Things, the popular personal organization application from Cultured Code, is still in testing, but it already has a large userbase that is thoroughly addicted to its attractive to-do list features. It's no surprise, then, that when the clock turned to midnight in Australia and Things suddenly expired, users were up in arms. Hours later, users in the US experienced the same problem. Several people congregated on the official Things help forum, which had nearly 50 postings on the problem as of 2:30 this morning.
Cultured Code hasn't yet responded with an explanation of why Things was set to expire. The application is still free, but users have already come to rely on it, with more than one person posting that they would gladly pay the $49 pricetag Cultured Code will charge for the 1.0 release to continue using Things right now. Why the expiration, though? We expect to see either a quick fix or an update pushed out this morning -- as the app is currently at version .9.1.1, the highly anticipated 1.0 release is possible, but not likely.
If you're a Things user, visit the help forum for some unofficial ways of resolving the problem. So far, most people are either setting their computers' dates back or using a hex editor to change the expiration date. Despite all the fuss, this could end up working in favor of Cultured Code. Our take: any publicity is good publicity when people are this frantic about your product.
We've met a lot of users who take their to-do list applications very seriously. It seems every task management system -- from old-fashioned pen and paper to OmniFocus -- has its own fanatical following. Listaculous is a web-based to-do list that keeps it simple, but still offers tabbed organization, and it could be the right to-do list for you.
There's not much to Listaculous, which is what might make it useful for a lot of people. It's just tabs and to-do items, all in one window. Opening Listaculous in a pop-out window is appealing; the tabs make for a small footprint, even with multiple lists. For those who like their action items embedded in a home page, Listaculous also comes as an iGoogle widget.
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.
If there's one thing that users of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system suffer from, it's typically the temptation to mess with their system. Nothing feels better than having all of your stuff under control, except maybe having all of your stuff under control in a sexy new system.
So if you've been rocking the same GTD application for too long and feel it's time to mix things up a little, check out this amazing survey of the GTD application landscape at About This Particular Mac.
While it originates at a Mac-centric site, the list should be of interest to any GTD practitioner since many (if not most) of the listed applications are web apps, with the occasional cross-platform app thrown in.
For good measure, here are our favorite GTD apps based on platfrom:
It's Friday, and Download Squad wants to make sure that you have completed all your tasks for the week. And what better way to track and ensure they are completed than with an online app. We have covered a bunch of note taking and GTD apps in the past, but Vitalist is another one you might enjoy using.
Vitalist offers a fresh outlook on the space. The interface is quick to grasp, well layed out and offers tasks that can be grouped and filtered by color coordinated projects, making it quick to scan and update as required. Vitalist has also built out special mobile access websites including a dedicated iPhone website for completing tasks while on the go. Support for both Google and Netvibes start page widgets is available as well as reminders that can be sent to emails and via sms. There are a few different Vitalist account options starting at free, and rising up to $10/month. Free accounts of course come with a few limitations. Actions and Tasks are unlimited, but projects and contacts are limited to 10 and there are no task sharing features available.
With so many GTD tools in the marketplace, it's hard to decide which one to choose that will help you along the way. Sometimes your best bet is to actually get a good old fashion moleskin notebook and a pen. Getting things done truly has nothing to do with the application, and more to do with the execution and sticking to whatever you choose to help you along the way.
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.
After all that teasing, 37signals has flipped the switch on a major upgrade to Backpack, their incredibly popular web-based PIM service that can store and organize lists, notes, pictures and files. As if features like sharing / collaboration and mobile phone access weren't cool enough, this major release takes Backpack productivity to entirely new heights.
One of the most interesting on the list of new changes is a much-updated UI, from a movement of the toolbar to the top of the pages (pictured) to the much-requested ability to drag and drop any list, note, pictures or file from one page to another. While the toolbar's new location initially feels like a good move, we find ourselves missing the authority of the previous design, as the buttons to create new lists and notes stood out a bit better.
Almost as drool-worthy as drag and drop abilities, users can now also search across all their Backpack pages. A new searchbox mounted in the upper right (directly underneath the 'Make a new page' button) should satisfy most users who use Backpack for more than a few tidbits of info. Searching seems pretty zippy, and your search term is highlighted among the listed results.
Continuing the healthy list of changes are other welcome new features, such as multiple photo galleries per page and RSS feeds for shared pages so you can keep an eye on changes made by everyone else. Altogether, this is a great update and we're very satisfied with the new features. With accounts ranging in price from 'free' up to $14/month, we recommend Backpack more than ever for anyone from casual users who need a simple web-based locker for storing bits and pieces of their daily adventures, to power users with a serious case of GTD or project management on their back.
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.
Have you got a bad case of Internet ADD? You sit in front of your computer and have trouble getting work done for all the distractions that come with online life; IMs, tons of tabs, new email, Twitter and Facebook dragging down your productivity? You're not alone.
ZenHabits lays out 8 awesome strategies to reduce your Internet ADD and start getting things done. By setting a few rules for yourself and sticking to them -- such as no Twitter at work, setting an "offline hour", keeping a browsing schedule and installing the Page Addict Firefox extension -- you can take back some of that productive time that your online life took away.
There are many task-list applications out there, but not many with the impressive feature set that Toodledo has. Its deceptive simplicity of task entry using inline editing via AJAX makes for lightning fast tasking and better productivity, while providing integration with Google Calendar, Google Personal Homepage, Firefox, and IMified.
One of the best features of Toodledo is the distinction between folders (for projects) and contexts (the many hats you wear). Contexts allows only your current frame of mind for work, and doesn't show you your home tasks. This keeps the honey-do list away from your work list, so you aren't thinking about that darn swing-set you have to put up in the middle of working on Mr. The-man's presentation.
If that isn't enough to make you jump over and check it out, they also have a printable tasklist, email alerts for your top tasks (called a hotlist), but also the ability to import/export tasks to iCal, Palm OS, XML, CSV, and text. Task lists can be published to the web if you want to share your inner-workings with the world, and with a non-free but reasonable price ($14.95/year) you can have others edit and append to your task list among other things. Toodledo offers a free 7-day trial of their pro account for your enjoyment.
Wait, there's even more. There is a developer API, it fully supports GTD, tags, history and stats, a scheduler, some goal-setting functions, RSS support, SMS support, WAP support and more. Tasks can be imported from Outlook, Apple iCal, and Remember The Milk. Seldom is there such a complete feature set in a free application. It is a major time-saver for the quick-and-dirty type task person who doesn't want to spend 8 years filling out a task form. If you don't have a solid task-list manager yet, this is the ticket.
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?
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 Scrybe there is a Planner pane which contains your calendar and tasks, and now the ThoughtPad pane which contains web clippings, or simply text and images as notes. These notes can be organized into different Labels (essentially tags), making it easier to locate relevant information when you're looking for it. Basic formatting like bold, italics and bullet points are included, but this is definitely not a full-featured word processor.
The ThoughtPad includes a browser at the bottom of the window that provides thumbnails of the clippings you have stored. This can be useful when scrolling through a number of related clippings to quickly locate a specific one, particularly if you're like me and your mind works in a particularly visual manner.
Yet again the latest update of Scrybe feels quite polished, and is very much usable. If I have any misgivings about using Scrybe as my productivity application of choice, it would be the user interface decision to confine task management to a relatively small corner of the Planner pane. As much as I need to keep an eye on the hard landscape of appointments I have scheduled, I typically find myself spending more time managing the tasks that need to fit in between those scheduled appointments. Working in a tiny corner of an application 80% of the time feels awkward, and demotes Scrybe (for me, at least) to the status of Worthy Productivity Application, but just not for me.
Things, the popular personal organization application from Cultured Code, is still in testing, but it already has a large userbase that is thoroughly addicted to its attractive to-do list features. It's no surprise, then, that when the clock turned to midnight in Australia and Things suddenly expired, users were up in arms. Hours later, users in the US experienced the same problem. Several people congregated on the official Things help forum, which had nearly 50 postings on the problem as of 2:30 this morning.
If there's one thing that users of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system suffer from, it's typically the temptation to mess with their system. Nothing feels better than having all of your stuff under control, except maybe having all of your stuff under control in a sexy new system.
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. 
After 
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. 
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! 
