Getting on Top of Your Task List

I’ve been thinking about task management lately. Seemed like a good thing to reflect on over the long weekend. If you are like me, the biggest problem about task management is just plain old too many. Some weeks I feel like I’m gliding through my lists until a loved one reminds me, I just have too many.

If you have too many tasks, then you need to focus first on having fewer of them. That’s what some systems (philosophies? Self-help psychologies? Emergency medical care?) are all about. Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" has a lot of popularity in this department. If you haven’t read the book, check it out. Most people probably can’t fully live the GTD way. I personally grant permission to cherry pick from its choicest rules. Things like, if you can deal with something in less than two minutes, do it now. If you can’t, put it where you can find it so you don’t have to clutter your mind with it until you can deal with it. And on from there.

Too Much Mail

For many of us, even before we get to our task lists per se, we have to face our email inbox. My inbox is like a tide washing up new tasks every day. I’m not going to tell you exactly how big my inbox is right now. It’s embarrassing. I’m working on it.

I get a lot of help form using the GTDInbox for Firefox + Gmail. GTDInbox adds a life-saving layer of task buttons built on top of Gmail’s labeling. (GTDInbox is independent of Dave Allen, and just carries forward some of the methodology. ) If you use Outlook, the Dave Allen company (www.davidco.com) has a nifty full-featured add-on. And if you use Thunderbird or other mail, Dave A offers an inexpensive PDF guide to adapting GTD manually.

For me, for now, GTDInbox rules. You can find it as a standard free Firefox add-in, and you can learn more at GTDinbox.com. I’m sure a premium version is heading our way, and I suspect a lot of folks will jump for it.

Too Many Projects

After too many tasks, my second biggest problem is having too many projects. Collaborative software commonly used for project management software generally comes with ways of dividing up project tasks. In Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com), you have a simple structure of milestones that give you due-dates, and to-do lists that assign responsibilities for meeting those dates. As I mentioned here recently, the new Open Atrium for Drupal has projects and cases, also in a clear intuitive organization that favors collaborative discussion, blogging, and document management. Microsoft Sharepoint, Central Desktop, Zoho and others also have their equivalent.

These systems are definitely a great thing for getting a team already discussing project goals and needs to now focus in on discrete chunks of work. If you are blessed to not have too many projects, this can also work for your individual daily task management. I use and need these features. Yet for much of what I need to get on top of every day, I find myself getting bogged down in navigating down and up the hierarchy of client-project-milestone-tasks.

For Basecamp at least, there are cool Windows or Mac desktop integration add-ons that simplify the to-do process. See http://basecamphq.com/extras for ideas. Some are even free; some have costs that add up as you add users. I have sporadically used the Project Recon add-in.


Like many people, even if I end up duplicating PM entries, I need to quickly get in, order and prioritize all the things to do today, tomorrow, this week and beyond in one place. I need a task list tool, pure and simple. Sometimes I come back to the idea that the best task list tool is the same small notebooks I carry around all the time. Notes with pen and paper. If you have been at meetings with me, then you have likely seen me with one of those black moleskine notebooks. http://www.moleskines.com/klmb712.html. Compact, rugged, no batteries and low carbon footprint, visual, fun, well-engineered, works in weak wireless area all the rest.

Where the notebook falls short is getting those tasks on your calendar. There is definitely a virtue to coming back to my desk, looking through my notebook entries for the day, and reorganizing them into on-line memos, events and tasks. To be useful, those tasks have to wind up on or close to my calendar. That’s the biggest advantage of a software task list.

Too Many Tasks

Maybe you still use a paper pocket calendar. Maybe you can fit your tasks in the margins of the dates on the calendar, and don't have to share your task list with anyone else. I admire this and recognize that you live a different life than me. Fortunately for me and probably most readers here, there are some amazing good software choices for simple task lists. I’ll mention a three favorites, and hope you will help fill in the gaps with others.

Google tasks: If you use Google calendar, why not use its own task list? The task capability has been recently spruced up to include list categories and dates. For most purposes, will do the trick, and if you have mobile Gmail, you can see them there as well.

Remember the Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com/) adds some pretty nifty features. You primarily use it on its web site, which has a simple, uncluttered interface. And you can add your notes and stuff to a task as it comes into play. You can do more visual organizing of your tasks, with a tag cloud, location map and other options you may find soothing as you face a daunting list of things to do.

And lots of cool stuff being done through the RTM API to lets you see your tasks when and where you want. You can also integrate RTM (yes, its adherents have claimed its 3 letter acronym) with your google or Apple iCal calendar. It will send you reminders via email, SMS text, Twitter, or IM, iPhone app, or off-line Google gadget. And if all else fails, you can share your task list with trusted contacts, who will hopefully help you reduce the task load rather than add to them. RTM has enough going for it that I've read blog posts arguing for abandoning more complete project communication systems like Basecamp in favor of just sharing lists with contacts on RTM.

Last I’ll mention Evernote. Evernote has flexible task lists like the others. It is also a polished, modern desktop app that enables pretty slick note taking, both text and web/multimedia clips. If you use your laptop in a lot of meetings, take notes on phone calls, or are constantly clipping articles and multimedia for later reference and writing, evernote has a lot going for it. It syncs an installed Mac or Windows desktop application with an easy, secure web site. Unfortunately, the desktop app will not run on my trusted lightweight Ubuntu netbook, but the web interface is cool enough I might go back to it again.

All three of these are ideal where you do have to manage tons of tasks day in and day out, and your your immediate tasks don’t always line up with a small, tight, hierarchical list of projects. Try them all and see what supports you best.

And having finished this, I get to cross an item off of my task list! Even better, thinking through the choices and casually interviewing a few folks recently about their habits has been therapeutic. Still too many tasks, and yet more confident about the choices in managing them.

Three random updates: Bing, iPhones, and Dropbox

On Microsoft’s Bing what’s new in web search: By all accounts, Microsoft has a success with its re-crafted bing search site. I posted something about it mainly to say, competition can re-emerge even in a market as dominated as web search. With the follow-on Microsoft-Yahoo deal, bing on TV, and all the rest, bing + Yahoo + related now can claim almost third of the search marketplace to google’s almost two thirds, with others nestled in there in single digits.

How good is bing? Or, how good is it for you? Here is a great site for doing a “blind taste test” style search comparison among google, bing and yahoo. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/. Its beta, but it’s fun.

On Apple and the hole it is digging for itself by stridently controlling iPhone software: I wrote about this on idealware recently. The iPhone App Store saga has really emerged as a major business news story for the summer. Apple finally conceded a more standard version of Gmail for the iPhone (one with email push out to the phone). The fact that these developments are covered like the daily sports says a lot. Here is a great run-down of some of the reaction to Apple’s brinksmanship on the iPhone.

The stickiness of this story reflects an important development of wider significance. Having changed the game in audio and mobile devices, consumers expect more and different of it. Sure, part of it is pressure to be more responsive on price. What is really fascinating is how much the pressure is about being more open, as in open source/open content. Compared to the beginning of this decade, having great design is not enough.

We are really in a new era in which “pure” Open Source software has given way to much more of a continuum between being completely closed, proprietary, license-driven and being completely open. And Apple is catching it as much as Microsoft, Oracle and other hold-outs of the last decade. Its about as likely that iTunes be open sourced as Windows, yet the issues of intellectual property, “walled gardens” of controlled add-ons, DRM and so on have become part of much wider social awareness and consumer thinking. This is a good thing for software and technology development generally.

On drop box. When I wrote about dropbox last spring, I really was just looking for something to keep home and work computers in sync. Start with a free Dropbox account and create folders on Windows, Mac or Linux computers (including servers) that will dynamically sync the files, simple as that. I am seeing now just how useful Dropbox really is.

First, it offers another piece in the project management, project planning puzzle. You can share a sub-folder of your drop box with a project team for working collaborative on documents. You can do this in a larger way with Basecamp, Sharepoint, Microsoft Office Live, a Google site and others. What’s nice about Dropbox is that setting up the sharing is really light-weight and easy where collaboration is short-term, project-specific, and not particularly staff-based. It is easy and free to get an account, and it only takes a minute to share out a folder for a team. You are still working in your standard desktop office applications. Yes, the documents are on their server, so there is that Web 2.0 trust factor, but they are also always on your computer. And the web interface includes revisions and other features in simple format.

The other thing I have been thinking about with dropbox is drop box as a full back-up alternative. The free version allows 2 GB of storage. If that doesn’t cover your current, active documents and more, then you lead a different life than me. Moving up, the price for 50GB and beyond, and is more than, say, Mozy or Cabonite, but reasonable enough to consider using it to back up everything. I don’t think I would even true to have it back-up Exchange Server, but I have been playing around with ways to ensure it will back-up active shared files (such as a database). Check it out at getdropbox.com or use this link, and yes, help me get even more storage free! https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTU4MjExMTk.

Dropbox seems like an ambitious small company. Hope they survive.

Google Wave: “what might email look like if we invented it today”

What do you do five years after shaking things up with Google Maps. If you are Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the core developers behind Google Maps, you apply yourself to a different way of thinking about collaboration and communication over the Internet.

Spend an hour and a quarter watching Lars, Jens and their project manager Stephanie Hannon and their crew on Youtube from the June Google I/O conference. Its hard not to start thinking, I could use this thing in my work and when can I try it out.




Background. Email has been around for almost forty years, starting out before the web and the Internet as we know it now. Today, we often have a love/hate relationship with our Inbox. In just the last couple years, whole new realms of team communication, web-base collaboration and social networking sharing have grown up as alternatives to “pure” email.

Problem is, unless you can effectively live on line in one or two of these collaborative cloud worlds, you often still depend on email. And if not email, then other things that push new information out to me to alert me to go back and look. I use Basecamp every day to organize discussion about the projects I’m involved in. I depend on it sending messages by email or feeding reminders into my calendar. If you work with a team using a Google document, a Gliffy process diagram, or a Slideshare presentation, you need to have it send an email to let everyone else know. It's cool that in MS Office 2007 – and now in Open Office 3.1—you can not only “track changes,” but also share comments with other editors. You still have to send the new version out and wait for a response.

Some things get a bit closer to real time collaboration. In a Google doc, you can be on a conference call and all take notes in the same document. Kind of crazy distracting at first, but really useful once you get used to it.

I mentioned dropbox in a recent blog, and now have been playing around with drop.io as well. These give let you share a folder either among your own various computers or else with a team. But you might not notice an update of your team’s collaborative materials unless someone tells you. Email, text, phone, IM, maybe Twitter or private micro blog environments still are needed to complete the communication loop.

Google Wave wants to change that. In the first place, it combines some of the best elements of Gmail, Instant Messaging, and Google Docs. An email becomes a Wave, an organized and organizing conversation. Instead of message and response, you can just respond by editing within the message, so a message becomes a Google Doc. You can discuss points within it by inserting an IM-like discussion at one or another points in the message. Or a poll, or other interactive feature.

So, if four of you want to draw lessons from yesterday’s workshop and blog about it, what can you do? Start a wave with your notes. Others can now edit it real time. And real time will mean seeing everyone’s contributions appear character by character. To broaden the discussion, you don’t forward an email, you just add them to the Wave, and they can use the playback feature to see everyone’s contributions as they came in.

Drag and drop photos from the event and the Wave will automatically have an embedded photo gallery everyone can tag, label or add to. Other one click tools allow you to add links or embed youtube or other external objects.

The line between an email discussion and a collaborative document has gotten a lot narrower. Instead of debate over whether email is dead, Google Wave aims to remake it into what it ought to be today.

Using the Wave API, once your team is far enough along with your summary of yesterday’s event, you can embed it in a blog post or insert into a social media page (much as with a Google map today). As the Wave gets further refined, it will be updated real time on that external page. Extensions based on the API will do simultaneous translation, so if I’m seeing the Wave in English, a team member in Mexico might see it in Spanish. The context sensitive spell checker fixed “icland is an icland” to become: “Iceland is an island.”

Usable versions of this seem months away. Maybe Google figured they would preview so much of it so early because they wanted to get developer attention as early as possible. Other things that will improve options available to collaborative teams also seem in the works. For example, Drupal 7, also due to begin appearing end of this year, also will have some amazing steps forward in collaboration and process integration. Discussion in Drupal circles has already begun, Drupal 7 versus Wave, or Drupal 7 PLUS Wave.

Like other cloud based collaboration initiatives, Wave poses privacy concerns. It will be easy, but will it be as secure as, say, a Drupal 7 collaborative site? One very exciting aspect of the Google Wave model, is that in addition to having the usual rich open environment for developers, the whole project will be Open Source. You will be able to create your own private label Wave site, and presumably ensure the privacy levels appropriate to your work and audience. Now, that seems different for Google.

How important is all this stuff? The collaborative tools we all use today make a huge difference in the creativity, practicality and effectiveness of all kinds of projects today. In its June 15 issue, even as the Business Week cover story bemoaned the slowing down of innovation in the United States, it also highlighted “Cloud Computing’s Big Bang for Business.” Google Wave will be a big part of this by this time next year. Watch the video, then sign up and check it out at http://wave.google.com.