Jeff Hunsberger describes his method for creating short-term location based tasks.
I didn’t want to set up geofences for my main “Home” and “Work” contexts because I had dozens, maybe hundreds, of tasks nested under those contexts that would have popped up when I arrived.
The location fences are clever in OmniFocus. Like Jeff, I rarely use them because they are inappropriate most of the time. If I walk past a hardware store on my way to a post office1 I don’t want to be nagged.
While I’m fascinated by this use of Github as a company infrastructure, it sounds a bit painful for anyone not highly technical but might be a nice fit for a few nerds working on secret projects.
I’m still very interested in an all-in-one semi-private collaboration space that supports threaded chat and code syntax highlighting. It’s hard to find without slipping into the world of development-sprint oriented features.
I’m also fascinated by the mention of Hubot
Nitro is a new opensource task management webapp. It’s basic but pretty darn good and syncs through Dropbox. The lack of a few key features prevents me from using it but it’s at least as good as many that I’ve tried in the past.
Chris Suave has a two part series critiquing OmniFocus and suggesting changes.
I typically despise artist renderings and mock-ups. They are disconnected from the reality of a fully integrated piece of software.
Chris acknowledges this position several times:
I really believe that. It’s so easy to be an armchair design critic; when you have nothing at stake, don’t have to worry about implementation, can ignore things that don’t fit into your grand design vision, you can suggest anything with impunity.
Sean Korzdorfer has a great outline depicting his use cases for Drafts and Launch Center Pro.
Just look at this list of Drafts actions:
I’m certainly not a model of effectiveness but I do pride myself on a few things.1 One of those things is the direct answer. I try, given enough time to edit myself, to give a short and specific answer to a question. I try to be direct.
Here’s how I attempt to edit myself in emails:
1. I do not ask for additional clarification up front unless I absolutely do not understand the question.
I like when Patrick writes on RocketInk. This post was a nice bit of cleverness about using plain text based Taskpaper and UI-centric OmniFocus for different reasons.
I guess a good part of my problem when opening OmniFocus is, that there’s a plethora of tasks which are paused and undone. This subconsciously affects my self-esteem, leaving me with a feeling that I haven’t accomplished that much. Since I use the app as a library and the amount of ‘unfinished work’ stands in no relation to the tasks I checked off, my mini TaskPaper projects are more rewarding to me.
I still use OmniFocus during the day on Windows. But there’s a trick. I use Spootnik as a rudimentary interface to my projects and tasks. What’s Spootnik? It’s a third-party WebDAV syncing service for OmniFocus that provides a basic web interface to the OmniFocus data.
Spootnik is not a complete solution. It lacks the ability to set start and due dates, see or edit notes or choose assign projects. However, for a few dollars a month, it provides a very convenient way for me to add and process tasks while on Windows.
DropTask certainly takes a unique approach to task management. The model doesn’t work for me but I’ll give them credit for trying. My brain just works like a list and bubbles don’t convey as much meaning for me. Maybe they do for someone without a lot of task management baggage.
The Ground Rules The bar is pretty high after the first round of evaluations.
There are a few areas that I have found most OmniFocus competitors fail hard and a few that make OmniFocus look like a LeapFrog application.
Sequential vs. Unordered Tasks
This is an odd omission. No system I have found has an option to indicate a sequential or unordered list of tasks for a project. Worse, some systems have almost no option for setting the order of tasks.
