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Search results for "Posted by Levi Wallach"
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Levi Wallach |
Count me as one of those very frustrated (former) RTM users. I started using it 3+ years ago and we were asking for a few things, most notably subtasks. The only thing RTM seems to care about developing is new clients, browser add-ins, syncing tools, etc. They haven't updated anything in the actual core functioning of their service for almost 3 years, despite incredible amounts of user feedback. You can do a lot with the tool, but you have to basically build everything from the ground up, enforce all your tag-based system yourself without any kind of built-in fields, subtasks, etc. It was so much work managing each task to make sure the tags were set up right, it got in the way of efficiently adding and checking off tags for me. The attitude of the developer, too, was, IMO not very professional. They basically wined that we were being too demanding to actually ASK not even for new functionality, but for them to just commit to add a particular feature or two within a broad timeframe. No, this was too onerous and was putting pressure on them and they could never do such a thing. After a few years of waiting around, it was like waiting for Godot. Toodledo may not add new features every week, but there pace is supersonic compared to that of RTM!
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Levi Wallach |
Posted Mar 23, 2010 in: torn RTM vs Toodledo: want offline
Score: 0
There's also Jott, which I believe works with both RTM and Toodledo. You can also text your tasks. Also Nuevasync for your phone as well as Outlook sync (you would enter the stuff on your phone, sync with outlook then sync with outlook sync?) Not sure if any of these options would work well for you.
Let me just say that as someone who used RTM extensively for a while, I greatly prefer Toodledo, which I've only been using now for a few weeks. It has a lot more structure that lets you to the GTD thing, but still has a fair degree of flexibility in how you want to implement it. RTM is so flexible that you have to come up with a system entirely and stick to rules and sets of tags. It doesn't have built-in (or settable) contexts, or statuses. Most of what you do is based on tags that you have to come up with (and adhere to). Aside from just it being easier to implement GTD stuff in Toodledo right now, since I was working with RTM some three years or more ago, I've come to the conclusion that you can't count on them to add much in the way of features to their product. People have been pleading with them to add subtasks for over three years for example to no avail. Not just that but there really has been about zero additions in core functionality in over two years. The only thing they seem to work on are new clients or ways to sync, api stuff, etc. This is fine if you are completely satisfied with the core functionality, but there were a lot of things that I wasn't, and there answer was basically "we're not telling you what we're going to do or when we're going to do it, so go eff off." Seriously, after some of the users started getting tired of the lack of communication and sent some heartfelt, albeit a bit ranty messages on their forums, they wrote back in a tone that was, I felt, less then professional. Compare that with Toodledo's excellent communication both on these forums as well as through their troubleticket system. They may not tell you when a particular feature will be added, but at least they will tell you that it is on their to-do list. And if you go back through their news items, you will see a constant and regular stream of feature enhancements and additions. If you look through RTM's blog, well, you don't see anything other than the aforementioned client and api work, plus maybe some "tips and tricks" and mentionings of their going to this conference or that show. I just got tired of it after a while and gave up on them... There are other GTD-oriented services out there as well, but while they may have a few features Toodledo doesn't, they lack others that it does and they don't have the great communication and record of enhancements, IMO... |
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Levi Wallach |
Posted Mar 22, 2010 in: Projects with no next actions?
Score: 0
I'm just wondering how people guard against projects that have no next actions? If I check something off within a next action list, I don't necessarily know that it's part of a larger project, or even if I do, I may not have the time to go looking for that project in order to find a new next action. I wish Toodledo had a mechanism to prompt you to specify a new next action for the now next-action-less task, but at the very least it might be nice to create a search that accounted for tasks that had zero (or more than one for that matter) subtasks labeled as next action. There doesn't seem to be a way to do this.
Speaking of such searches, wondering what other ones people have come up with that try to account for potential situations that aren't "legal" based on their implementation of GTD - ie tasks that don't contain status, tasks that have contradicting statuses, etc. |
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Levi Wallach |
Thanks for all your help and postings in the conference. I haven't seen Nirvana and they might create a very good GTD system. I've been looking for GTD systems for some time and there are certainly systems out there much more specifically geared towards GTD, such as Nozbe. Still, a big part of why I choose a particular provider is their responsiveness to their customer, and I feel that Toodledo is very responsive. They may not have every single bell and whistle that every user wants, but they have a list of desired functionality that people have requested and continue to knock those out over time. What more can you ask for? Often services take weeks to respond to an inquiry if ever, or they simply say that they can't tell you whether or not your idea is one that they are planning to implement. Toodledo has also been around for many years and has proven itself in terms of its longevity. I feel like even if some new service comes around like Nirvana that has some stuff more catered to the way I do things, I'm still going to wait until it's had a year or two on the ground with a large number of users asking for new things, reporting issues, etc. I'm not willing to keep two databases of tasks, so for now I'll let other brave souls like Proximo do the beta-testing :) Anyway, good luck and I hope it proves useful to you without a lot of bumps in the road.
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Levi Wallach |
Posted Mar 19, 2010 in: A tip, an issue, and a feature request
Score: 0
Posted by PeterW:
I've asked elsewhere in other threads but will say it again... I also want to rename Inbox to Inbox. Peter, it's a hack, but the script that I link to above at least fixes this in Firefox... |
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Levi Wallach |
Posted Mar 19, 2010 in: Get access to saved searches?
Score: 0
Posted by Toodledo:
We do plan to add saved searches to the API. Its on our todo list. I hope you've made this priority. In my opinion these searches are one of the most powerful features of Toodledo and deserve to be exposed on every client/interface out there! |
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Levi Wallach |
Thanks Lance, I think for me Someday will work ok as just a status entry. The only big advantage I see to using folders for these things isn't even an advantage but a potential one - that being that if Toodledo allowed you to drag tasks from one folder to another, it would allow for very quick categorizing of multiple tasks.
Anyway, I wanted to add that I just came across a limitation of Toodledo which makes some of my plans a bit more difficult. That is there slim/mobile versions have no access to saved searches, which are going to be a big part of how I will look to find what is currently the next action(s) I should be looking to do, especially given the ability to create custom sorts as I've discovered. Without access to this on my phone, it just means things are going to be harder whenever I'm away from home or the office... |
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Levi Wallach |
Posted Mar 18, 2010 in: Please, Please, Please - saved searches on Mobile/Slip sites!
Score: 0
This is pretty important to me, and perhaps others who have very specific saved searches that are custom-designed to give us the specific types of information we need. Without this we're left to wade through lots of items that don't matter and thus make the whole mobile interface to Toodledo much less usable. Please, please, please!
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Levi Wallach |
Posted Mar 18, 2010 in: A tip, an issue, and a feature request
Score: 0
I've just started playing with Toodledo and trying to implement a GTD system with it. Toodledo has some of the features that are part of GTD, but there are things that aren't set up the way I would like. There are various workarounds and one such that I've discovered is a greasmonkey script:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/41369 This lets you replace text on a page with some other text. What I'm currently using this for is to replace "No Folder" with "Inbox" In GTD, your "inbox" is where you collect stuff to later process. In Toodledo if you don't specify a folder, then your tasks are assigned as "no folder." Sure it's a minor thing and a matter of semantics, but I've seen others actually create a separate folder called "inbox", but really what's the point if you can rename "no folder"? While the above works well (for me), there are other items I want to do this for that don't work quite as well. For example, many of the status items in Toodledo are not part of GTD, or are called something else. I've tried to rename these, and they do appear renamed as plain text, but in form pull-down lists they are still the original name. Oddly, "Inbox" DOES show up fine in the pull-downs, but statuses do not. So my question is, is there any way to get this to work. I've tried messing with the script but haven't had any luck. I'm sure it's something about how the status option entries are created by toodledo which is different from the folder options, but I can't quite figure out how. Finally, it would be great if we were able to actually rename the status fields and even remove some that were not relevant to us, but at least a renaming ability would be a nice feature. And while you're at it, maybe even have a way to edit the "no folders" or at least give you choice between that and "inbox"? An important note here I've not mentioned is the limitation that this script is only going to rename things on the machine(s) you have it installed on, so if you look at toodledo on your phone (or any other browser that you haven't messed with previously or that can't run such scripts), the old names will still show, which is why being able to rename them would be the optimal solution... |
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Levi Wallach |
A few more thoughts about status before you all kick me off the forum for talking to much! :)
It seems to me that out of all the statuses in Toodledo, all I really need are None, Postponed (which I've renamed to Tickler), Someday. I'm still conflicted about whether or not to use the star for next action or the next action status. On the one hand the star is just easier to sort by as well as being more visible, on the other hand because it is completely separate from the status, you are maintaining two fields for one field AND there's the potential for making something next action while also setting the status to something like waiting on, which would be really a contradiction. Otherwise, though Delegating and Waiting are really one thing in GTD, not two. I can see the usefulness of separating it out for some, but not for me. Canceled isn't necessary - it's basically like deleting a task (I don't need to keep a record of tasks I started or thought of but then decided not to do/continue them). Reference - I keep such stuff in Evernote, as others do. Planning vs Active to me are just about whether you've started working on a task or not. It might be useful to track, but you can always track this by searching start date. I'd rather just mark the start date when it starts rather than having to maintain this status entry as well. Really, when I'm looking to see what to do, I don't really care whether I've already started a task or not, just how much time there is LEFT to finish it, right? I've tried to use the script to remove some of these, but unfortunately the still show up in the pull-down lists. It works fine for folders, just not for statuses for some reason! Please, Toodledo, can you allow us to change the status names and even remove some? |
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Levi Wallach |
Sorry to keep posting about this as I do it, but it helps with the mental processing of this and hopefully it's useful to some of you.
Basically, I've decided to go with Statuses instead of folders for the main items, mainly because I think the folders as Proximo has set them up are not necessarily mutually exclusive (ie something can be a project but also a waiting for or someday /maybe) That's why for me I think the project vs lone action aspect needs to be completely seperated, otherwise there's a temptation to have tasks and subtasks in different folders, which doesn't seem right to me. I've kept two folders, Projects and Actions, and use them in the same way that Proximo does. For the rest I use statuses. Proximo, I know that you find it simpler to as you say, manage statuses via three lists vs. 9 (actually it's really 11!) statuses, but just because there are that many, doesn't mean you need to use them. Really, you just should use the ones that are in GTD and/or the ones that suit your workflow - eg Action, Next Action, Someday, Waiting, Tickler. I know some of these don't exist per se in Toodledo's status list (sure which we could modify the names or even delete some!), but one can use a greasemonkey script, like the one I mentioned earlier, to edit the names... Another thing about contexts: Proximo you've suggested that you use tags and contexts in combination in order to deal with the fact that you can't have multiple contexts in Toodledo. Currently I'm not including resources (phone, internet, etc.) in my contexts because I feel like most of these are not needed when I can just specify a location. My only issue is that there are some things that I may have access at home or work, but not on the road. Thus, it would be great if I could have assigned BOTH @home and @work to a particular task so that it doesn't come up with I'm not at one of these places, but does when I am. Since I only am using 3 contexts/locations, I thought of a workaround that I might use, and that is to create combo contexts myself! So in addition to an @home, @work, and @out, I could also have an @home@work, @home@out, and @work@out. Then use the lack of any context as meaning the same thing as being able to do a task in ANY context. This way I can also use tags for a specific purpose (either to categorize things into major life focuses as you have or as a way to specify energy level needed for a task). I can see, though, that this might get impractical if you also have resources as contexts. If you have phone, computer, and one other (can't think of one right now), you're talking about how many different combinations? at least 54 from my quick rough estimate. |
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Levi Wallach |
Ah, never mind, figured out that I have to click "Save this search" after I hit search, and then name it the same thing as the existing saved search I intended to change. Not the most intuitive interface, but at least it works!
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Levi Wallach |
I'm fairly new to Toodledo and still trying to learn the UI. I'm having difficulty right now editing searches. When I click on "Modify This Search" and add new criteria, there doesn't seem to be a "save" button or something similar. Hitting the Search button doesn't save it, just runs it. What am I missing??? Seems the only option I have right now is to completely remove the search and recreate it, is that true?
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Levi Wallach |
So I'm finally going through my brain-dumped set of tasks and putting them in folders and adding context to them. One thing that occurs to me (it occurred to me before but I forgot to mention it in my previous message) is that projects can actually span into different buckets. That is, I can have a project that is "someday /maybe" (not sure I want to consider the project for a while but I know that it would be a project vs a single action) or "waiting for" (ie I can't start the project until I get some go ahead).
The way I am currently thinking of "someday /maybe" is to not bother contextualizing or categorizing these items at all. They might be projects, they might be single actions, but because they are not definite to-do's and/or things I want to think about now, I don't feel like they NEED to be fully fleshed out. When I do go through these (presumably on a weekly basis) I can consider each of them and figure out if I really want to upgrade them to something I want to do now. But "waiting for" is a bit more difficult when it comes to tasks vs projects. I'm wondering how others deal with it. The whole idea of moving a subtask to a different folder than it's parent task seems strange to me. Do you just move the entire main task and all subtasks there? since essentially if one of the tasks in the project are in the waiting for status they all are? Or wait, that's not even true! You could have delegated one task on a project, but other tasks are still actionable, one of which could be deemed a next action. In such a case I would think you would HAVE to move that one delegated task to the waiting-for folder. I see now the issue of it not showing up in that waiting for folder unless subtasks are flattened, which doesn't bother me all that much, but it does seem odd that it ALSO shows up in the project folder even though it isn't actually IN that folder! :) What I've been wondering is whether it makes any sense to have just two folders, an projects folder and an actions folder as Proximo has set up, but then to use the status field to designate whether something is active/waiting for/someday-maybe/tickler? I suppose you could also use it to designate next action, but I'm not sure yet whether that would be preferrable to just setting a star... Seems I will need to play with this a lot more than I thought! Someday maybe I'll actually get to DO my tasks! ;-) |
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Levi Wallach |
Posted Mar 18, 2010 in: Book on best way to use Toodledo to manage tasks and projects?
Score: 0
context is either the location that a task needs to get done in or a resource needed (phone, computer, etc.)
status is the overall status of the task (ie whether it's in progress, on hold, delegated to someone else, etc.) Folders can be used for different purposes. Some use them as project containers (put all your tasks for a given project in a folder specifically for that project), some use them for broad categorizations (ie personal/job), and still others use them in place of the status field to hold various "buckets" (single tasks, multi-step tasks (ie projects), someday/maybe, waiting for, etc.). You might consider looking at the mammoth thread started by Proximo in this forum (http://www.toodledo.com/forums/5/2660/0/proximos-gtd-setup.html) that shares his method which is the last one I mentioned. Lots of good discussion on contexts, status, and folders in that. |
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Levi Wallach |
Thanks for the reply, Proximo. I'm sure this works for you but I'm not sure if "areas of focus" will really mean much to me. Perhaps it makes it more flexible for you, but I think it overcomplicates things (at least for me). I'll try to explain. If I have work stuff do to, I'll just make it @work (either tag or context, I haven't decided yet). I'm not going to look at @work stuff when I'm away from work, so in this sense the focus is the same as the location. Home/Personal is a bit different since theoretically I might want to do some personal things at work. However, I don't have work-related stuff to do at home (thankfully), and if a stray task came up that required me to do a work-related task at home, I don't mind marking such things as @home. I guess I understand the distinction. Your area of focus as you call it is kind of a broad category of how you divide your life rather than a strict location or resource. I suppose if I wanted to track these things, which who knows maybe I'll decide (although right now 98% of the tasks that I've brain-dumped into my inbox are personal), I think it would make more sense to my brain to use tags for these. I don't know if this extra level of categorization would be too honerous or if it would allow me to create more useful searches in the end. I guess it works for you and that's the important part.
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Levi Wallach |
First of all I want to thank Proximo and everyone else for this long-running thread. I finally got through the whole thing.
I have been playing with GTD on and off for a few years, have read and listened to the book, and even created my own pdf flow-chart in order to understand the process better. I used Remember The Milk for a long while and tried to mesh GTD into it. I did this by developing a greasemonkey script (or really modifying one that was already out there but unrelated to GTD): http://bit.ly/ayvI6w. The only problem was all the maintenance you have to do in RTM. It is so open and flexible (based only on tags and searches), that it's a pain having to remember all the rules to get a given system to work right. I had seen Toodledo back then but it seems it wasn't as powerful then and when I took a look at it a couple of weeks ago again I realized that it had improved marketdly and with a leaning toward elements that are built into GTD. It has additional structural items (folders, contexts, and subtasks) that RTM doesn't have, despite YEARS of people pleading for them. That was another big reason I gave up on RTM, they seemed unable or unwilling to devote any time to actually enhancing the featureset of their tool. Very frustrating, it seems they have not added a feature in three years. They've chosen to devote all their attention to connectivity (new client versions, api stuff, syncing in different ways, etc.). That's their perogative, but it somehow gives the sense they believe their service is perfect in it's core features, despite constant clamoring to the contrary. Ok, sorry for that little rant, back on subject! I found the use of folders here interesting and fairly intuitive, although I initially was confused as others why Proximo wasn't using statuses for these. I suppose you could use either depending on how your brain works. I'm probably going to configure things more or less the way Proximo has and then play with it if I feel it's not working as well as I hoped. Contexts: I've struggled with these a bit and the discussion about them has been helpful. It's true that I have my phone, and even internet with me all the time, whether I'm out, at home, or at work. So perhaps location is the key context for those of us who have smartphones? The problem with this is there are also things that I can do in multiple locations, so how exactly do you contextualize these? I guess multiple contexts, as Proximo suggested, might work, but I don't see how using tags in addition to single contexts can solve this issue. The only current solution I can come up with off the top of my head is to use tags for these instead. Thus you could tag some tasks with just @home, some with @home and @out, and still others with @home, @out, and @work. Then you can modify your searches to search by tag instead of context. So then what would you use context in that case? Actually, there is another item in GTD that is not incorporated in Toodledo that might fit well here. It's energy level. From my notes and flowchart it seems that once you get down to all the tasks that are actionable and that you want to do now (or as soon as possible), you are then faced with which to do first. Part of this is done by the context, but after that there are three additional criteria: 1)time - do you have enough time to complete it. 2)effort/energy - how much mental (or physical?) energy does it take, and does that match your current energy level 3)intuition - this is a kind of wildcard that some might consider a cop-out in some ways because there's no way to systematize intuition, it's by definition a very slippery idea. But I think he also suggests just having a feeling of what will give the "biggest bang for the buck" here. So, Toodledo has the first one (length of time), the third one is impossible (or I suppose you could try to use priority in lieu of something intangible like intuition), but the second one is not available either, and at least to me is easier to define and calculate than "intuition." So you could create "Low-energy" "Medium-energy" and "High-Energy" (or whatever terms make sense to you) contexts. This makes the context view not very useful, but if you are using searches than you can search by tags (ie context) but then sort by length of time and/or energy level. My only wish here is that Toodledo would actually allow you to save multiple sort criteria - eg sort by length ascending, then energy level ascending. I don't currently see a way to do that, so i'll have to play with all this. Finally, I just wanted to let folks know of a cool trick that I was able to figure out by using a greasemonkey script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/41369 that replaces text on a web page. I set it up to replace all instances of "No Folder" with "Inbox" because really that's what "No Folder" means to me, and it seems like extra work having to choose a constructed "Inbox" folder to do the same work. It seems to work fine! Levi |
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Levi Wallach |
I'm very interested in this as well, but it seems Joel is even too busy to follow up on this thread (over two months now), so I feel a bit hopeless! Ethan, any chance you can develop some front-end stuff yourself? I'd assume the front-end is actually the easier part to this. I'm a developer myself but haven't yet delved into WebOS, and would love to help out but given my lack of experience with WebOS as well as my lack of time, I don't want to promise much. Perhaps I can see if some of the WebOS devs I know might be interested in collaborating on a project?
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