Posts Tagged ‘gtd’

Why context is killing me

3 December, 2007

If you’re a GTD-disciple, you usually have a task description, project, due date and context. The first three are rather self-explanatory, but context deserves a little explanation. Context is the physical pre-conditions needed for you to complete a certain task. The original purpose for this was to enable to “put away” stuff you couldn’t complete right now (due to lack of contextual ability). The “putting away” is the fundamental principle of GTD, a context is it’s “big idea”.

Main problem with using context is that most people end up just a couple of contexts such as “computer”, “word”, “excel”, “email” and “phone”. Interesting thing about this is that all but the phone a “virtual contexts” (inside the computer)… and come to think of it, counting Skype or other VOIP-clients, so is the phone ;) So many tasks have converged into being digital tasks, even shopping and going to the library have become redundant contexts in some cases. And with the laptop-computer you can really do all these things anywhere. When context was linked to physical spacetime, organizing by context made sense and was pretty easy… but with so many contexts converging digitally it’s not only affluent, it’s also confusing.

There is however, another benefit to using contexts (or tags in Things) in your support structure: it sharpens the focus of your “batches”. Batches are chunks of similar tasks which are done in sequence, based on the scientifically supported notion that executing many similar tasks at the same time is more efficient.

Working with batches allows you to stay focused. But you can do just fine without using context: “Project” and “Due date” is more than enough for creating batches.

For example: ideally, you have tasks broken down to fewer than twenty minutes. Filling 75 percent of you 8-day, that means you have about 20 tasks to complete in one day, plus another 5 for home. First of all, most people simply don’t have the discipline to actually break down their tasks to this level, which sort of leaves the whole context methodology a bit redundant. AND if you’re one of those able to break tasks down this good, you certainly have the mind to leave the batch adjustments to common sense. Also, creating focused batches assumes you won’t get disturbed when executing, which is a bit utopic in my view.

So here’s what you should do: start organizing by the “getting the right things done”. Start by making a list of stuff, project and when they should be done, “this week”, “next week” or “someday”. Right after dinner, make a list of the three things that your must get done tomorrow, adding their subtasks if necessary. Lable this list as “today”; no more than 10 tasks in total, preferably 5-6. The trick is to convert as many tasks as possible into actionable items, making you feel the “tick off” pleasure all the time. It’s addictive ;)

First thing you wake up, start getting these things done, using projects as support structure and let context emerge naturally from a combination of device access, location and project. Focus on getting these things done, and fix emergency tasks if it’s really necessary. When you’re done, look at your watch. Can you go home? If yes, go home. If no, you move another task from the “this week” list to “today”. Look at your watch. Time to go home? Etc. Before leaving work, organize your tasks, shifting new things to be done to the “today” list.

Rinse, repeat.

Interesting Things

3 December, 2007

So this new task-management software, Things (great name!) , has started to create some stir. Looking at the screencast on their website it’s easy to see why, since it actually brings some novel concepts to the “productivity scene”.

Like my Todude-project, they have chosen due-date as their main structure for organizing tasks, rather than OmniFocus and GTD, which uses context as their main structure. However, Cultured Code (the authors of Things) couldn’t resist including the context structure, which they have in the shape of a pseudo-tag system. Sorting by tags is said to be of a more emergent nature than using context in a GTD-way, although it seems to me that you usually end up with writing more characters for your various tags than for the task itself…

A bit clunky interface, they haven’t really solved the depth yet… my guess is that the software is a bit more feature packed than when they started off scetching their UI ;) But it’s alpha, so I bet they’ll iron these things out. Another interesting part is the “area” feature. An area is something which doesn’t have a definitive end, it’s a “perpetual project” so to speak. I’m not sure that it deserves to be separated from regular projects, but an interesting distinction none the less.

Back to finishing work, so I can continue code Todude tonight!

Announcing Todude

5 November, 2007

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.

Scratching my itch

21 September, 2007

I’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.