tools

If only life were this easy. Kinkless' Ethan Schoonover gives us this video preview of OmniFocus, which looks to be a pretty nice little app.

The thing that gets me, though, is that OmniFocus does not seem to provide any way to prioritize tasks. To be fair, there is a simple project setting where you can designate that all tasks must be done sequentially, but that's not the same thing as true prioritizing.

I assume this is because the Getting Things Done system does not provide for prioritization. I don't know. I've not read the book and don't plan to. I've got a system. I just don't have the software (no thanks to Windows-centric Franklin-Covey).

The idea behind prioritization is that not all tasks are alike, and to-do lists can become run-on laundry lists of everything to be done under the sun without some prioritization.

My system is fairly straightforward:

A - must be done today
B - should be done today, if possible
C - would be nice if done today (but it's not essential)

This way, even though I may have literally dozens of important things on my list, I can focus straightaway on the most important things first, and then move on to the next most important things -- without having to stop and evaluate just how important each thing is, over and over, throughout the day. I don't know about you, but sometimes my days can get to be pretty darned hectic, and it's great to have figured out in advance what are the big rocks to put in the jar first before dropping in the pebbles and sand.

From what I can discern, OmniFocus (and Kinkless' kGTD + OmniOutliner) don't provide for any native prioritization of tasks. (It's especially ironic when syncing with iCal's own task list, which does in fact offer prioritization. It's not exactly an obscure feature, is it?) Now of course I could subvert the context feature of the system and use that to establish prioritization instead of work context, but that's not ideal, either.

I'd like to have both! I'd like to look at my tasks by priority, broken down by context ... and then flip over to tasks by context, broken down by priority. Alas this doesn't seem to be in the offing, at least in the first release. With dozens of things to get done, having a big long laundry list of unprioritized tasks could end up being more depressing than empowering.

I'm still likely to get OmniFocus when it's released, but I'm not sure how I'll use it. I hope against hope. OmniGroup has won much loyalty and admiration from me for their league-of-its-own OmniGraffle. If they can get task prioritization settings into OmniFocus, they'll have the killer app not just to get things done, but to get the right things done (including laundry).

Shelley directs our attention to Anne Zelenka's SXSW-prompted rant, which includes this:

4. Too many to do list applications. As a Web Worker
Daily writer, of course I’m interested in to do lists and applications implementing them. But just because you can build one with whatever web framework you’re trying to learn doesn’t mean you should release it as a beta and expect me to write about it.

...

8. Getting Things Done. The productivity virus so many of us have been infected with in 2006 and 2007. Let’s move on. Getting lots of stuff done is not the way to achieve something important. You could be so busy planning next actions that you miss out on what your real contribution should be.

Ken Camp chimes in:

It’s the weekend. I’m quite focused on getting little or nothing done. And finding a different sort of appreciation for tools like Twitter that allow my to note what friends, colleagues, and strangers are doing
in passing. Send a little chirp of input if I like, yet still step back and recharge batteries, and in what would be an anathema to David Allen acolytes everywhere - get nothing done.

Stephanie Booth pushes back:

To me, GTD is “a solution to finally be able to enjoy free time without feeling bogged down by a constant feeling of guilt over everything I should already have done.”

Maybe not everyone has issues doing things. If you don’t have trouble getting stuff out of the way, then throw GTD out of the window and continue enjoying life. You don’t need it.

But for many people, procrastination, administrivia piling up, not-enough-time-for-stuff-I-enjoy-doing and commitments you know you’re not going to be able to honour are a reality, and a reality that is a source of stress.

To me, it seems like blogging is getting done on the topic, but the real topic is being missed by all. (Either that or we're all debating over the nature of an elephant.)

The real issue, I feel, is what Peter F. Drucker put so well:

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

These eleven words are part of premise of Franklin-Covey, the gold standard when it comes to productivity management systems.

--And no, it's not "time management": you can't manage time, it happens no matter what you do; all you can do is manage what you do with the time.

"Getting Things Done" suffers from an inept title -- and I confess haven't allocated much of my own attention towards trying to figure out its merits or lack thereof -- so I'll leave off on further commentary there.

But Franklin-Covey suffers even more by keeping their system paper-based, with the only (proprietary) software available able to run only on Windows machines or on hard-coded Palms or in a new online system where even a demo is hidden behind required registration. (Hint to Franklin-Covey: Establish value before picking our privacy pockets.) On the other hand, Kinkless has made "Getting Things Done" relevant for people who live and work primarily on computers (but not me, as it does strike me as rather focused on the doing rather than the what-to-do).

Meanwhile, on my office shelf sits my Franklin-Covey planner in its gorgeous red leather cover, rarely used because when it comes to something dynamic like planning, turning away from the computer to a paper notebook seems neither efficient nor effective.

One of the challenges of launching a new community or social networking site — or introducing new users to an existing site of more-than-modest complexity — is turning people on to the various features and areas. Any community site owner can rattle off a dozen "How do I — ?" questions that came flooding in to them in the first days and weeks of a public launch. (Even worse are the expected questions nobody is asking, because nobody has discovered that cool new widget or feature that apprently is languishing in obscurity.)

Ideally, good design can avoid the more obvious questions like, "How do I sign up?" But even the best-designed social networking site or online community is going to need some sort of introduction to its (hopefully) rich features. After all, new tools, ideas, widgets and usage trends are emerging every day, to the point that new sites almost always reach into feature areas that, for many, if not most, users were until that point largely unknown.

The flip side is that these days even 1-year-old sites and software can seem almost stale. People have come to expect almost any new community or "social networking" (which itself is a relatively new buzz phrase that reflects features that largely did not exist not all that long ago) site is going to offer new frontiers to explore, be they the as-yet-unknown features mentioned above, more common features offered in new ways, or both offered to existing online communities that have been under-served. As someone who develops Drupal-powered sites, which almost always embody myriad powerful features, I can say that, from my experience, this is a challenge that arises with almost every website launch.

The catch-all solution for the challenge of introducing a new site and/or new features to new and prospective community members is the site tour.

Creating a good site tour is always an editorial challenge. The site administration team has to come up with a good, clear, instructive, and hopefully entertaining (or at least certainly not boring) introduction to the site. Usually that consists of your basic page of text with a few graphics. More ambitious or resource-flush groups might produce a video or flash animation that gives an animated presentation. (My own personal bias is to largely avoid these presentations, as they almost always are boring, they almost always take a lot of time to plow through, and they almost always instruct by emulating reality, without any chance for folks to actually do anything — and there's no topping learning by doing.)

Enter Amberjack, a new open source JavaScript library that makes it incredibly easy to create site tours that walk users through the actual site. Licensed LGPL, with a fabulous online wizard that even a Luddite could appreciate, Amberjack is a way to create annotated site tours on actual site pages.

But don't take my word for it. Check out this quick site tour.