Scheduled tweaking

I have been following life-hacking and productivity for quite some time now, like many of you. After a while the many of the subjects and themes seem repeated.

I have taken a tool box approach to productivity. I read Getting Things Done by David Allen. I studied Autofocus. Years ago I had some training in the Franklin Covey method. I read all of the Zen to Done articles. I studied Agile. There are others. I use elements of many of these.

I find all of this interesting. One of my undergraduate degrees was in psychology. I came quite close to doing a Masters in organizational behavior.

The downside to this interest is that I tweak my systems a lot. I evaluate new ideas and see if they will help me. I get restless and switch between system. I have started keeping notes when I make these jumps so that I can remember the pros and cons of various approaches and minimize changing.

What if I limited tweaking to only certain days of the week or the month? What if any approach I chose had to stay in a steady-state for a month?

I could save a lot of time. I’m trying to focus more on actually getting things to completion rather than focusing on the methods or the philosophy of productivity. Novel idea, right?

Contexts and metadata on tasks - is it a waste of time?

Many productivity methods mention tagging tasks with metadata. I’ve been thinking about this and wondered if I have gone overboard in this regard. Having been a fan of productivity systems for many years I’ve seen systems come and go and most include this in some way. There was the Franklin letter/number system. GTD has contexts. I’ve seen recent articles advocating more expansion of tags to include energy, passion and others.

Is metadata tagging worth the time to do it? One thing I can’t stand about Omnifocus and Things is the number of taps it takes to enter metadata on iOS. I have tried to minimize this time investment by using Taskpaper with Textexpander. I have snippets that expand to sets of context tags. For example typing “t1m” expand to “@AAA @1 @m” which is a priority one task to be done today on the mac. Very fast tags.

I find, however, in practical experience, that I don’t end up leveraging these tags on the back end like I could. Perhaps that makes it not worth my time to do it in the first place. I most frequently use my mac-related tag “@m” when I am seated at the computer. I rarely filter by priority. Why? I already know what is important with or without a quick glance at the list. I also like my “@AAA” tag which is my designataion for today’s list. That allows me to see my actionable stuff for today and prevents me from feeling overwhelmed by the size of the global list.

Mark Forster’s Autofocus system advocates scanning pages of tasks to see what stands out. I have always found this to be interesting. I think I agree with what I believe to be an underlying assumtion of this method: our brains know what needs to be done and are able to consider, in real-time, any number of related elements such as our energy level, our passions, our priorities, our deadlines.

Maybe simple list apps like Clear have a good thing going in being too simple to allow tagging.

My wife writes task lists on paper, or her hand on days she needs to and just works from an inner list on the other days. She has no formal productivity system. She is as productive as anyone I know.

Perhaps I will back off of all this tagging and trust my brain more.

Does iOS/iPhone todo app design really matter in productivity?

Does iPhone App visual design matter in productivity?

I’ve been thinking about Clear and how much appearance and design might affect productivity. Is Clear more than just an app that is cool to look at and play with? How many of us will be using it in 3 months? Here are some factors related to design that might be considered.

Tap Count

Some apps suffer from a high tap-count. I have previously logged the number of taps it takes to create a todo, for instance, and used it to compare several apps. Things, Reminders, Omnifocus and others can have a high tap-count if one is entering in more than just the task name. Clear forces a low tap-count by not allowing additional data entry and by truncating the task name field size. Taskpaper has a lower tap-count also because all addition task data is placed on the same line as the task name.

One hand or two?

Apps that allow one-handed navigation are more situation-adaptible and therefore faster. Sometimes one mostly is full or used for a task. Perhaps once must enter a quick todo when (gasp) driving. Clear is interesting in that some of its fuctions must be done with two hands. Other apps such as Things, Reminders, Omnifocus, and Taskpaper can be used mostly one-handed. Siri, of course, is another wrinkle on this.

Data compartmentalization

I really look dimly on designs that have extensive areas that must be tapped into and out of. Enter the task name on one page, exit and go to a page to enter the due date, exit and enter a page to enter the context, etc, is a painful process. Clear has only three levels and only one level for the task data. A Taskpaper todo file has one level, period. Things, Reminders and Omnifocus have data stuffed in all kinds of various and sundry places.

A pleasure to use

Some have commented that Clear is fun to use and therefore they will be more productive. I think there might be some truth to this but have not looked at it objectively. For me, Clear is fun to use until I need to search, tag, sync, etc.

Screen content balance

I like Taskpaper’s ability to change font size. I use a 13pt Helvetica font which allows a nice high-level view of &;12-15 tasks. Clear gives me the feeling of too little presented at once. It maxes out at 8 tasks at a time. Things used to annoy me because I felt like I saw too few tasks at once. On the other hand, sometimes Taskpaper can be intimidating because I can see the entire list easily and it seems overwhelming.

Task name truncation

Things truncates the task name in the master list. Taskpaper does word wrapping. Clear doesn’t truncate, it just limits the task field to one line.

Is it cool?

I like to use apps I think are cool. Clear is cool. I think the same of Taskpaper - especially with a black background and white lettering.

Conclusion

In thinking about this, I think there will be users that will get more done with Clear because it is gesture-based, innovative and cool. However, for many of us that want tags, search, contexts, sync across devices, scripting on the Mac, etc, Clear falls short and is just a nice looking veneer over a simple list. I do admire the design of Clear and commend the Devs/Designers on a fine app.

Augmenting GTD apps with a spreadsheet for repeating todos

I’ve used several GTD apps and one weakness many have is the lack of repeating todos. I recently used Things again for a while due to the ability it has to manage todos. I grew to not like the mystery as to how many repeating todos would appear on any given day. I recently set up a Numbers spreadsheet as a chart for repeating todos. I put 1-31 along the top for the days of the month. I listed repeating todos along the left column sorted by my life roles (or areas of responsibility). I put a one in a box to designate the need to do a repeating todo on a given day. Each column was summed which allowed me to balance repeating todos across all days. This setup allowed me to achieve the daily-load balance that was not easily achieved in Things. Such a spreadsheet could be tracked on paper or on a handheld device. It was stress-neutral. I felt initially less stress when I felt my repeat todo load was balanced across days. My stress level rose, though, when I realized I have, on average, 13-15 repeating todos every day. Now to cull the number of repeats and simplify things. Addendum: I’ve since moved onto a trial of a new strategy using Taskpaper and repeats added to the document at weekly intervals.

Productivity system wish list

I’d like a productivity app that can handle all of this:

1- Todos:

      One-offs.
      Repeats.
      Archivable todos
      Scheduled todos
      Todos with a journal-type comment affixed later

2- Various Calendar views (day, week, month)

3- Displaying appointments with todos

4- Sync via MobileMe (iCloud). Don’t care about Google.

5- Journaling - comments on appointments, todos, free text. Outputs appointments + todos + other.

6- Estimates of todo possibilities within time blocks based on historical todo durations.

7- Plenty of speed

8- Clutter-free design

9- Powerful desktop companion

10- Philosophies: GTD + Agile +/- Superfocus

I care too much about this.

Handling inputs

I have a fair amount of intermittent stress related to all of the inputs in my life: Twitter, RSS feeds, paper, todos from other people, webpages, e-mails, calls. I have to work on controlling the inputs flow rate as well as effectively be able to process things (ie - GTD). I recently culled several of my inputs.

I love tools that help with fast processing such as NetNewsWire (see ‘L’ key), paper, text files when needed. Some tools are fun to use or exude appeal and design but are not efficient. One example of this is Reeder on the Mac. It looks nice and is fun (in some ways) but is only moderately efficient.

On the other hand, one should not have so much to process that one is forced to only use efficient tools. It is good to have a managable amount of inputs and then use tools that are efficient enough and well-designed as well. NetNewsWire with the Brockman style plus Twitter pulled in via RSS is a nice balance for me.

Todo list too long

My todo list is too long with several dozen items on it. My person record is 175 items. That might be smaller than some out there but it elevates my stress level. I recently moved 40-50% of my list in Taskpaper to my Someday/Maybe list. I think I was under-utlilizing this list. From GTD Times: “feel free to put anything on Someday Maybe as a place to capture it. Just be sure to review it in your Weekly Reviews (or regularly) to trust you’re seeing what’s in there.”

TextExpander and TaskPaper on iPhone

I mentioned that I like to use the combination of TextExpander and TaskPaper on the Mac. This is even more useful on the iPhone. I used to use Things and Omnifocus on my iPhone but became frustrated at the large number of taps needed to get tasks entered with metadata / tags. Taskpaper is much quicker at data entry on the iPhone and especially so with TextExpander. For example:

“Buy milk t1e”

Expands to “Buy milk @t @1 @e”

I shortened the tags to single letters a while ago for increased speed, for example, with sorting. @t is today, @e is an errand, @m is for a mac, @h is at home. @1 is a top priority. @w is waiting. I prefer the wait status to be a tag rather than a project-level collection so todos can remain with their original projects.

This is the fastest data entry for todos that I have seen on iOS. I haven’t used all todo apps, though. I’m sure there are simpler apps that are just tasks-only which are quick. For more advanced GTD-level apps that add tags to todos and enable sorting (Things, Omnifocus, etc), this is very quick. Minimal, quick - love it.