Having a personal assistant is great. If you need a cup of tea, your dry cleaning done or someone to walk the dog simply send your personal assistant out to do those things. If you lack the finances to retain the services of a personal assistant you can get one for free from macscheduler.
Unfortunately, Scheduler for Mac will not get get you a cup of tea or any of the other stuff that a real live personal assistant would do because after all Scheduler for Mac is a program on a computer. But what it can do is automate.
Unlike other basic schedulers that just present you with a dialog box letting you know that you should start on those sales charts now, Scheduler for Mac will actually open up your spreadsheet application as well as the document ready for your review. Scheduler for Mac has incorporated a very easy to use automation process along side the standard scheduling options. When setting up a new task, select the file or application you want open and when the time comes Scheduler for Mac will handle the rest.
Aside from the usual office documents you can also schedule websites to open (think eBay), assign custom audio files to act as audio alerts and customize the visual aspect of the alerts as well.
So while Scheduler for Mac will never take the place of a real live personal assistant, at least your reports will be completed on time.
We're back with another episode of The Squadcast. This time, it's all about email. We talk to productivity expert Matthew Cornell about the five D's. Also, we take a look at our five favorite email add-ons for keeping your house in order.
With the vast number of task management applications that are available, particularly for the Mac, you'd think that every possible feature has been done in a to-do list program. But maybe that's part of the problem. These programs are so feature-rich, that they end up getting in the way of actually getting things done, which is their purpose in the first place.
Jesse Grosjean thinks so, which is why his Hog Bay Software company has released a "work in progress" (notice the absence fo the word "beta"?) version of a new app called Taskpaper. The idea of Taskpaper is to boil down the job of task management to the most basic list making functionality, and make it work with plain text files. This makes it both dead simple to use, and totally flexible, since plain text can be used wherever and however you like.
Right at the top of the page, you'll see a quote from The David: "For the most part, the applications that are specifically designed for project organizing are way too complex, with too much horsepower to really be functional for 98 percent of what most people need to manage."
It seems Taskpaper might well be onto something here. If you're looking for something similar to Taskpaper, but web based, there's always Backpack by 37 Signals.
We first looked at SimpleGTD back in June, and concluded that although it had a lot going for it, it lacked of the ability to view your action items by the Project they're assigned to. That one missing feature was the only thing that prevented us from recommending it wholeheartedly, since there really is a lot to like about SimpleGTD.
Fast-forward a month and a half, and we're in the pleasant situation of being able to revisit SimpleGTD for the purpose of testing out its newest feature: the tasks by project view!
Happily, the tasks by project view completes the feature set of an otherwise top-notch online Getting Things Done tool. SimpeGTD remains a very fast and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to get your GTD groove on with a minimum of fuss and muss.
In a day and age where everything from YouTube to Pownce are vying for both our free and shouldn't-be-free time, it's great to see a company like Remember the Milk figuring out an ingenious way to help keep our daily tasks organized while we're goofing off or micro-blogging with Twitter. On the company's blog today, RTM announced not only that they have a Twitter account of their own, but that you can actually get some clever use out of it. By adding the RTM Twitter account as a friend and then direct messaging it with a specific syntax they have put together, you can actually create tasks, send tasks to friends and even command tasks (mark them as complete, get an SMS of a list's tasks, etc.). This is a stellar way of combining such a dynamic service as Twitter with a way of being productive, and all it requires is some simple linking of your RTM account with your Twitter username.
Fortunately, both Twitter and Remember the Milk are free to sign up for, giving you a valid way to justify all that time you spend on Twitter to your boss.
SimpleGTD is another in long list of online task management tools that attempt to adhere to David Allen's Getting Things Done system. On the surface, it's incredibly appealing; the makers of SimpleGTD have used Ruby on Rails to create a system that is stripped of the extraneous gunk that seems to litter other GTD tools, and instead present an incredibly bare-bones GTD environment. For those of you who prefer text files or paper lists, this may well appeal to you.
However the true value of using an application (be it a web application or a local one) to manage your tasks, particularly when following the principles of GTD, is the ability to see your tasks grouped by either context or by project. In other words, while you want one list to tell me what you can be working on right now based on the context you're in, you need another list showing you everything that needs to get done for a particular project.
SimpleGTD does not offer this project-based list, and it's a real shame. Without the ability to see this alternate view of your tasks, it's hard to recommend this tool for any serious GTDers. Otherwise, it's a very slick implementation.
SimpleGTD is free to use, but the makers suggest that regular users make a small $2 donation.
It seems there's more Getting Things Done inspired software packages out there than there are Flash games littering the web. It's understandable; GTD has become the geek mantra for productivity, and finding the right tool to suit your GTD needs is like searching for the holy grail.
For Mac users, that holy grail may be iGTD. iGTD is a free Mac program that pulls from all of the GTD principles to provide a very concise platform for manging your projects and next actions. Links with Quicksilver and the ability to handle URLs that are drag-and-dropped onto it make using iGTD a seamless experience, and it even synchronizes your tasks out to iCal. In fact, the pairing of iCal and iGTD work very well together. iGTD functions as the management interface, where you manipulate your tasks and projects, and iCal can be your dashboard when you're actually trying to get things done.
If you're still searching about for the right GTD solution and you're a Mac user, give iGTD a try before you shell out big bucks for some other solution. It's free, so there's nothing to lose, right? Except maybe a couple days of messing around with all of your lists... but that's productive, right?
Mindjet, the folks behind the slick productivity tool MindManager, announced today that MindManager 7 hits the shelves on May 30. Whether you're planning your ten-year old's birthday party or your next corporate takeover, there are always a zillion details to attend to. Some folks find it easier to organize and visualize things by getting them down on paper (or pixels, as it were), and opt for mind mapping tools to help. Others find productivity software indispensable when it comes to Getting Things Done.
Mindjet knows their product is used in hundreds of different ways by people with different needs. That's why there are three versions of Mind Manager to choose from: the full-featured Pro 7; MindManager 7 Lite for home users; and MindManager 7 Mac for (you guessed it) the Mac.
A bevy of new and updated features will be available in all versions. MindManager Pro 7 has a spiffy new user interface with a look and feel similar to the "ribbons" sported by Microsoft Office 2007. In fact, it's so tightly integrated that users can even launch Word, Power Point, Outlook and Excel right from MindManager itself. It will retail for $349 but upgrades will only set you back $119 during the promotional period before going up to $174.
MindManager for Mac 7's price has been lowered to $129 and upgrades are only $69. The company says prices were reduced "to compete with similar mapping products on the market." Mac 7 has several new features including a timer, the ability to position notes, and a new method to select topics by rules. They've also enhanced the import/export feature and made substantial improvements in printing.
MindManager Lite (formerly Basic) runs $99 and, while it's not as robust as it's Pro sibling, it's intended for home and personal use. Mindjet also plans to position MindManager Lite as a useful tool for students that will "make homework fun."
When back-of-the-envelope planning just won't cut it, maybe it's time to give MindManager a whirl.
While many other task management applications have found ways to incorporate the ideas put forth by the Getting Things Done methodology that David Allen developed, it seems that very few have been built from the ground up as GTD applications. There are certainly a few web applications that can make that claim, but in terms of "offline" applications, the pickings are pretty slim.
One such application, however, is ThinkingRock. Written in Java, ThinkingRock boasts versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
In ThinkingRock, you work in specific modes that relate to the various levels of the GTD workflow. For example, rather than entering a task and setting the project it relates to and the context at that moment, you can simply use a collection view to do a brain dump of all of the tasks and ideas that are bouncing around in your mind.
It seems like there is another Getting Things Done related task manager popping up online almost every week. The latest to surface is one called Nozbe, which reminds me in some ways of Tracks, although it takes a very different approach to the design and workflow.
Anyone that is familiar with the GTD methodology will be comfortable with the concepts used in Nozbe; you create Contexts, Projects, and Next Actions. A couple of the nicer features in Nozbe is the time field, which allows you to estimate the amount of time a given Next Action will take, and the pre-populated list of default contexts, complete with icons representing them.
I'm not sure how this one has flown under the radar for so long! There's a Getting Things Done solution that I wasn't aware of until just recently, and having taken the time to implement it I have only one thing to say: I'm in love!
Outlook has had the ability to use alternative "dashboards" (basically just web pages encoded to work with Outlook data) since Outlook 97 - that's a full ten years ago. And in that time, although I've tried many, none of them ended up being simple yet useful enough to continue using. In fact, for years I've considered the dashboard functionality in Outlook to hold huge unused potential. I think that potential is finally being used.
Jello.Dashboard is a relatively simple interface that allows you to quickly and easily view and manage your tasks (and in fact all Outlook elements, but I prefer to use it for tasks) in a very GTD-centric manner, assigning Context and Project categories to each item. It also has a special category called Next Actions which allows you to maintain what is effectively a sub-list of your tasks, so you can focus on what is truly important right now in your day.
Once you have set up your context and project categories, you can continue to use Outlook as normal and check back in with the dashboard interface as little or as often as you find necessary. Since it's based on built-in fields in Outlook, you can take your task lists with you on any portable device that synchronizes with Outlook. When you come back and resynchronize your device after making changes all of your contexts and projects in Jello.Dashboard will reflect any changes you made on the portable device.
It took me less than an hour to massage my task lists sufficiently to make them work with Jello.Dashboard, and already I feel like I have a better handle on things. It's free, and it works with any version of Outlook since Outlook XP (I'm using it in Outlook 2007).
In my ongoing search for the ultimate software system for use with the Getting Things Done methodology, I've recently come across a real winner. Tracks is a web application that was built from the ground up for the purposes of implementing a GTD system. Written in Ruby on Rails, Tracks offers the familiar Projects and Contexts organization system made popular by David Allen's Getting Things Done system, coupled with the sparse graphical design and easy functionality made popular by well-known Ruby on Rails applications like Backpack, Basecamp and Ta-Da List. Now I should mention that Tracks is not affiliated in any way with 37 Signals (the maker of the other three web applications I mentioned), but it's clear that the Tracks developers are inspired by what 37 Signals have done. Plus, I'm sure it doesn't hurt that Rails was released by 37 Signals as a framework with which to get productive with Ruby very quickly.
The installation of Tracks is unfortunately not for the faint of heart; if you're someone that would shy away from installing a web server on your local machine, or don't have access to a Ruby-enabled web hosting account, installing Tracks probably isn't for you. If you are, there are a number of sets of instructions available.
For the rest of us, our best bet is to find a hosted solution. Since Tracks is by its very nature multi-user, it appears to have been a relatively straightforward task to build a hosted solution, and allow users to pay a monthly fee for access.
My favorite of these hosted offerings is called GTDTracks. GTDTracks is extremely affordable, at $1.49/month, and they offer regular backups and upgrades. I'd much rather about getting my stuff done than messing with upgrading a web application that I know very little about, so this option appeals to me a great deal. Plus, they take care of what is arguably my biggest fear with online hosted services, which is the question of how to get your data out if you decide to move on to something else. GTDTracks has a policy of allowing users to cancel their account at any time with no penalty (so you're not on the hook for more than a buck and a half at any given time), and you can take your data with you, exported as a plain text file that can be imported into another installation of Tracks, or simply mined for the data it contains.
Using Tracks is very straightforward - simply create Contexts and Projects as needed, then create Next Actions (essentially tasks) and associate them with the project and context they relate to. Due dates can be set through a convenient calendar widget. One nicely done element of the application is the Done page - one way to get inspired to get things done is to see what you've already accomplished. The Done page shows items that were completed in the last 24 hours, last 7 days and last 28 days, as well as a link for everything older than that.
Lifehacker brings us a nugget from Davo, one of their avid readers, called What To Do Next. The idea behind the little application is extremely simple; it's written in javascript, and therefore will run on any platform. All it does is act as a front-end to a list of tasks that you would like to accomplish. Clicking on the button for one of the tasks starts a ten minute countdown timer (the time is configurable), after which an alarm sounds. The idea here is that ten minutes is short enough to feel approachable, so you may find that you can get started on a task that otherwise felt too large to tackle. Once the alarm goes off, if you're feeling like you're making good progress, just continue. But if you feel stuck or like you're spinning your wheels, the alarm is your escape - just choose a different task from your list and get to work.
I really enjoy the idea behind this application, but don't need yet another task manager to maintain. But that's okay, since really all I need is a 10 minute countdown timer and the resolve to actually tackle some of the items on my ever-growing task list in Outlook. But downloading and installing What To Do Next takes mere seconds, and if you don't have a to-do list, or aren't particularly fond of the one you're using, this might be a nice alternative.
Note that the source file containing the actual list of tasks is well laid-out and easy to follow, but if you're averse to editing text configuration files, you might want to give this one a pass.
After playing around with the user interface for a bit, which is sort of fun in and of itself, I decided to test the killer feature that puts Scrybe in a league of its own when it comes to online calendars and productivity applications: offline use and synchronization.
What can I say? It just works. I turned off my wireless adapter, put my browser into offline mode, logged in, and proceeded to add and change data in my Scrybe account. Everything worked as you'd expect - it felt like being online. Then I turned my wireless back on, put my browser back into online mode, logged into my account, and everything was there, as expected. Okay, so far, so good. So then, I moved over to another computer, and logged in to Scrybe. And, as expected, everything was there, as well. Perfect!
So what is there to complain about with the beta release? So far, surprisingly little. My one peeve is that the Scrybe window defaults to a specific size, which is slightly too long for my laptop's native resolution of 1280x800, and awkwardly short for my two available external monitor's resolutions at 1440x900 and 1280x1024. Given that Scrybe is written in Flash, as TechCrunch notes, it seems strange that they would have chosen not to make the interface fluid like, for example, Google Calendar. Certainly it should be possible. Let's hope this is on Scrybe's radar for future enhancements. For more thoughts on what it means that Scrybe is written in Flash, check out Ryan Stewart's thoughts at ZDNet.
I'm sure as time goes on bugs will be found, and fixed (oh, the beauty of online apps), but for now Scrybe is giving us a seriously strong first draft to play with. In terms of functionality, this beta release of Scrybe is almost feature complete, based on what they showed in the demonstration video. The only feature that did not make the cut for this version is the bookmarking / web clipping functionality. According to Scrybe this will be added in a few weeks, to be followed by the mysterious sharing functionality that is alluded to at the end of the first video.
Although I could take this time to walk through the functionality in Scrybe again, it's really no different than what we saw in the demo video, and I described in our first post about the system. That is to say that so far, everything works as I'd hoped it would.
Right now the only way to get a beta account is to sign up at Scrybe on their main page. Unfortunately for all of us excited users, Scrybe is doing a phased rollout of their beta program. Although this is frustrating for those of us that would like accounts and can't get them immediately, I think they deserve credit for deciding to do things right. Faizan, CEO and co-founder of Scrybe tells us "We could have launched with a bang and gotten another mega spike on Alexaholic, but the purpose is to control the hype and improve the product with focused users." That's a very refreshing perspective. For more information about the beta rollout, check out the Launch Details page on the Scrybe site.
In this era of worshipping at the temple of "The David" (Getting Things Done), there is no shortage of offline and online productivity suites. With that in mind, I rarely get all that excited about the new Web 2.0 offerings that get a bit of buzz here and there. But Scrybe appears to be different.
Way different.
Like wow different. Here, just watch:
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Scrybe is an online organizer that is grounded in one word: context. The user interface is designed to always give the user context relating to the data they are dealing with. So if you're working in your calendar, you can fly up to a year view, or dig down all the way to a day view, and all of the related information is intelligently displayed so that you never lose track of where you are. Watching the video on their site, you immediately get a feeling of "that just makes sense". Google Calendar is good, but doesn't appear to be as good as this.
Having a personal assistant is great. If you need a cup of tea, your dry cleaning done or someone to walk the dog simply send your personal assistant out to do those things. If you lack the finances to retain the services of a personal assistant you can get one for free from macscheduler.
With the vast number of task management applications that are available, particularly for the Mac, you'd think that every possible feature has been done in a to-do list program. But maybe that's part of the problem. These programs are so feature-rich, that they end up getting in the way of actually getting things done, which is their purpose in the first place. 
We f
In a day and age where everything from 
It seems there's more Getting Things Done inspired software packages out there than there are Flash games littering the web. It's understandable; GTD has become the geek mantra for productivity, and finding the right tool to suit your GTD needs is like searching for the holy grail. 
Mindjet, the folks behind the slick productivity tool MindManager, announced today that 
I'm not sure how this one has flown under the radar for so long! There's a Getting Things Done solution that I wasn't aware of until just recently, and having taken the time to implement it I have only one thing to say: I'm in love! 
