42:00.000-05:00

I read this post at lifehacker, and it seemed to fit so closely with my way of doing it, I thought it was worth sharing. The question is keeping one's home free of clutter. It can be hard to do, but that's mostly because we keep putting it off.

The lifehacker post suggests a list of typical things one might want to get rid of in order to de-clutter, but the list is rather generic (and thus applies to only few people). Also, the article doesn't talk much about how to go about it. These are two things I'd like to cover here.

First: the list of things to toss.

I find that my own personal list doesn't line up well with the list in the lifehacker article. But that's cuz I'm weird. Things I toss include: old paperwork; old textbooks; old tests, exams, and other student work; old CDs with old software on them; stuff in my "someday" pile that I know is now "never."

You may find the list of things you tend to de-clutter is also different from both mine and the one in the article. So how exactly do you make your list? Here's a simple meta-list that you can use to review and identify things - and because it's meta, it should work for nearly everyone. You should get rid of:

anything you haven't used in a year;
anything that's broken;
any document older than 10 years; and
extras anything that you have more than one of.

Of course, you may find there's some things really want to keep in spite of these rules - memorabilia, for instance; even if you don't use it, and if it's broken, and you have another one that works, I doubt you'd want to throw out your grandfather's gold pocket-watch.

These things, that violate the rules, need to be dealt with somehow. If you leave them scattered about, you'll likely never deal with them. Gather them all up and put them in boxes. Label the boxes with something obvious, and don't put them in storage. Leave them somewhere not really underfoot, but also not somewhere you'll forget about. Keep them under your nose; make them an annoyance. As more and more boxes accumulate, you'll get so frustrated that you'll set aside a Sunday afternoon and sort it all out.

Second: how to do it.

Here's what I do: once a week, I spend 15 minutes wandering around the house looking for stuff to toss. It might just be a magazine. Or it might be a chest of drawers. If I can't deal with it then and there (like the chest of drawers), I add it to a list of stuff to do the next free weekend I have. I actually book it into my agenda because, for me, that lends a certain pressure to completing the task. It also prevents me from overbooking my Sunday afternoons.

Sometimes, I do my 15 minute check just before bed; other times, while I'm having my morning coffee. Sometimes, but rarely, I'll do it during a few successive commercial breaks during some TV program I'm watching. The important thing is to book the 15 minutes to do this, and treat it like the important task it is. Get it done the day you that you've booked it for. This will help you form the good habit of not putting things off.

You might not notice a big change at first, but if you keep this up - a wee bit at a time - you'll start to notice a real difference in the amount of flotsam and jetsam you've got lying around. And what's more, you'll be teaching yourself a habit that will prevent the junk from ever accumulating again.

Weave is threadbare

2012-01-17T06:05:00.000-05:00

Weave, by Intuit.com, is an interesting task manager app. It's visual design is nearly perfect, which is a great hook to make you want to try it. It's free, so it won't hurt. But there's some things about it that just don't work for me.

The app will not function without you registering at the Weave web service. While I have no reason to think anything nefarious is going on there, Weave is the only task app I know of that requires you to register. What are it's developers doing with that information? I don't know.

Once you've registered, you're confronted with some tutorials on Weave's use. You can't skip the tutorials. This is, to me, the developers saying "You're an idiot and you can't be trusted to use this app without proper training."

Finally, once you've set everything up, the app seems to sync every time you start it. It syncs in the foreground, thereby locking the app for a good five seconds or more. Every time you start it. This can really slow a user down if all they want is to fire off a quick little reminder.

As I mentioned, there's some great aspects to Weave - you can see them all by going to my comparison of iPhone task managers. But there's enough hangups with Weave that I really cannot recommend it.

Tagging links: a hint

2011-12-27T20:46:00.001-05:00

One of the more popular classes of productivity app is the social bookmarking app. The principle behind sites like delicious, diigo, Google bookmarks, etc. is that a group of people will tend to reuse the same (or similar) bookmarks for similar items thus leadings, eventually, to a self-organizing collection of links.

Whether the hypothesis is a good one is, for my purposes here, irrelevant. (Personally, I think it is false because too many people seem unable to identify key and rather obvious tags associated with relatively obvious web resources. But that's another story.) These sites are also very useful for individuals simply trying to keep track of web resources for themselves. I used to have a home-made system that treated keywords and tags as the same, which seemed to lower the number of tags one actually needed. (I've not kept that system up just because I haven't time to nurse the code.) Still, I find that existent systems are good enough - you probably will too.

But the question remains, how does one use tags in a sensible way? This is a broad question that I don't really want to get into because it requires one to eventually call forth the cumulative knowledge of the library sciences with respect to categorizing resources. And I know just enough to know that I don't know enough about that to comment intelligently.

There is one small "trick," though, that I've developed over the years, and that seems to work quite well for me. It is this trick I'd like to share.

The trick involves trading off two goals: minimizing the number of tags one must remember and apply to a given resource; and capturing sufficient meta-data to be able to efficiently search for resources later. I'll show the trick with and example.

Let's say you want to tag a resource as relating to decision making. Depending on which site you use the syntax will vary, but most of the good sites allow multi-tag words or some approximation thereof. I'll use double-quote to denote a multi-word tag, and I'll italicize tags to set them off from surrounding text.

There's three general techniques by which you can tag that resource.

decisionmaking - jam multi-word tags into a single word, which has the merit of reducing the extra characters (underscores, spaces, quotes, etc.), but hurts readability. And what about makingdecisions? Does that count?
decision-making or decision_making or "decision making" - You can separate words with special characters. Some systems let you use hyphens; others support the use of double quotes to group multi-word tags. I like hyphens because I don't have to hit the shift key to get one. Other systems only allow underscores to join multi-word tags. I find that annoying, but the underscore is a time-honoured mechanism for forming multi-word variable names in many computer languages - and since many of these systems started as some programmer's pet project…. Well, you know.
Finally, some systems, like diigo, separate all tags with commas and allow spaces in tags. This is perhaps the best, most natural, and efficient way of specifying multi-word tags. That's one of the reasons why I have for a long time now used diigo.
decision and making - The last technique is perhaps a little counter-intuitive, but this is in fact my trick: treat each word in a multi-word tag as a separate tag.

Why on earth would you treat a multi-word tag as a whole bunch of tags? Doesn't that break the semantics of the single, multi-word tag?

Well, yes it does, on the surface. But I think that's a result of limiting your thinking to just what tags are most appropriate in some objective way. Rather, I think we need to think of how you (and possibly others) might search for resources based on those tags.

So, what simpler way is there to search for something than just typing all the tags as separate words? And what is most likely to catch related resources that might also interest you? I think it's the single-word tag approach. It's also pretty efficient in the long run.

For example, if you search for decision in a collection tagged as I suggest, you'll find all the resources tagged with that term, including those tagged with decision and making. On the other hand, if you had treated decision making as a single tag, your search for decision wouldn't find them. If you don't know that decision making is a single tag, then you might not find anything useful.

Many systems will show you a list of tags that occur with the tag for which you're searching. So a search for decision will show, among other related tags, making. Those systems will also show you other related tags, some of which may trigger new ideas.

This means that what you're really doing is constructing an implicit taxonomy of terms, where, in this case, decision is the most general term, and decision making is an item under the taxonomic tree for decision. And it all happens naturally without any effort on your part.

So, as far as I can tell, treating multi-word tags as lists of single word tags is one of the easiest ways to enter tags, one of the most natural ways to search tags, and self-constructs a taxonomy of meta-data along the way.

Win-win-win, right?

Updated iPhone Task Manager Chart

2011-07-03T06:36:00.000-04:00

I maintain a comparison chart of iPhone task management apps. It's not very big yet, but I'm working on it.

I've updated the ratings of all apps currently in the chart.

I've also changed the presentation. I've also colour-coded the values in the chart, so its easier to get an overall sense how the apps compare. Red is "bad," yellow is "medium," and green is "good." This is, of course, all based on my analysis. Your milage may vary.

I note with interest that Taska seems to be the best, except for the bugs that seem to keep messing it up. Too bad there hasn't been any activity on that app since Sep 2010.

Zotero: maintaining online bibliographies

2011-06-13T13:15:00.000-04:00

Zotero is a bibliographic application developed at George Mason University, and it lets you manage, share, and export bibliographic information on the internet and locally on all your computers. It's not the only package of its kind, but I think it's the best of the lot.

Zotero started life, and still works as, a browser plugin for Firefox. It's very clever because it recognizes (most) web pages that contain citable documents, and lets you add that resource to your zotero library with one click. You can of course add items manually if you want, and if you have a PDF or other file that contains a citable work, you can load it into the zotero plugin with drag-and-drop, and then have zotero scan it and search the internet for the bibliographic information to match it. You can also tag any resource however you like, to make searching easier and faster.

You can create collections of resources and share them with other people. This is great for students who are working on team projects, and also for researchers and academics who want to share resources with their students and colleagues.

And of course, you can export selected items in formats consistent with a variety of document processing packages, so you can largely automate the construction of the bibliographies in your own publications.

The one big problem with zotero used to be that it only worked with Firefox. Many people had complained about this but its developers were adamant in not wanting to support different versions for different browsers. As a Google Chrome user, I really found it annoying to have to keep Firefox open just for the sake of zotero.

But then they came up with a novel solution: create a standalone version that doesn't require a browser, and just write tiny, little plugins for the browsers that talk to the standalone version. Granted, the standalone version is still in beta, but I've been using it regularly for quite some time and it seems to work just fine, almost all the time. Occasionally, it has difficulty accessing the zotero servers - but that is quite rare.

There's a lot of useful information about zotero on their website, and I would encourage you to consider it if you're looking for a web-enabled way to manage your bibliographic information.

A great list of lessons

2011-05-27T22:41:00.000-04:00

I know I took a shot at Leo Babauta last time, but it's important to remember that everyone makes mistakes. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe he is. Whatever. I can say that there's some things that he and I do agree on.

Leo compiled a great list of "life lessons" that I would encourage everyone to read and adopt as rules to live by. They distill in words far clearer than anything I've come up with, some ideas that I've had myself but couldn't quite verbalize.

I'd suggest only one modification, to Leo's first lesson about always being willing to apologize. I don't believe in apologies. An apology accepted is just permission to make the same mistake again. And an apology denied is, well, useless. Don't apologize. Instead, explain that you understand what you did wrong, and that you'll do your best to learn from the mistake.

I would note also that Leo's lessons seem to be good principles to achieve what I call balance. Balance is about finding that sweet-spot in life where you've got what you need, just enough to be good and happy, doing things that matter, with a minimum of stress.

I know what I'm going to do: build Leo's lessons into my own rulebook.

The myth of the myth of discipline

2011-05-23T20:49:00.000-04:00

Normally, I have high praise for Leo Babauta's blog Zen Habits. However, I came across his page on the myth of discipline. I don't get this page, because while arguing against "discipline," Babauta keeps talking about how to make habits.

And if you look up the word "discipline" and "self-discipline," you'll find that the ability to form habits is pretty much what discipline is. It's a bit confusing. Babauta is usually quite insightful. That he didn't bother to study the dictionary definitions of discipline is atypical.

In point of fact, and using words as they are generally defined in English, discipline is just self-control based on a consistent system of rules. So the best way to get discipline is to build habits. And that's just how it is.

Of course, anyone can make mistakes, and this doesn't diminish the general validity of Zen Habits. I guess the real lesson here is to remember to be flexible and adaptable, because one can never tell where a problem will come from, but come they will.

Chrome extension for Google Tasks

2011-05-13T20:53:00.001-04:00

Google recently released a long-awaited API for Tasks. They also immediately made available, code and all, an extension for Chrome that lets you access Tasks via a toolbar button. This is great news for people who use Tasks. (Previously, you'd have to have Tasks open in a window or tab, or access it via Gmail.)

A particularly cool feature of the extension is that you can add a task in two interesting ways:

you can just type t your new task in the Omnibar, no matter what web page you're on, and the task will be created; or
you can highlight text on any web page, right-click, and add that text to a new task.

This is good news for minimalists like me. I'm going to have to seriously reconsider Tasks for my own task management system.

Google Tasks finally gets an API

2011-05-12T07:44:00.000-04:00

Google finally announced on 11 May that they've published an API - an application programming interface - for its Google Tasks app. Gtasks, as it's sometimes known, is a minimalist take on task management that I've written about before. If you don't need projects, and contexts, and priorities, and stars and fancy stuff like that, you should look at Gtasks. There are gtask apps for every kind of mobile device I can think of, and it links to Gmail and to Gcal.

An API is a standard way for programs to access other programs. So for all of those people who write, say, iPhone apps that interact with web services, APIs are absolutely essential.

Gtasks has been around for a while now, and by far the most requested feature for the app was an API. Since it was a long time coming, several programmers managed to figure out how to get their apps to talk to gtasks on their own - thankless task at the best of times.

Those days are, thankfully, over.

I predict there'll be a flurry of activity, especially in the mobile app world, as extant and new task management apps are written to take advantage of the new gtasks API, followed by a flurry of new products and apps to help us get things done fast and well.

I will keep an eye out for developments and post them here as quickly as I can.

Orgmode: productivity geek heaven

2011-04-11T19:53:00.000-04:00

Orgmode, or just org, is an add-on for the venerable emacs editor that manages your tasks, builds your daily agenda, builds websites, outlines notes, help one keep a journal, tracks how long you spend on a task, and probably walks your dog and makes great julienned fries. Unfortunately, you have to be a bit of a geek to really appreciate it.

Don't get me wrong: I've got nothing against geeks, being one myself. Indeed, I think geeks rule - literally. I think we wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced as we are if it weren't for geeks, and I'm very satisfied to self-identify with the geekery. We might not be pretty or politically correct, but we do get shit done.

Still, geeks are not in large supply, so this productivity tool may not be to everyone's liking. But given that org is free and open sourced, and that it does damned near everything, it is very worthy of mention here.

For those who don't know emacs: it's the mother of all text editors. Much older than the Web, emacs is really a double-precision floating point dialect of the Lisp programming langauge, with a plain text interface, that happens to manipulate strings of text really well. Some people have even compared it favorably with operating systems like Windoze and Linux. (Well, anything compares favourably to Windoze....) It seems nearly infinitely flexible because it is its own programming language; an emacs program can load chunks of itself while it's running, thus changing its behaviour on the fly; it can even output its own source code. Emacs works in modes, each of which is targeted at a specific type of task. While emacs is best known as a programmer's tool, it can be taught to do nearly anything by just loading up the right mode.

Org-mode, as the name implies, is "just" one more of emacs's modes - about 85,000 lines of it. Originally designed written by Carsten Dominik, org recognizes certain special but not cryptic combinations of characters as specific types of information, and let's you do a number of interesting things with them. You can see a number of screenshots of what org looks like here.

Typically, org is enabled on any file that ends with ".org" so you can create as many "org files" as you like, and the emacs editor will keep track of them, enabling org any time you open one of them.

One of the basic structures in org is the headline, a line of text that starts with some asterisks followed by a space. Text after a headline is treated as belonging to the headline. It's as if the headline were a section heading and the text below were the body of that section. Org understands subsectioning based on the number of asterisks that start a headline; the more asterisks, the deeper the level of the section. Text that goes with a headline is automatically visually indented to line up with the headline itself. I say "visually" because, like real word processors, org recognizes that format is not content and rearranges text to fit nicely on the screen without altering the file itself. (Of course, you can get org to embed the formatting directly into the file, but if you tend to transfer content from org into other applications, like blogs, then you don't want your content to carry all of org's formatting with you when you move it out of org.)

Org lets you hide the chunks themselves leaving only the headlines visible. This means you can use it as an outliner or what is sometimes called a folding editor. You can lay out a long document by starting only with headings, then go back and work on the document one heading at a time, hiding all the others and focusing only on the one on which you want to work. Indeed, in this regard, org has been compared favourably to apps like WriteRoom, especially because org and emacs are both free.

If the first word after the asterisks in a headline is TODO, org recognizes the headline as a task. When you complete a task, you change its state to DONE, after which the task will no longer appear in your agenda (described below). You can assign start dates, due dates, and priorities to these tasks. Since a task is a headline, you can write as much as you want after the headline to describe the nature of the task, and then fold it away so it doesn't clutter up the screen. Also, a subtask is simply defined as a sub-headline starting with one of the magic task keywords.

Org can then generate an agenda for you: a list of tasks according to deadline, priority, etc. and lay it all out for you in a easy to read, if somewhat unaesthetic, form. Working on the agenda automatically works on whatever files were used to build the agenda, so you don't have to worry about not syncing the agenda with the other org files. Of course, not all your org files need contribute to your agenda. You can tell emacs which of your org files are those you want it to manage within the org agenda.

Orgmode agendas are dynamically constructed summaries of appointments, tasks, and all kinds of other things. You can even create your own combined agendas. Indeed, you can even define your own set of task status labels. The default list includes only TODO and DONE; I have TODO, WAIT, ACTIVE, DONE, and CANCELLED. You can even define alternative sequences of task keywords, each representing a different possible workflow. Besides the sequence I noted above, I have a separate sequence for "bugs" (OPEN, WIP, PAUSE, and CLOSED), and for projects (PROJECT and COMPLETED). You can associate a shortcut key with each keyword, so changing the status of a task can be as short as one keystroke and never more than three.

This just scratches the surface of what org can do. It can export its contents in all kinds of formats, including HTML, which means that you can publish your org pages to a website. Not that you'd want your agenda published for the world to see, but since org includes outlining capabilities, you can literally create websites using it. You can attach files, create links between different parts of different files, and link to images (such that when published to the web, the resulting web pages will have the images embedded in them). Of course, all kinds of web linking is also possible; for instance, just pasting a URL into an org file automatically turns the text of the URL into a link to the corresponding web resource.

I've been using it for only a few months but I'm still exploring its functionality. A(nother) nice thing about org is that you don't need to know all of it to use just part of it. The functionality is very nicely compartmentalized, so you only need to learn as much of it as you need to use. But be forewarned - once you get into it, you may want to learn more of it than you first thought. Also, you may set up your org files in a way that makes functionality you haven't yet discovered harder to use because it doesn't "fit" with the way you work.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and there are some irritants in org (largely arising from emacs itself).

Emacs was born in a time before computer mice, even before the numeric keypads and function keys on your keyboard. All that its original developers had at their disposal was the conventional keyboard. So most commands involve holding the control key, or the escape, or meta, or opt, or whatever other special keys that don't print characters might be. This means that some commands in org are composed of keystrokes that might seem bizarre to those unacquainted with emacs. For instance, the three keystroke sequence control-c control-x control-e is how you get org to update the "effort" (i.e. number of hours needed) to complete a task that is currently being clocked. Even though I've been using emacs for more than 20 years myself, there are days when I swear my hands cramp up from typing all those wonky keystrokes.

Another problem is that the documentation is not geared to the org beginner. And if you're new to emacs generally, then heaven help you. What's needed to make org really popular is a manual that anyone can use successfully.

One last major complaint I have about org is that the iPhone app for it, MobileOrg, requires you to sync by performing four separate manual operations. Assuming you've set up org on a real computer to do remote syncing with MobileOrg, and configured the app properly (neither of which is a trivial task), you then have to manually push the content of your real org installation, then manually pull it into your iPhone. Then, when you want to sync everything back to your main computer, you have to manually push from the iPhone and manually pull it all into your real computer.

Now, the iPhone app is quite new, but - really! - this is not how it should work. For example: I sync my org files over all my computers using Dropbox. Allowing the occasional and brief delay for Dropbox to work its magic, my org files are automatically synced everywhere. And I know there are many iPhone apps that automatically sync to Dropbox.

Why can't they do the same thing with MobileOrg?

In any case, here's the bottom line. Org for emacs is a fantastic productivity app that will only get better with time - if you can understand it.

Keyboard shortcuts in Chrome

2011-03-11T17:52:00.000-05:00

Keyboard shortcuts can really speed you up, and help stop you from being distracted by having to reach for the mouse and then back to the keyboard. Here's some extensions for Google Chrome that give you configurable shortcuts.

I find that moving my hand off my computer's keyboard to use the mouse is a supreme distraction. Maybe it's just that I got used to computers before mice were ubiquitous - i.e. maybe I'm just old - but I find that having to move my hand back from the mouse to the keyboard breaks my concentration just enough to be supremely irritating - like a small round stone in one's shoe: it's not painful, but it is distracting.

So I love keyboard shortcuts, keystrokes that equate to mouse actions, menu selections, etc. With a good set of shortcuts - and a little time to get used to them - one's hands can fly across the keyboard. And more importantly, I find my concentration is unbroken because I'm not having to move my hand to the mouse and then back to the keyboard.

I pretty much use only Google Chrome these days, and I was getting more and more frustrated with the typical mouse-oriented interactions, so I set about looking for a Chrome extension that would give me some control over the keyboard.

It took longer than I thought to find something reasonable, so I thought I'd share the fruits of my labour.

My first discovery was the aptly named Shortcut Manager. It offers a nice interface in which you can enter any keystroke and bind it to one of many, many actions. However, it doesn't work very well. For one thing, it misunderstood some keystrokes (e.g. the Apple Command key - I use only Macs - was interpreted as three Escape characters). Even worse, though, is that it messed up the javascript in the browser so that I couldn't use buttons in the WYSIWYG editor at wordpress. That's a showstopper.

Then I noticed that the extension hadn't been updated since December 2009. That probably explains the bugs - Chrome continued to change, but the extension didn't. Indeed, I'd wager that Shortcut Manager is dead.

So, back to the drawing board.

Next up is Vimium. This extension creates a set of default shortcuts that are reminiscent of the vim text editor, which has two modes - a command mode (cursor movement, opening lines, deleting words, etc.) and an input mode (where keys insert their characters into the text). Vim is based on vi, one of the original Unix text editors, which existed before computer mice, even before function keys and numeric keypads.

Currently, I use Vimium, and it seems to work fine. '?' brings up a summary of the shortcuts, which is great for users still getting used to it. Scrolling left, down, up, and right are bound to h, j, k, and l. (If you don't get this - put your fingers on those keys; you'll see how useful that is.) Typing '/' will start a text search of the current page (not very useful in Chrome since it's Find command, bound to Command-F on Macs, is bloody brilliant). 'H' and 'L' go back and forward in the History. If you want to turn off the bindings, so that you can for instance type something into a web form, you hit 'i', and to turn the shortcuts back on, you hit ESC. This might not sound sensible, but trust me that it makes eminent sense to anyone who know vim or vi.

You can also rebind commands to different keys, and add your own shortcuts too, so there's plenty of room for you to tweak any of the shortcuts you don't like, and to get creative with shortcuts that are particular to your own browsing habits.

I also found a third extension: Keyboard-Fu. This extension seems much more powerful, giving far more flexibility by letting you associate complex chunks of javascript to a keystroke. Unfortunately, it's still in "alpha," which means it's likely incomplete and quite buggy. It is, however, under vigorous development, so I remain hopeful.

Bottom line: keyboard shortcuts are all that. If you're looking for a good way to use shortcuts in Chrome, then go with Vimium for now. But keep an eye on Keyboard-Fu; it's got great potential.

Best. Wiki. Ever.

2011-03-11T00:29:00.000-05:00

I've got a lot of good to say about foswiki, a recent and thriving wiki engine that evolved from another more established wiki. There's lots of wiki engines out there, and I've tried a bunch. But I keep coming back to foswiki because it strikes the best balance of all of 'em between flexibility, simplicity, and robustness.
Because the post wasn't really about foswiki as a productivity aid, I wrote it at my design blog. If you're interested in wikis, you should check out foswiki. As time goes on, I'll post here about how foswiki can be used as a productivity tool.

Appigo Todo is now in the comparison of task managers

2011-02-13T16:55:00.000-05:00

I've been developing a comparison matrix of iPhone task managers as a Google Spreadsheet. I've just finished adding an entry for Appigo Todo to it. You can see the spreadsheet here.

My first original tool: formatting AutoFocus

2011-01-31T08:39:00.000-05:00

Pulling together bits from a number of sources, I've come up with my first task management tool. It's a slight enhancement to AutoFocus - not in terms of method but rather in format. That is, one thing I've noticed about AF is that little is said about how to arrange things on the page; I've come up with one possibility in that regard.

Here's an image showing a page written up in my format. The goal was to balance the utility gained by adding structure to the page against the extra work needed to add and maintain that structure.

I'm using a simple spiral bound, quad-ruled notebook here. This image only includes sample notes and tasks because the real pages in my notebook all have private information.

I prefer quad-ruled paper because I can use the book in either portrait or landscape and still have a usable space. And the grid of lines helps me when I doodle rather than write linear text. (More on both landscape mode notes and doodling in a future post.)

First thing I do when I start a page is draw in a rather wide left margin. The margin is used to basically "tag" entries with keywords and a few other things. The margin can be thought of as for "meta data" about a task.

Next I put today's date at the top of the body of the page.

Entries come in two basic types: notes and tasks.

Notes are for things like meetings, and generally writing down ideas, rather than actions I need to take. Notes are distinguished by their general topic. I put the topic in the margin, to mark the beginning of a new "chunk," then just write out the notes. Sometimes a note might be just one or two lines long; other times it might be several pages long and have a variety of tasks embedded in it.

This is one particular advantage, I think, of this format: since notes and tasks are kept together, you can put pretty much anything at all into a single notebook. Having everything in one place is a big deal for me; no more multiple booklets and scraps of paper in jacket pockets.

Blank lines are your friend here. A simple spiral bound notebook can cost less than $2, so there's no reason to be stingy with space. Vertical space is important to clearly mark boundaries between items and to make sure you leave space for annotations you may add to items in the future. And if you're worried about the environment, then you shouldn't be using a paper notebook at all. But that's another post too.

Tasks are marked by a small box in the margin. The box is useful because it not only lets you separate tasks from notes very easily, but it's also an anchor for other bits of task meta-data.

Completed tasks get a checkmark in their boxes. Cancelled tasks get an X.

Delegated tasks are marked with a left-pointing arrow through the box. Optionally, you may want to put a marginal note indicating the reason for delegation. I don't, but it might help you.

Finally, if a task is hung waiting on something, then I put a small circle in the box - small enough to be plainly visible if the box is empty, and yet vanish pretty much completely if I put a check, or an X, or an arrow through the box later.

The very last task on the sample page shows a task marked as important (the exclamation mark at the left side of the margin), and having a due date (the date between the box and the exclamation mark), and a completion date ('way over on the right side of the page). I like the idea of having the dates at either end of the task, representing a span of time as it were. It also makes sure I don't confuse due dates with completion dates.

You can use any variation of AF with this format. That is, the format lets you keep the information you write a little more organized just by the way it's put on a page, while AF in any of its forms helps you sort through the actual tasks and get them done.

I note that if you prefer other forms of paper notery for this format, you do have some choices. Circa makes some very interesting notebooks - which I also use. The beauty of the Circa notebooks is that you can rearrange the pages as in a binder, but also fold the cover back on itself as with a spiral-bound notebook. You can buy pages for Circa that are either plain grid paper or pre-printed to have a large left margin, special locations for dates, and so on. Or you can buy a Circa hole-punch and use whatever kind of paper you like. Circa notebooks work well and look better than the goofy spiral-bound notebooks. I like their touch of class.

There are other manufacturers of disk-bound notebooks like Circa (I mention a number of them here), but I haven't looked into the kinds of pre-printed pages they have and how that might impact the format I propose here.

So there you have it: a simple way to organize content on a page to help you use AutoFocus. It works great for me; your mileage may vary.

If you're interested in how this format came about, here's the short version: I read an article by Mark Forster for lifehacker.com where he mentioned how nice it would be to have both notes and tasks in a single notebook. At the same time I was playing around with orgmode, an editing plugin for the Emacs text editor that does just that: combining journaling and note-taking with appointment and task management. These two things, plus the notebook I keep on my desk at home, just kind of merged one day. And out popped this format. I've been using it ever since. Indeed, I'm even thinking of hacking orgmode to support my page format.

A fabulous fountain pen

2011-01-08T08:52:00.000-05:00

I have a thing for pens. Don't ask how or why, but I love pens. And I especially love fountain pens. Every Christmas, I allow myself a few pens to add to my collection. This year, I added a few Chinese fountain pens to the list. I did this because they look interesting, they're economical, and - in my experience - a good pen doesn't have to be expensive.

Boy, was I right.

A Wenliang 652

I've only tried one of the four pens that I bought: a Wenliang 652 stainless steel pen with a fine nib. It cost $3.90 USD and has free shipping - can't get much more economical than this!

The pen is a little heavier than typical pens (but lighter than, say, Rotrings), and very well balanced. The cap fits snugly on the slightly recessed end (one of my greatest problems with fountain pens is when the caps don't stay on, and end up flying off - especially if I'm writing on the subway or a bus...). It has a removable reservoir so that you can use cartridges if you prefer. The reservoir I got looks different from the one in the images on eBay, but it still works fine.

What really got to me, though, was how smoothly it writes. I can't recall the last time I used a fountain pen that just... floated across the paper like this $4 pen! I charged it from a bottle of Sepia Omas ink I've had for at least a decade - I doubt that the ink made any particular difference. Indeed, I should think ink that old might even do more harm than good. And yet, the pen writes like a dream.

There's nothing like a good pen to help me a deliberate and attentive writer. Seeing a fine, steady line of ink appear on the page, unskipped and unsplotched, somehow makes me think the words I'm writing are that much more important. A good pen helps me write by giving me pleasure in the writing.

If you like fountain pens, you really should give this one a try. (I'll let you know how the other Chinese fountain pens work out, when I get to them.)

In case you want to get a Wenliang 652 yourself, there's still 9 available on ebay as of this writing.

Calvetica is a great calendar app

2010-12-24T15:25:00.000-05:00

I wrote a piece about Calvetica, a great calendar app for the iPhone, at my design blog.

The short version is this: it's a near-perfect calendar app, clean and minimal, with a fantastic user interface. If you're looking for a new calendar app, you really need to consider calvetica.

New comparison of task manager apps

2010-12-20T06:04:00.000-05:00

On the companion Google Site to this blog, I kept a list of short descriptions of various iPhone task manager apps. The list was getting a little long and not, I thought, very useful. In DFW speak, it was neither effective nor efficient.

The idea was to capture all the salient features of a number of iPhone task manager apps in one place such that people could make more informed decisions about which task manager app might be best suited for them. The single long list just didn't seem to make sense anymore.

So I've reconstructed it as a Google spreadsheet, a read-only version of which is now available where the list of apps used to be. I've also significantly updated the list of characteristics that I evaluate for each task manager app.

I will be adding to that chart over the next couple of months, so stay tuned for more.

Mash up GTD and Autofocus with Toodledo

2010-12-10T18:09:00.002-05:00

GTD is David Allen's all-encompassing live-organizing goliath of personal task management methods. Mark Forster's Autofocus, on the other hand, is a supreme example of minimalism. I've written before about the two, and while - being a minimalist myself - I lean toward Autofocus, I find that it suffers from being designed to work with pen and paper rather than digital tools. My personal way of doing things is a middle road - Autofocus plus some features of GTD. And being a computery kind of guy, I find that taking advantage of the power of my iPhone is an undeniable temptation. The problem is that the ideal task manager app that fits exactly how I like to do things doesn't exist.

But there are some that come close. I've already written about using Appigo ToDo to implement an "Action List." This time, I'm going to write about stripping down Toodledo to implement a combination - a mashup, if you will - of Autofocus's simplicity and GTD's structure. The example I'll use is how I do things with Toodledo, but I'll explain why I made the decisions that I made, and what the alternatives are, so that you can decide for yourself what's best for you. Remember: your mileage will vary.

To make sure we're keeping our system as simple as possible, we start with Autofocus (AF). The key principle of AF is, I think, that your brain is fully capable of deciding what you should do next, and that all you need is a way to quickly survey what all your tasks are. Your next task depends on your current situation, and that's something you can't predict. Yet that's exactly what I think GTD would have you do by describing so many different facets of each task. Forget the meta-work needed to maintain an accurate and so-finely-multifaceted description of your tasks, which just eats into the time you could spend actually doing stuff. The real problem is that adding a task to your list is leaving yourself a direction for the future. And we suck at predicting the future. Yet specifying too much information about a task requires you to commit to a prediction of your future self. Even a science geek with a PhD in engineering like me can't predict my own situation for spit.

AF, on the other hand, is more about just leaving yourself prompts or cues, and then letting your future self decide, in the moment of choosing to complete a task, which is the best or most important thing to do.

The basic tool in AF is a simple list. You add new tasks to the end of the list. You review your tasks from beginning to end, one chunk at a time (where, if you're working with pen and paper, a chuck is a page). Breaking your list into chunks is important because your brain's ability to choose well drops dramatically as the number of alternatives to choose from increases. AF has no due dates, no contexts, no projects, and no tags.

Once we move to a digital platform, however, we can change the rules. Chunking things is still important - that's just how the human brain works. But in the digital world, we can edit and rearrange tasks very easily, and that changes everything.

Enter Toodledo.

(I note here that I'll be writing exclusively about the features of Toodledo that are supported by the free Toodledo sync service. Syncing with Toodledo's servers is useful because it (a) ensures you have a backup of your tasks, and (b) lets you use Toodledo's web interface if you're so inclined. Toodledo also offers a premium service for which you have to pay, and that provides added functionality.)

Somewhat ironically, Toodledo is targeted at GTD users, but it can easily be used to implement something very close to AF. It has one (among many) truly fascinating features: you can configure which of the many available fields you actually use. The ones you don't want to use will be completely hidden. As of version 2.1.2 of Toodledo, you can find this under Settings > Fields & Defaults. You are presented with two lists; the first is an ordered list of the fields you want to use, and the second list is of the fields you don't need. I say that the first list is ordered because the fields will be shown in whatever order you put them in the Fields & Defaults settings. You can just touch and drag the fields around into whatever order you want, and pull them from one list to the other. You can also define default values for any of the active fields. As you'll see, this is very useful.

I should mention here what I see as one of the shortcomings of Toodledo: you can't manually reorder tasks. Toodledo comes with a number of interesting built-in methods to sort tasks, but manual sorting isn't one of them. The most interesting of these is sorting by "importance," which is a value calculated internally by Toodledo based on due date, priority, and whether a task is starred. This technique is quite clever because it allows you to focus on very specific task attributes (like due dates) that are easy to set values to, and then the app combines these into a single value of importance. It's not perfect (for me, anyways), but I can see the attraction.

The problem with sorting by importance is, again, that it requires you to know when you create the task what will be important to your future self when you're looking at your task list for something to do. I vastly prefer the AF approach of giving the user more choice so that you can respond to the specifics of your current situation without having to add all those attributes to each task when you create them.

Toodledo's developers have indicated that they may add manual sorting, but apparently this will require a significant rewrite, so I wouldn't expect it anytime soon. Lack of manual sorting is a shortcoming because I don't think there's any single way to comprehensively order a whole collection of tasks that will be suitable for everyone under every circumstance. This is one area in which Appigo ToDo really shines: it has a very powerful manual reordering capacity that includes tweaking due dates depending on where you drop a task in a list of other tasks. Still, as we'll see in a few paragraphs, there can be merit to Toodledo's approach. In the end, users will have to decide for themselves which way is best for them.

Toodledo has a special list, the Hotlist, that gathers only those tasks that need to be done, based on certain criteria that depend on the various fields. The Hotlist can be a very good friend, as we'll see below.

If you put all the fields into the unused list, all you'll have is a list of tasks with no other fields at all (except the ability to add a note to a task). Combined with the lack of manual reordering, you've just turned Toodledo into a pretty good version of classic AF. The Hotlist will be useless because there are no criteria to identify the most important tasks. You can use the All Tasks list in this case, and it works fine in this role.

Now we can start adding fields, one at a time, based on the features we want. Again, I can't guess which fields will work best for you, so all I can suggest is ways of deciding and showing you how I decided. The one piece of advice I would urge you to take is to add new fields slowly. You might think that you really need one field or another, but you won't actually know until you add it and use it for a while, and reflect on whether the addition of that field is making you more effective, or more efficient, or both. If you add multiple fields at once, you will only cloud the issue and you're less likely to be able to tell if one or the other or all the fields you added are good for you. So, adding one field at a time is the way to go.

The first and most obvious field to add is Due Date. Setting a due date means that Toodledo will push that task into your Hotlist. How exactly it does that depends on how you define the due date. Toodledo supports four kinds of due dates: Due On (the task will appear in your Hotlist only on the day it's due), Due By (the default, the task appears immediately but moves towards the top of the list as you approach the due date), Due After (for tasks you can't complete until at least a given date, the task appears in the Hotlist on that date but is never overdue), and Optionally Due On (especially useful for repeating tasks, the task will be removed, and advanced to its next occurrence, after the due date). I've had trouble using Due After and Optionally Due On, on the iPhone, in that they don't really seem to do anything. However, even just having the choice of Due On or Due By is very useful.

You can then set a default value for the due date. I set it to "today" thus forcing me to make the time to either do it, or spend a few minutes deciding what exactly the due date should be.

Depending too much on due dates can be a problem. I use them only for tasks that really have a hard deadline, not just for scheduling when I would like to do them. This allows me to easily distinguish between the things I really must do today and tasks that I would just prefer to do today. It's very easy to set due dates for every task, especially if you set a default date for the field, but I would discourage you from this practise since you can (or, at least, I can) get wrapped up in doing things that really aren't due just because I prefer doing them to those other tasks that have harder deadlines.

Enabling the Due Date field in Toodledo also adds a new list to the home screen. This list orders all your tasks by due date, so you can switch to that list to see only tasks that have due dates, sorted just as one would expect. I personally don't like switching between lists because I tend to forget what list I'm actually looking at, which confuses me. But that's just me; I know there are many people who find it very useful to switch between different "views" of their tasks. If you're one of them, then the Due Date list could be very useful to you.

A second field that I find infinitely useful in any task manager app is the repetition rate for repeating tasks. When you complete a repeating task, the next occurrence is immediately scheduled. Toodledo can set the next occurrence to be due either a fixed period from the initial due date, or from the date you actually complete the task, which can be two very different things. Repeating tasks are great for things like remembering to pay certain bills, putting out the garbage, and checking certain websites, to name a few.

Another field that Toodledo supports is Start Date. Any task with a Start Date set in the future will not appear in your Hotlist until that date. You can set start dates independently of due dates, so you can have tasks that have a start date but no due date. This is a great way to put tasks off for a time, but know that sooner or later they'll pop up so that you won't forget about them.

A fourth very useful field to use is the Folder field. This allows you to create folders to contain tasks. You can use folders to group tasks any way you want. I have folders for each of the courses I teach, for each of my graduate students, and for key projects that each might have many tasks associated with them. Because I dislike contexts (more on them later), I also have folders for Home, Work, Computer, and so on. The usefulness of folders is when I'm looking through undated tasks for ones that I want to do next.

This too is an important feature of AF: that you choose what to do and work on it as long as you like. The choosing is greatly facilitated by grouping tasks into logical chunks. If all you have is pen and paper, then a page is a logical chunk. In a digital world, however, one is not so constrained, so a logical grouping by subject makes sense. Hence, the usefulness of Toodledo folders.

So far, the fields I've suggested are pretty conventional. The reason for adding them is to take advantage of the inherent abilities of a digital platform while remaining true to the intent of AF.

There are other fields in Toodledo that can be useful. Again, remember that you should only add one field at a time and the use it for a while to evaluate whether it is adding to your effectiveness and efficiency.

If you use folders, you might end up with a large number of them. This can become a meta-work problem: if there's lots of folders, then finding the right folder for a given task can become more of a distraction than an aide. If you prefer single, long lists of tasks - and if you already use AF, this could very well describe you - then you might prefer using Toodledo's Contexts.

A context, per GTD, is a classification of tasks based on circumstance - usually a location. Some apps actually connect contexts to GPS locations using the iPhone's location services. Toodledo doesn't do that. Still, with the Context field active, you get a top level list of contexts and can choose which context best describes your current situation. I'm not fond of this approach myself, but given Toodledo's popularit, many other users are quite happy. As an alternative, Appigo ToDo treats contexts as filters that modify other task lists. If I used contexts, I would prefer ToDo's approach.

In any case, contexts let you hide tasks that aren't pertinent to you current situation, so you can use it as another way to chunk tasks in a meaningful way.

One word of warning: I am not fond of using both contexts and folders. These two fields are supposed to be orthogonal - entirely disconnected from one another, but it's very easy to fall into a trap of having both folders and contexts for the same thing. And that just complicates the matters of deciding how to classify new tasks and finding out what tasks are relevant at a given moment. For instance, I could easily see myself using a folder for tasks relating to general teaching stuff, and a context for making sure those tasks only show up when I'm in "teaching mode." So the question is, where do I add a new teaching task? To the Teaching folder, the Teaching context, or both? I just can't see how having to make those kinds of decisions can improve effectiveness or efficiency; as far as I can tell, doing this just adds to your meta-work, which just ain't a good idea.

Another field in Toodledo can be useful: stars. Stars are especially useful because you can arrange your Hotlist to automatically show a starred task regardless of any other field. What I do is:

activate the Star field in Fields & Defaults settings;
set the default value of the Star field to Yes - this will automatically turn on the star for all new tasks; and
in the Hotlist settings, at the bottom, check the Has A Star option.

Now any new task you create, even in fast entry mode, will have a star and will appear in your Hotlist immediately.

I often find that I add tasks that I can't do now but will do later today. This is a great way to quickly and easily enter such tasks - no due date or other data is required. They'll be there in the Hotlist so I can quickly move on to other things, till I have a chance to do them. If you also happen to set a default due date of today, and sort your tasks by Importance, those starred tasks will appear quite high in your Hotlist, so it's less likely that you'll overlook them.

There's one more technique available in Toodledo that can be quite useful, if you're so inclined: tags. Indeed, you can use tags as a replacement for nearly everything else. Say you create a tag "Now" that you assign to any task you want to do as soon as possible. You just add that tag to any tasks you want to do today and, regardless of any other fields, you call easily pull all those tasks into a single screen with Toodledo.

You can also replace Folders and Contexts and even Stars with tags. By adding many tags to a task, you can make a single task appear in any number of tag-based views. Indeed, there's a task manager app called Voodo that only supports tags (and I like it's design).

Once you enable the Tags field in the Fields & Defaults, you'll have a special list for tags on the Toodledo home screen, from which you can select any tag and see all the tasks with that tag. You can even set a default tag of Now in Fields & Defaults, so that all new tasks will immediately appear in your Now tag view - which is why tags can replace the use of stars as I described it above.

The problem I find with this approach is that you can quickly end up with many, many tags. Since all the tags are arranged in alphabetic order, you'll end up with folder tags mixed up with context tags, priority tags, and any other tags you think of. Because of this, the Now tag will likely end up somewhere in the middle of the list of tags. But you can make it appear first in the list by adding a zero (as in "0Now"). Or you can even just name the tag "0." Since numbers come before letters lexically, the 0 tag will be the first tag in the tag list.

So there you have it. A whole gaggle of things you can do with Toodledo to streamline its use in keeping with Autofocus, without getting too mired in all the different options and capabilities of Toodledo. Of course, if you use all the things I've suggested here at once - due dates, start dates, repetitions, folders, contexts, stars, and tags - then you've pretty much got GTD again.

The point is that you don't need them all. Remember: try one at a time and actually use it for a few days before deciding if you want to make it a permanent part of your task management system. That way, you'll be sure to use the fewest number of fields, which will keep the whole process as lightweight and easy as possible.

Simulating an Action List with ToDo

2010-11-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

I really like action lists - these are integrative lists that show you, in one place, all your current tasks. Not all task manager apps use action lists. In this post, I'll describe how you can set up Appigo ToDo's focus list to act like an action list.

Most task manager apps let you organize your tasks into a variety of groups: contexts, projects, lists, etc. They'll also try to arrange your tasks so that you'll find it easy to see just what you have to do next. But different people have different ideas of what "easy" means.

I've found that task manager apps can be grouped by how they handle "easy" presentation of tasks. One group defines a fixed set of views on your tasks on the basis of some rationale that tells them their way is best. This approach, taken by apps like OmniFocus and Task PRO, usually gives you separate views for tasks that are overdue, tasks due today, tasks due soon, and so on.

Another group of apps, including Taska and Things, are built on action lists. These are user-constructed views of your tasks. You pick which tasks should be in the list based on what you think is important. Most of these apps will automatically compile some tasks (e.g. those with due dates) into the action list.

Then there's a third group of apps, like ToDo and Toodledo, that give you some flexibility. There's an optional list that is configurable, and that you can set up in a variety of different ways.

I really like action lists. I want all my current tasks in one place; I don't want, for instance, to have to navigate to another list just to see my overdue tasks. And I like to control what goes into the action list. Some of my tasks have to be done, but don't strictly have to be done by a given date - they're just whatever's next in a given project. Those kinds of tasks are nigh-impossible to bring to the fore with apps of the first type.

But what do you do if you prefer an app that doesn't directly support action lists? Well, it depends on the app, but if you like ToDo, you can rig up a pretty good action list in just a few minutes.

ToDo has a focus list that can be configured in a variety of ways. Here's how to make the focus list into an action list.

In the in-app settings for ToDo, go to the Focus List settings.
Under Show Tasks:

Set No Due Date off.
Set both Starred and Subtasks to on.
Set Completed to None.

Under Hide Tasks:

Set Due After to Today.
Set Priority to -.

That's all there is to it.

All dated tasks will appear in the Focus List, on their due date. And any task with a star will also appear in the Focus List. This includes a regular task, a project, a task in a project, a whole checklist, or single checklist items.

ToDo has a really easy way to star tasks. Choose the reordering icon (the one with three horizontal lines at the top right of the screen). This lets you reorder tasks, but it also lets you star or un-star tasks. Just tap the star beside a task to toggle its state. You can also do this within the Focus List itself, so it's easy to un-star your starred tasks and get them out of the Focus List immediately.

I think this is a very nicely balanced way of managing your current tasks; it's both highly effective (giving you complete control) and efficient (it doesn't require much work to set up or use). If you like the Action List approach and are willing to try ToDo, then you should give this technique a try.

If you come up with any variations that work better for you, please do leave a comment and share with the rest of us.

[Read my other posts about ToDo.]

iPad still cool, but Air wins for me

2010-11-28T21:30:00.000-05:00

I've written a couple of posts about my iPad. This will probably be my last post about it, because, unfortunately, it hasn't turned out as well as I would have liked. And there's a much better, existent solution, which I've now adopted - the Macbook Air.

Over the past few months, I've struggled to find ways to take advantage of my iPad for productivity. Struggled is the right word. Not because the iPad is somehow bad or insufficient. Rather, because it just doesn't fit my needs.

The iPad is, as others have noted, primarily for content consumption. There's all manner of apps for finding and using information. Whether it's playing games, or online books and newspapers, or reading blogs, or finding great recipes, or viewing MRI images, or buying things on eBay, or any of a hundred other things - the iPad is wonderful. It's light; it lasts forever on a charge; now with iOS 4.2, it does fast task-switching and supports folders. And it's oh-so cool.

On the consumption side, I really enjoy the iPad, and think it's quite brilliant.

The problem is that I'm not about consumption, but rather about content creation. Whether it's saving links to interesting sites and blogs, or writing my own blog entries, or uploading photos, or just managing my research notes and articles, I use computers to create things. I'm not passing judgment on content consumers; the only reason I have so much content to create is that content I consume is stimulating that creativity. But, for me, consumption is useless except that it helps me create. So a device that can't do both isn't going to help me much.

And I've found the iPad is rather weak on the creation side. I know I've written to the contrary, but I thought I'd find more apps that would help than I actually did. And let's face it, these days it's all about software. Thanks to the Web, Java, Javascript, Perl, and other programming platforms, it's quite easy to write software that will run well on any platform. This makes the platform irrelevant.

Or mostly so. The iPad suffers the curse of iOS, which is a good and robust operating system for mobile devices, but the iPad could be so much more than "just" an iPod Touch on steroids. Unfortunately, many Web-based apps still consider the iPad as a small device rather than a real computer. And Apple's decision to not support Flash on iOS doesn't help. I know what their thinking is, and in principle I agree with it. HTML5 seems to be the way of the future, in that HTML5 is an integrated solution, whereas Flash is always going to be an add on. There's an interesting post in ReadWriteWeb that suggests the race is still on. And while Flash has a huge installed base, HTML is the heart and soul of the Web; all previous versions of HTML were adopted rather quickly, and I don't see HTML5 being any different in that regard. Still, today, the problem remains, no Flash support in iOS is game-limiting for content creators like me.

Sure, I can create documents in Word-compatible format and sync them to Google Docs or Dropbox or any number of other services. But I still can't pull those documents into, say, most blogging platforms because the rich text editing features of services like WordPress don't work on the iPad. And I hate the notion of adding all the formatting tags myself.

I can read news and blogs very well on the iPad. Indeed, many of the feed-based reading apps (like GoodReader, Pulse, and Reeder) are among the best apps I've seen. And G-Whizz works around the limitations of iOS to give you the full desktop version of Google Reader (albeit with some occasional weird behaviour) as well as access to most every other Google service. But there are still some things I can't do. Like finding a good link and adding it quickly to Diigo, the bookmarking service I use. Which is something I do a lot.

The lobotomized version of Safari on the iPad is also rather limited compared to the desktop version, and even more so compared to Chrome or Firefox - neither of which run on iOS. Something I often do is tag, or bookmark, or save, or whatever certain web sites I run across. Can't do that with iOS's browser.

So while things are still possible, and there's always the hope that things will improve in the future, I really need to get things done now. Put another way, the iPad doesn't hit the right balance of function and form that I need.

Enter the Macbook Air. It's unnervingly thin and light, and packs a truck-load of flash memory in place of a hard-drive. The small ones weigh about as much as an iPad. It doesn't have a touch screen, but it's large trackpad does support the same multi-touch interface as iOS. It doesn't last as long on a charge as an iPad, but it does last longer than a regular laptop. (It's rated at between five and seven hours, which I've found to be a pretty accurate measure.) It needs a regular, laptop-sized charger, which is a dead-weight to lug around when I've travelling, but because it lasts so much longer on a charge, I don't have to worry about bringing the charger with me everywhere.

And the Air runs full Mac OS X. Indeed, I've even installed the dreaded Microsoft Office on it, and it runs just fine (well, as fine as any MS product runs...). With full OS X, I can run all the apps I run on any other of my computers. I have total compatibility, and the interface is exactly what I'm used to. I can blog, and surf, and tag, and bookmark, and edit, and link everything.

All in a package just as wide, slightly longer, and only a smidge thicker than the iPad. Sure, it costs more than an iPad, but you do get what you pay for. And what I've paid for is a frighteningly light and powerful computer.

So in the end, if you're looking for a simple, light, long-lasting device that will do exactly everything that a larger, more expensive, and heavier laptop will do, I would urge you to take a very close look at the Macbook Air.

(In case you're wondering, I've regifted the iPad for my wife.)

Dropbox: totally transparent file sharing and backup

2010-11-13T15:33:00.000-05:00

Dropbox is a great service. It allows you to sync files between an assortment of computers in an entirely transparent way. Since my perspective on it is more designerly, I blogged about it at my other blog. Having tried a few other services, I'm perfectly happy to say Dropbox is the pick of the litter.

App face-off: Taska versus ToDo

2010-11-05T23:30:00.000-04:00

Taska and ToDo, two of my favorite task managers for the iPhone and iPad, recently came out with updates. Since the updates came out pretty at the same time, I thought it would make sense to mini-review them together.

ToDo version 4 includes better support for iOS 4, fast task-switching, sync with Appigo's own sync servers, local alerts, better robustness, and a few other minor features.

Taska version 1.0.8 constitutes a significant update and includes a new look and feel, tweaked fonts and icons, simplified interface, accommodating new functions in iOS 4, alerts, and a whole lot of bug fixes. I should also note that Taska's look and feel is remarkably similar to that of Things for iPhone, by Cultured Code. However, having used both apps, I can say that there are significant functional differences between them, and to read more than this into the matter is, in my opinion, unwarranted. Cultured Code may beg to differ, but it's a free country and that's my opinion.

While Taska shows the greatest improvement and has superior functionality, I find it still needs more work.

ToDo supports all the key functions one would expect from a GTD-oriented task manager: folders, priorities, stars, due dates, task repetition, tags, contexts, and search. It's quite customizable, it syncs with toodledo, and it's very robust. It also has a pretty good fast-entry mode and push alerts thanks to iOS 4. ToDo has a fairly configurable Focus list that let's you gather key tasks in one place for easy reference. It also supports projects and checklists, but can't sync them with toodledo unless you subscribe to toodledo's premium service. Appigo has also introduced it's own fee-based sync service for ToDo.

Taska does pretty much everything ToDo does, and then some. Its Action list is an even more flexible version of ToDo's Focus list. It can sync checklists and projects to toodledo without requiring users to have a premium toodledo account. It manages this by embedding information in other task fields. While this is an interesting way of doing things, it also means that toodledo's browser interface doesn't understand Taska's notion of projects and checklists. This is only a problem if you expect to use toodledo's browser interface, or if you expect to use toodledo as a medium to transfer your tasks from Taska to some other app.

Taska also supports location services for its contexts, which ToDo doesn't do so far. This means Taska can change the content of your Action list depending on where you are - which is pretty cool. (Taska isn't the only app that does this, but it is one of the most affordable.)

Another really cool feature of Taska is it's support for horizons. Setting the horizon of a task tells Taska to pop that task into the Action list before its due date. This is great for tasks that require some advance warning. It's a feature I don't use often, but it's screamingly useful when I do need it.

On the face of it, Taska seems far superior to ToDo. However, Taska does have some shortcomings that, for me at least, are substantive enough to make choosing one app over the other a hard choice.

Taska still requires more "taps" to get things done than does ToDo. This is especially evident when quickly entering a task the details of which you'll add later. I can see why Taska's developers did it this way: to integrate fast task entry with detailed task entry. It's a noble goal, but not if it ends up costing the user extra taps. ToDo's developers forsook that integration for the sake of speed, and I think that it has worked well for them.

Searching is also easier in ToDo. In Taska, you can only search one list at a time; to search all your tasks, you have to navigate to the "All" list, which I find distracting. In ToDo, there's a search icon in the toolbar which let's you search all tasks from almost any screen. It makes sense: if you need to search for a task, you're probably not sure which list it's in, so a global search would seem to be the most useful thing to do.

While Taska's Action list is a wonderful thing, it remains rather hard to reorder tasks in an arbitrary way. It was even more confusing in older versions, so again there is certainly a big improvement, but it's still not quite there. And a proper action list can be simulated quite well in ToDo.

The other odd thing that I noticed is that changing the sorting of tasks in Taska tends to cause unexpected changes in order. For instance, say you have your Action list sorted by due date, and you want to change to a manual sort. As soon as you select manual sorting, but before you actually do the manual sorting, all your tasks get rearranged in some way that I still can't figure out. This is unexpected and distracting. It should instead keep whatever order was there, then let you adjust it by manual reordering. (Again, ToDo does this right.)

Taska also sorts things oddly when you create a new list (Taska lists are like toodledo folders); it seems to sort tasks in the new list in reverse alphabetic order. While this might seem like a minor thing, it's unexpected. And unexpected things are jarring to the user and raise the spectre that something has gone wrong.

These differences are perfectly understandable: Taska is quite new, but ToDo has been around for a long time (by app standards). And I don't mean to rag on Taska; it has a number of great features, like horizons rather than start dates, and contexts that use your current location. Even though I don't use contexts myself, I can certainly understand how others could find this very useful.

So which would I recommend? I don't know, really. It depends on which features you really need, and whether you're willing to put up with a few rough edges. Since I use my task app for seriously important work-related stuff, I tend to use ToDo because it's just more robust and efficient. Taska is more effective in that it offers an excellent range of functions without being a bloated software monster. I would rather use Taska, but I'm worried that I'll lose important information due to its occasionally odd behaviour. I am a patient man and I will keep an eye on how Taska evolves; all else being equal, if Taska's development continues at its current brisk pace, it will surpass ToDo.

One word of caution: if you expect to be able to switch between Taska and ToDo easily, be ready for a disappointment. While both apps sync with toodledo's task management web service, they don't use comaptible data formats; don't be surprised if tasks are synced between the apps via toodledo imperfectly and incompletely. (I note that this isn't anyone's fault - there are no standards for task app data storage and representation, so the kinds of incompatibilities are entirely expected.)

The iPad: pretty darned good for content creation

2010-09-20T13:43:00.001-04:00

There's been a number of posts to various blogs and tech sites that diss the iPad. I think most of them are really unfounded.

One of the more sensible one's is by Jason Hiner at TechRepublic. He wraps up his article quite correctly, identifying a number of aspects of the iPad that give reason to be optimistic of its future. The biggest one being that it's still a "1.0 device;" that is, it's the first version. Apple has a tendency of using its introductory devices, such as the original iPod and even the iPhone, as testbeds that are improved upon quite dramatically within a few years of introduction.

Still, there's a slant in Hiner's opinion - most evident in the title of his article - "The truth about iPad: It's only good for two things" - that tends to give one pause. I don't like that, because if you bother to read the article, you'll see just how broadly Hiner defines those two "things."

One shortcoming Hiner describes is that the iPad isn't very good for content creation. And in particular he points to the difficulty in inserting images and links as an example. Well, of course, it isn't. Duh! While the glossy propaganda from Apple repeats like a matra that the iPad is good for "everything," you will note that none of the adds give examples of content creation under that rubric. This is a danger of the sound-bite. If you have sufficient attention span to observe Apple's ads in their entirety, using both your eyes as well as your ears, you do get a good sense of what the iPad is all about.

Just on this one point, let me offer an alternative view: I think the iPad is really great for content creation.

I do a fair amount of writing, both professionally and otherwise. Most of this stuff is largely based on text. While I love diagrams and graphics, they're a pain to develop - even on my laptop or desktop - compared to the ease with which I can churn out plain ol' linear text. One might ask when we'll see some really usable and useful apps and software for communicating graphically, but that's not an iPad thing - that's a general software thing.

When I write, there's two phases to it: creation and editing. When I create, I use plain text. I just need to get my thoughts down, choose the right words, get my ideas in the right order, and make sure the underlying logic of my argument is as good as I can make it. There's no great need at this point for images and links. Indeed, adding them during context creation breaks my concentration on the text. I might leave myself notes, like embed image of a fleebnorb here, but to do more than that is disruptive to the creative mode of thinking.

Once I've got the basic text in order, I go back through it all, in editing mode. At this point, I'm correcting the language, trying to make sure that readers will understand me, tweak the odd bit here and there, and augment the text with appropriate images and links. This is not a creative mode of thinking, but an analytic mode. I'm dissecting my own writing for the sake of clarifying it for others.

How does the iPad figure in this? I do the creative text writing on the iPad. Since it's so light, I can carry it pretty much anywhere. It's size is ideal (for me) to use on the subway (sitting down), or on my lap during an otherwise meaningless meeting, etc. Once the text is in order, I use DropBox or Google Docs to make the text available on my other computers. Then I sit down in peace and quite, at my laptop or desktop, and do the analytic part of the operation, including adding images and links.

As far as I can tell, the iPad fits perfectly into this two-mode way of turning stuff out, making it a very effective tool. So sure, it's not a silver bullet solution. Big deal: there's no such thing as a silver bullet. But it sure can play an important role in getting stuff done.

Being productive with the iPad: setting up

2010-08-28T13:03:00.000-04:00

I recently picked up an iPad, and I'm loving it. Not because it's "cool," and not because it's one if the It Toys of the summer, but because it seems to me to be (potentially) quite a great tool for productivity. Of course, I'm new to the iPad (and so is everyone else), so I'm still getting my sea legs. But if the early returns are a good indication, then it's got great potential.

In some ways, the iPad is just a really big iPod Touch: no camera, no phone. But just the "really big" part is enough to change the rules of the game, and Apple's sometimes subtle changes to the interface to take advantage of the "really big" part open up lots of possibilities.

You can read about my first impressions of the iPad at my other blog, where I wrote about it more from a design point-of-view. Here, I will focus on the productivity side.

What drew me to the iPad is it's power, which is significant, and it's weight, which is anything but. I used to tote a 13" MacBook Pro with me when I travelled for work. It was the smallest, and therefore the lightest, Mac laptop. It was also the cheapest, which didn't hurt. But it was still too heavy to lug around at research conferences (once you add the charger and other indispensable extras, and not big enough to give me useful screen real-estate when I was just using it at home.

The iPad changed things up for me. I can bring the iPad with me when I travel, and it weighs next to nothing (compared to my laptop). Indeed, it's even more portable than a laptop, and I bring it with me to more places because of that than I ever did my laptop. While it isn't as powerful as a laptop, it's good enough to do the important things - thanks to some impressive apps. Given the iPad, I can get a bigger laptop, with a better screen, for home use. So I went from a 13" MacBook Pro to an iPad plus a 17" MacBook Pro. Obviously more costly, but also 'way more effective. I got a laptop instead of something like an iMac because I can move the laptop around the house and even hide quite quickly when guests are around. Indeed, in a pinch I once just closed it and put it on a bookshelf amongst a bunch of large picture books. No one even knew there was a computer in the room.

Now, since the iPad and the iPhone (which I also have and adore) are basically the same kind of device, one might be tempted to run the same apps on both. But that isn't a good idea, for three reasons.

You'll need to sync both your devices regularly, if not often. Say you add an appointment on the iPhone using one of the better known task managers, such as Pocket Informant. To make sure your iPad knows about the appointment, you have to sync the iPhone app to whatever service you're using, then sync the iPad to those same services. Of course, you could use Mobile Me to push sync to all you Apple devices, but that will cost you $109 a year (in Canada at least), and it would limit you to apps that sync with Mobile Me. I prefer to use free stuff, like Google Calendar and Toodledo. In any case, all this syncing around is a recipe for disaster (when, not if, you forget to sync something) and it's also a meta burden on your time.
That app you love on the iPhone because of it's sweet interface may not have such a sweet interface on the iPad. Some developers have really tried to keep a certain integrity between the iPad and iPhone variants of their software (Pocket Informant and Taska are good examples); others have not.
There are price differences between the iPad and iPhone versions of some apps. The iPad versions tend to cost more. Even worse, some apps will download for free on the iPad if you already have them on your iPhone, but others will ding you again - and you won't find out about it till you've already committed to the purchase.

So, my advice is this: if you have an iPhone and an iPad, try to keep each app on only one of the two devices. And if you have both, you'll want to consider each app separately to decide on which of the two devices it should live.

First of all, check to see if that app is even available for the iPad. iPhone apps will run on the iPad, but they will only use one iPhone-screen's worth of the iPad's screen. Not much fun. Fortunately, the App Store clearly distinguishes between iPad apps and iPhone apps.

Then, if the app does have an iPad variant, read over its description and look carefully at the screen-shots; you really can't tell what the interface will feel like till you download (i.e. buy) it, but sometimes you can get a sense of it. If there is no iPad variant, then you need to decide how important it is. You might consider switching to a related app for the iPad.

The key here is to weigh the importance of keeping the app on the iPhone versus using a different app on the iPad. Remember, you don't want to have the same apps on both devices - not for "productivity" purposes anyways.

Take your time deciding. It's better to be slow than wrong. Sleep on it; ask a colleague or friend; let it swirl in your brainpan for a while - maybe a few hours, maybe a few days. Don't dwell on it or you'll just tie yourself up in cognitive knots; think about it hard for 15-20 minutes, then try to forget about it for a while. Your brain will keep working on the problem even if you yourself don't. Consciousness is funny that way. After a time, the answer will become clear to you.

Of course, given how economical apps are, you might also download a few alternatives and play around with them a bit. If you can afford to do that, it's certainly the way to go. Nothing like taking them out for test drives to really let you understand what each app has to offer.

So far, I've decided to keep my task manager only on my iPhone (currently I use Taska). That's to avoid the whole sync problem that I mentioned above. My iPhone is almost always with me because it's pocket-sized, so it's the logical candidate for that.

I've moved my iBooks library to the iPad - it''s just easier to read on the iPad's screen. (That happened when I first synced the iPad with iTunes.)

I've also moved reading email and news/blogs to the iPad. While it's good to be able to fire off a quick email from my iPhone, I can actually get quite a bit of real work done on the iPad. This is highly dependent on your email and RSS reader apps. Since the iPad is essentially a big iPod Touch, it suffers from many of its shortcomings - the biggest one, I think, is that it runs the mobile version of Safari. Seriously, there's 64 GB of memory in my iPad - isn't that more than enough to run a real browser?

Fortunately, as far as email and RSS goes, salvation has come in the form of a wonderful app called G-Whizz! It is a "front end" for a number of the Google services, including Reader, Gmail, and Calendar. What's particularly good about G-Whizz! is that it can run the "desktop" versions, rather than the somewhat lobotomized mobile versions, of these three services. This means that I get pretty much every function out of Gmail, and Calendar, and Reader on the iPad as I do on my desktop. (Gmail Labs seems to be missing as of this writing.) I've found G-Whizz! to be quite robust, and subject to very little weirdness on the iPad. One example of a little thing that had me going for a while: I couldn't figure out how to scroll a news article in Reader, or an email message in Gmail. I posted to the G-Whizz! Google Group, and got a response literally within minutes. Turns out that to make a pane scroll, the standard iPad interface is to swipe vertically with two fingers instead of one. To quote Johnny Carson, I did not know that!

I find reading news with Google Reader via G-Whizz! especially gratifying because I can tag and share just as I would at my desk, but I can do it anywhere and in greater comfort with the iPad than with my laptop. Since I got G-Whizz! on my iPad, it hasn't even occurred to me to read news on either my laptop or desktop.

Another fairly obvious use of an iPad is to take notes. The biggest reason to move note-taking from my iPhone to my iPad is the bigger keyboard. Granted that the iPad's keyboard is only virtual, but it took me only a few minutes to get used to it. Even though the key layout isn't exactly standard, I found that I can type pretty darned fast. This is, for me, a huge selling point. And if you type a lot, it should be for you too.

The Land of Notes Apps for the iPad is rather like the mythological Wild West at the moment, with a wide variety of generally crappy software, with tremendous repetition of function, and only a few really interesting exemplars that are both usable and robust.

These apps generally fall into three categories:

Scrapbooks & journals. These apps let you track your own life for your own benefit, usually let you include images (though often only one image per entry), and emphasize their aesthetic appeal (use of colour, font, background images, etc)
Handrwriting apps. These apps are based on letting you use your thumb or a capacitive display stylus to "write" on the screen. This includes handwriting recognition apps.
Document preparation apps. These apps are basically stripped down versions of iWork (or [cough] MS Office).

I haven't yet had time to look too deeply into these apps, and my primary concern is document preparation, because I need it for work. Also, I need to be able to sync my documents with Google Docs, which is the de facto document sharing and collaborative editing medium for most of my colleagues and students.

Given these constraints, there are two iPad apps that seem to be at the front of the pack: Office² HD, and Documents To Go (Premium). Documents To Go supports Word, Excel, and (that's why the Premium version) Powerpoint; however, it has quite a clumsy interface and the process of syncing with Google Docs is, quite frankly, bizarrely complicated. Also, it's default font is far too small, and I can't figure out how to change it. For a guy like me, who needs reading glasses, this is an unnecessary inconvenience. Office² HD has a much cleaner interface, and syncing with Google Docs is easier. But it doesn't support Powerpoint (and what academic doesn't just looove Powerpoint?)

If your needs are anywhere near mine, go with Office² HD; it's not perfect, but you'll likely spend less time futzing around with the app and more time getting stuff done.

So, I've only had my iPad a couple of weeks, but I have sorted out that it's great for email, reading news, and pretty darned good for document preparation, and I've found some apps that are quite satisfying if not wonderful.

There's other things I want to look into - handwriting recognition and drawing tools in the near term - and I'll have something to write about those soon. And, of course, I will consider a few of the available task managers.

Action Lists and Listmaker: unremarkable

2010-08-08T01:02:00.001-04:00

Daze End Software has recently released new versions of two iPhone apps: Action Lists, a GTD-oriented task manager, and Listmaker, a stripped down version of Action Lists for simpler listing and todo needs. Unfortunately, neither of them is really remarkable in any way.

Action Lists ($9.99) offers a simple interface that's very consistent with iPhone standards, but it seems to need more taps than other apps to do relatively simple editing tasks. It has smart lists for projects, contexts, and for tasks marked as "waiting" and "someday," and it syncs with toodledo.com. It is simple and appears quite robust. It has a fast task entry mode, start dates and due dates, and a pretty good assortment of options for repeating tasks.

However, the options for setting due dates are not particularly flexible. There's no master action list, which means, for instance, if you're looking at tasks due today, you have to manually switch lists to see overdue tasks. I find that amazingly annoying. Horizons are not supported either, which means due tasks only show up on the day their due - you can't have the app give you any warning that a task is coming due.

And there's at least one bug I've found. If you create a task, save it without assigning a due date, then edit it again, give it a due date and save it again, the badge count of how many tasks are due/outstanding isn't updated.

Listmaker ($4.99) lets one create nested lists (lists that contain other lists to arbitrary depth - which can be very useful) of items. It too syncs with toodledo.com. You can assign due dates to items, but it doesn't handle recurring tasks. Since it shares much of its interface with Action Lists, it's very consistent with iPhone interface standards, and has the same issues, primarily there are too many taps required (I believe) to get things done. Listmaker has a fast entry mode too, but one must save each item separately, as opposed to other apps, like Appigo ToDo, in which one can enter an item in fast entry mode with a single tap. For what Listmaster does, I think Geetasks, at only $2.99, is actually much better.

In the end, while these apps seem quite robust and typical by iPhone standards, I find them unremarkable and rather pricey for what they do. Quite frankly, I think you'd be better off using some other, cheaper apps, like Appigo ToDo and Geetasks.