As you may know, I’m currently developing a todo-list manager. It’s the essence of a better mousetrap. Don’t know wether anyone will use it, but I will and that’s enough for me 
For more information have a look at Todude.com! I’ll be inviting more beta users on soon so send me an e-mail and you might get a golden ticket.
Posts Tagged ‘Creativity + Productivity’
Announcing Todude
5 November, 2007The next big thing(s)
29 September, 2007For no apparent reason, other than to put it out there, I felt like listing what I feel are the next big things:
- Domain specific meta programming
- Indivdual/social apps for creating better/more ideas
- Productivity for unproductive people
There it is. And yes, I’m (naturally) pursuing all these areas 
Scratching my itch
21 September, 2007I’ve been annoyed by the lack of a good task-manager for quite some time now, trying just about every solution out there. OmniOutliner – too general-purpose, OmniFocus – too bloated/GTD, GooToDo – too crappy UI and poor philosophy, TadaList – too simple, RememberTheMilk – too plain messy (though I still love the name)… so, triggered by my girlfriend’s overuse of post-its, I’ve decided to go at it on my own, building my own interpretation of how one should organize one’s daily work for maximum productivity and inner peace.
And by “daily work”, I mean just that. Too many task-managers have a tendency to try and be a substitute for MS Project, Merlin or even SAP. A task manager needs to reflect the fact that tasks change in nature, timing etc. It needs to have features and a philosophy supporting that.
Probably nothing you would pitch too your average VC… though it might not be such a bad idea: “Productivity/stress is a huge problem most companies, I have a product that increases productivity by at least 25 percent, and stress by 25 percent. With the world economy turning over about 1 gagillion each year, our product could be worth at least 0.25 gagillion, plus future cashflows.” The sick thing is, that with a polished executive summare and the right team – meaning people that are old and managed a complicated main frame start-up in the eighties and then went off to work for IBM, or that were early employees of a successful start-up (founders of a successful start-up seldom need financing for an idea with zero traction) – you could probably pull it off.
My app will be “opinionated software”, which is fancy talk for that I know best But if you do have any suggestions, give it to me! And yeah, I’ll building it in Rails and (if I have time) a desktop-client in AIR. Always nice to have an excuse to polish up on those coding skills.
A universal todo list format
18 September, 2007I finally did the migration to use OmniFocus as my task-management software a couple of days back, and I’m not sure what to think. It seems that they’ve might have been a bit too Dave Allen-centric in their approach, in the sense that if you’re not slavishly hooked on GTD, it’s kind of cluttered and clumsy. If you’re actually any good at getting things done and since there’s no workgroup view/interactivity, the whole system with reviews as basis for prioritizing is actually kind of overkill.
Maybe there should be some universal todo-list file format (UTML?), a simple collection of: task, category, tags, context, due, start, flagged, notes and person. Would be a sweet way to hook up different types of todo list software, both social and individual, since there seems to be no software alone to rule them all?
Kill your darlings
28 August, 2007So yesterday I read a wonderful story about Picasso (it also exists a similar version about Michelangelo) on how he was supposed to make a lion sculpture out of an awful looking piece of rock. A guy asked him how on earth he would transform that lump to a beautiful piece of art, to which Picasso replied “Easy, I just remove everything that doesn’t look like a lion”.
I’ve been stuck on a problem for a week now, trying to explain something that I find painfully obvious to people who don’t. I overcame the problem not by inventing good ideas out nowhere, but by removing everything that didn’t look like a good idea. It worked. Lesson learned. Now you try it.
OmniFocus, yikes!
2 August, 2007Just got invited to the OmniFocus sneakypeek-program (better late than never). Being an avid user of their OmniOutliner software as a means to sort my thoughts and organize my life, I have been very anxious to try it out. Kinkless GTD never really did it for me, and with the developer of Kinkless being a part of the OmniFocus-team I’ve been kind of interested in how much improvements they would be able to make in a stand-alone app. I must say the result is striking; if you’re into GTD this will be a must. Love the different views, the ability to zoom in on different projects and contexts. Simply brilliant. Only thing that annoys me is that the Alpha-character of the software hinders me to make a full switch, btu I will for sure when it’s in public beta!
Finally some help
26 June, 2007I’m lovin’ it
19 June, 2007After trying out various more or less complex PM-apps for the mac (Merlin2, FastTrack, ProjectX etc.) I decided to go for OmniPlan, which is nothing short of fabulous. Sure, it might not have the workgroup-support of Merlin or ready-made web access of ProjectX but it does the job extremely well. Already a proud owner and addicted user of of OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, this seems logical. Can’t wait for OmniFocus, the OmniGroup’s productivity app, which promises to be something of a holy graal for us GTD-addicts. Sweet.
