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Rory |
Very interesting, thanks for the responses. I'd been trying to use due dates for everything since that seems to be the only way it shows up on the hotlist (I'm not using priorities at the moment).
I suppose that trying to work purely off the hotlist might not be the way to go then. I was a bit worried that I would leave the date field empty and then never actually do it since I wouldn't see it (apart from in my weekly review). I'm not using a someday list yet, but looking at my projects I think some of them should actually be on this list. I'm going to start using that. Thanks for the "Verb the Noun with the Object" idea, that really helps to clarify my project names. My reading example was probably poorly explained, but I'll often get try to read technical books for work. For recreational reading I just let it happen when it happens. One question based on this then: Say I do want to read through technical books at a rate of one a month, but it's not required. I'd like to still set a task to read through one chapter every three days or so. Isn't the only way to do this to set a due date on this task? Thanks. |
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Rory |
I've been applying GTD (well, sort of) for about a month now, so I thought I'd just post my experience so far as a newcomer. I hope this may be of interest to some people here, or that you might be able to point me in the right direction with a few questions I have.
My Dad actually sent me the GTD book about a year ago, but ironically I never got around to reading it and it got shoved away in a bookcase. I ended up purchasing the book (because I forgot that my Dad sent it to me after a year) after reading about GTD on a personal finance blog. I've read the book just once, and I get the impression it's the kind of book you'd have to read a few times to fully grasp it all. My initial impressions were that the whole concept sounded really interesting, but the suggested methods of application seemed a bit outdated. I mean, today we have great web services like Toodledo along with smart phone applications which really enable a different way of applying GTD compared to the idea of using folders and physical inboxes to track 'stuff'. One example of this is that if someone tells me something, and I need to jot down a task, it just takes me a couple of seconds to whip out my phone and add it to Toodledo. I suppose in the folder method I would have used a notebook or something, but then I'd have to transfer it to another piece of paper so that it could be filed into the correct folder. I feel like the idea of a weekly brain dump isn't as important if you can add tasks at any point in time (though I actually still find it helpful sometimes to do the brain dump to get me focused on what's rattling around in there). My overall impression of applying GTD using Toodledo and Todo (on the iPhone) has been overwhelmingly positive. In the last month I've moved house, repaired my motorcycle (which I've procrastinated on for nearly two years), got back in touch with some old friends, and a lot more. Even the stressful task of moving house went really smoothly, and I can attribute much of the reason for that to having a method to deal with all of these tasks. I definitely have an immense feeling of satisfaction based on how much I've gotten done recently, but I can't help wonder if this is just an initial euphoria due to actually getting anything done. We'll see... Initially I felt relieved to dump all of those things in my brain into some kind of system. I was still far from a mind like water, and actually I was preoccupied a lot with trying to remember all those little things I'd filed away. Looking at my statistics, I can see that I added about 80 tasks on one day, and the following couple of days I added about 30 more each day. After that it started to die down to a more managable level. The flip-side of this is that I also had a huge surge of tasks to complete. For a while it seemed like a lot of effort, but that too soon died down to a much more managable level. There were some unexepected benefits of using GTD too. For example, I would sometimes go somewhere like the hardware store specifically to buy something, knowing that there were probably other things in the store I'd been meaning to pick up at the next chance. My way of reminding myself of what these things were was to wander around the store hoping that the sight of the item would remind me. Now I head in with a list and I'm out as quick as I can. Also, getting things like car maintenance and other chores under control is really easy now, so I have a lot more freedom to do what I want when I want without feeling guilty about neglected chores! It's a strange feeling, but I kind of feel like there's two versions of me at the moment: One is the boss who processes all of the tasks and makes projects and decides when things will get done. The other is the worker who gets given a task list and just has to finish all of the tasks on the list. It actually feels pretty good to have this separation, and it makes things easy for me. I definitely have some questions still. For example, I end up dumping a lot of tasks into a miscellaneous folder, but this feels like a cheat. Is this cheating? I also struggle sometimes to choose a good due date for a task, and I often seem to pile them up at the weekend. I'm sometimes pretty optimistic about what I can get done in the future, and when I get to the time I end up postponing some lower priority tasks. I suppose this is to be expected to a certain extent, but I feel like I'm cheating whenever I do it. One mistake I continually make, but I'm starting to improve on, is that I often make tasks that are projects unintentionally. Is there a good litmus test for this? For example, I might write a task to read a certain book, but this really feels more like a project. I would suddenly see a task on my hotlist to read a certain book, but there was no way I could read for 5 hours and complete that task. Instead I now write tasks like 'read at least one chapter of XXX' under a project to read the book. There are several features of GTD/Toodledo that I'm not really using at the moment, like goals, priorities and statuses since they don't really feel that useful to me at the moment. I'm trying to slowly adopt GTD so that I don't get overwhelmed or discouraged. Anyway, long post I know! Congratulations if you've got all the way down here. My big take away of all of this is that doing something about all of my 'stuff' is so much better than doing nothing. No, I'm not doing GTD by the book, but what I am doing has made such a big difference that I'm going to stick with it. Cheers, Rory |
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Rory |
Posted Jul 10, 2009 in: Toodledo's iPhone app has been updated.
Score: 0
Speaking of tags, it would be nice if you could select from previously made tags when adding a new task. It's really easy now to misspell a tag since you have to type it in.
I think that might have been requested before, but I thought I'd pipe up just in case. |
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Rory |
Posted by Tyler:
Toodleloo (meaning "goodbye") doesn't have the snobbish connotations you mention in the US (in fact, it's news to me that the phrase has this connotation in the UK). Yeah, I get the pun. For me it evokes memories of watching old war films where the officers would chirp to each other "toodleloo old chap!" and such like. I don't think I've ever heard anyone use that phrase in any seriousness though. |
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Rory |
I'm fine with the name too - it's amusing and has some character. It's definitely memorable.
Coming from England though, it reminds me a lot of the phrase "toodle pip / toodeloo", which is pretty much reserved for upper class snobby-type people with curly moustaches. I assume this is what Sven was referring to (albeit with a much more eloquent description), so I kind of understand the somewhat negative connotations there... |
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Rory |
Posted Jul 07, 2009 in: Staying logged in on the website
Score: 0
Great, thanks. I really like Toodledo, and the fact that it is actively improving is a great sign. Keep up the good work!
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Rory |
Posted Jul 07, 2009 in: Staying logged in on the website
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Ok, so this is by design? It seems like most websites which hold potentially sensitive data online (like banks, email services, amazon) will not keep you logged in after closing the browser unless you have checked the option to do so (if there even is one).
Have you guys considered doing the same? This seems much safer to me, since I don't have to remember to sign out every time I use a computer to access Toodledo. |
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Rory |
Thanks for the tip Anders!
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Rory |
Posted Jul 07, 2009 in: Staying logged in on the website
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Well I don't want it to delete all of my cookies when the browser closes since they're useful for other websites I visit. I thought that the cookie should be invalid the next time I come to the site if that check box isn't set?
I tried this on Firefox for mac and I have the same problem. It seems like that login flag just isn't working. |
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Rory |
Is there a shortcut to get to the no-folder folder?
That would be really useful, since most of my tasks end up there initially. At the moment I have to go to the folders view, then click more (since I have a fair few projects), then click no-folder. I just realized that I could potentially use the recently added tab instead for that. Is that what everyone else does? |
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Rory |
It's just one layer - subtasks and that's it. I think there are a few posts on the forum with a similar question, so you could probably do a quick search to find out why.
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Rory |
Posted Jul 06, 2009 in: Staying logged in on the website
Score: 0
Hi,
I'm using Google Chrome 3.0.191.3, and I remain logged in even after closing the browser. I've made sure that I don't have the check box set for 'remember me for next time', so it's not that. I don't have other browser windows open, and my google account (which is also set to not stay logged in) correctly requests my login information again. I tried this in Firefox and it seems to have the same issue. Is this a known problem, or do I need to change something? Cheers, Rory |
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Rory |
Appigo's Todo syncs to Toodledo over the internet. I'm using Toodledo's web interface whenever I'm on the computer, and Appigo's Todo app on the iPhone.
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Rory |
Posted Jul 04, 2009 in: Why Contexts Don't Work (and what will!)
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Posted by Anders:
Maybe I misunderstand your post, but you could do that now with a saved search for: Tag contains home OR Tag contains phone OR Tag contains computer. On the surface it seems like that would work, but in practice it might break down. For example, you may end up with a task that was actually marked as "phone, work" since that matches the phone part of the query, but you can't do it since you're not at work. By using the subset rule, you are guaranteed to get tasks that you can do now. When looking at the task, the rule basically says "is every one of this task's tags part of the query set passed in by the user", if so, present it as an option. Of course, this is probably going to be a bit pessimistic, since it would discard things like "phone, dad" when actually that could be a good option. Rory |
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Rory |
Posted Jul 04, 2009 in: Why Contexts Don't Work (and what will!)
Score: 0
I too ditched contexts fairly quickly after realizing that it's pretty hard to maintain orthogonal contexts. I found it much easier to use the tags, and I'm looking forward to see any improvements in the tagging system.
Simple boolean operators are clearly not good enough to match tasks based on a bunch of tabs, but it seems it would be pretty easy to match based on subsets. For example, you may enter your current situation as the tags for home, phone and computer. It seems like it would be really easy to match any task whose tags are a subset of the supplied tags. e.g. This would match all tasks with tags: home phone computer home phone home computer phone computer home phone computer I'd love to see something like this, especially with presets for common situations as mentioned above. I'm brand new to Toodledo though, so I'm still learning the best way to approach things. The flexibility of Toodledo is just fantastic, and I'm very impressed. Rory |
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