Does a good Task Managr / MindMappr / Project Managr / Calender combined tool exist?

[Ship69]

Hello

I've been thinking more deeply about task management. It seems to be that from a data architecture point of view there are the following types of relevant data:

A) Project name - i.e. The desired outcome - the purpose of any task
B) Tasks (Actions) - i.e. their short titles (many per project)
C) List - i.e. What list each task and/or project is on (Active/Someday/Waiting)
D) "Ordering of tasks being done" information including:
- importance / urgency / dependencies / RELATIVE importance & urgency / Timing commitments
E) Subject area type information - potentially a tree hierarchy. (e.g. starting with Area of Life)

And each of these types of data needs to be held in a separate database field in the software.

It occurs to me that I personally keep conflating D) - the subject area for a project with A) it's desired outcome.
Part of the reason why I do this is that I thing very 'visually' i.e. I think better in shapes.
And if I can see and recognize a nice hierarchy, I immediately get a good handle of the project I'm working on.

But really A) and D) are completely different concepts ! And so they should be stored separately.

It also occurs to me that a 2D "mind map" would a brilliant way of representing the subject areas of a project. But how many decent task manager tools include 'mind mapping'?

So I had a look at Mindjet's Mind Manager which has a superb (if horribly expensive) mind mapping tool. It also has some sort of dependency built in. But sadly it didn't seem to have any way of doing Next Actions per project. Nor can it do "forced" Next Actions (one of GTDNext's best features, imho). And making lists of starred items seemed clunky. I couldn't find a good way to move tasks between lists. And I couldn't work out how to putting things into the future (Tickler list). All of means that it ran out of steam when you have hundreds of task at once.

So what I am looking for is a system that at the push of a button give you:
- Task level (i.e. all the normal GTD list management views - Active/Someday/Waiting etc)
- a mind map view
- a dependency/project management view (useful for larger projects)
- a calendar view (showing your tickler list)

Does such a thing exist?

thanks

J

PS. And why not throw in a timer to allow you to report (to management and/or clients) on how much time you are spending doing what.

 

[mcogilvie]

The answer to your question, Ship69, is no. Every attempt to create a flexible, simple, intuitive and broadly applicable program of this type has failed.

 

[Ship69]

The answer to your question, Ship69, is no. Every attempt to create a flexible, simple, intuitive and broadly applicable program of this type has failed.

What normally goes wrong? Does the interface wind up being too complicated & confusing?

 

[mcogilvie]

Many small developers have a very personal vision that most people don't share. There's also the problem of bloating, and the related problem of UI design. I think the sleekest design I have seen is Things and Wunderlist, which are far from perfect, but make intelligent design choices. Omnifocus is what happens when good designers start from a given format, an outline, and work hard to make it smooth and powerful: it's successful, but more organically grown than designed. And these are all "merely" GTD-compatible task list programs, without the scope you are talking about. Mindjet tried expanding their core mindmap product, and ended up retreating from consumer space. Curio is another program that in my opinion flew too close to the sun- too many features, and most people lost interest.

 

[Oogiem]

What normally goes wrong? Does the interface wind up being too complicated & confusing?

I think the problem is that there is enough flexibility in the GTD system to accommodate many styles of working and no single app can implement all those styles for all aspects of the system. Usually general or multipurpose tools are poor implementations compared to specific tools. For example, a simple text editor can be used to do all computer writing tasks, a word processor is a step up and handles linear writing much better and provides needed style and structure, an app like Scrivener takes that to a whole new level giving a writer much more flexibility. It's very specialized and excellent as what it does. Does every writer need to use Scrivener?

As a program gets larger and more complex the interactions are much harder to handle. For example, your desire to have tasks visible as both a mind map and a list seem at odds to me. As a programmer that would be very hard to implement because mind maps are spatial but lists are not. How do you store that data? How will the user interact with it?

You want a calendar integrated but hardly anything in GTD goes on a calendar. How would you want that implemented? What about people like me that use the calendar as a diary looking backward more than a planner looking forward except for the very few GTD things that go on it? Then in calendars in particular there is the whole issue of dates, time zones, epoch's start dates, how they are stored, how you display them MM/DD/YY, DD Month YYYY which calendar do you want to use, Islamic? Gregorian? Chinese? How will interactions happen if you change your calendar? What if you get info in one calendar but want to see it in another?

I like to think of the suite of apps that I use to do GTD as an ecosystem that is carefully selected to suit my styles for each particular portion of the GTD method. I can pick and choose the best app for the purpose and if a particular piece of my system needs to change due to changing requirements I am not required to change the rest of the parts that are working fine just toget a new update in one area. It's appropriate compartmentalization of tasks and also enforces using context for updating and working on my GTD system as well as using it which makes me more efficient.

 

[Folke]

It would seem that each individual user and each developer all have their own very different ideas about what they would like to be able to get out of the app and about how those kinds of features could be implemented.

I often feel a similar frustration that you often express - why the heck don't they build it properly; it would be so extremely easy to get it right; so powerful and so very simple to use; and they would even save development time and cost. And nobody seems to listen.

I think the reasons are multifold:

• actual difference in life situation, type of work, experience etc
• differences in what we tend to get annoyed by - too many buttons, too many different programs, too much information, irrelevant information ...
• different ideas (imagination, knowledge) about what would be meaningful and easy to build and use vs what is complicated and useless
• communication problems - sharing and understanding each other's visions about how the app ought to be

I have never seen an app that is 100% right for me. Usually they have way too much bloat that I never use. Although I can live with that, it is saddening to be constantly reminded of the waste. And at the same time all of them are way too crude in at least a few essential ways. Excessive crudeness in the design/features then forces me to find my own workarounds that improve things but which still fall short of the mark.

 

[Oogiem]

You know you can always write your own app that does GTD the way you want to see it perfectly. I'd start with some of the open source stuff and go from there if I felt a need to do that.

 

[mcogilvie]

You know you can always write your own app that does GTD the way you want to see it perfectly. I'd start with some of the open source stuff and go from there if I felt a need to do that.

I think most people are actually bad at doing just what you suggest. Part of the reason is undoubtedly that people want features that are great in theory but not so much in practice. This is one of the reasons developers produce GTD apps that people don't like using.

 

[Ship69]

You know you can always write your own app that does GTD the way you want to see it perfectly. I'd start with some of the open source stuff and go from there if I felt a need to do that.

Don't tempt me! That would surely be the ultimate "creative avoidance" - i.e. stopping one from actually completing what's one my current to-do lists?!

MLO is so incredibly configurable that for a long, long time, driven but deep frustrations, every month or two I would turn all my data inside out and think of a whole new way of working (e.g. using Flags for something new). What has kept me with MLO is how brilliant it is at certain things. (e.g. user-configurable hotkeys for absolutely anything you can think of, incredibly powerful multiple-task selection abilities, a whole load of fields that you MIGHT think you need - e.g. Importance + Urgency... you can write your own filter logic and you can even write your own rules for highlighting task in any way you choose. By any normal standards it's genuinely amazing. And rock solid stable to boot.) But in the end it has finally dawned on me that the database structure is wrong and no amount of all fudging and cludging will ever get around that.

I had a similar albeit shorter problem with Mind Manager - which is also brilliant in certain ways, but which becomes messy with 100+ tasks.

As far as calendar functions go I'm talking mainly about a GTD Tickler list. And at a single button remove Tasks and just show genuine diary commitments.

I agree that there are serious dangers of clutter when developers try to get there by Darwinian evolution, and listening to ALL user requests. (Witness MLO!)

Yes, you're right that different people think differently will value different things less or/and more. And in the end - much like different tastes in music - no doubt a few different tribes will emerge. Modest forbids me to claim to actually be Mozart - very far from it! - but I feel more like a affectionado/lover of classical music who had the misfortune to be born a few decades before Mozart, who just knew in his very bones that classical music could be so, SO much better...

 

[Ship69]

OK, I've seen the future. I have no idea how it actually works, but your GTD software tool in the year 2050 will have an infographic, no a choice of infographics... that spin around in 3D mapping all the nuances and full complexity of your life... And it looks something like one of these infographics:

http://ideas.ted.com/gallery-how-net...erm=art-design

Pretty cool, huh?

Now... the little matter of finding someone to build it for us :^)

J

 

[TesTeq]

Pretty cool, huh?

Now... the little matter of finding someone to build it for us :^)

Us?

I love text outlines. I am lost and confused by graphic representations of text outlines. I can understand mind map but I prefer to export it to a text document to manage it. The only mind map I use is Mindly - it has a very rigid structure.

So... us?

 

[TesTeq]

It would seem that each individual user and each developer all have their own very different ideas about what they would like to be able to get out of the app and about how those kinds of features could be implemented.

#SarcasticHistoricalNote

The world was simpler in communism (I'm from Poland and old enough to know). There would be only one official GTD software implementation to use. Any other application would be illegal and banned. Ship69's problem would be solved, our discussion irrelevant and we could return to a work to build a better society! ;-)

 

[Ship69]

Us?

I love text outlines. I am lost and confused by graphic representations of text outlines. I can understand mind map but I prefer to export it to a text document to manage it. The only mind map I use is Mindly - it has a very rigid structure.

So... us?

Yeah well, probably not us... all!

Although my post was distinctly tongue-in-cheek, more seriously, I do find reading through all my tasks to be a significant problem with the GTD method. To get you to feel what I feel, imagine that your lists of task was say 10,000 tasks. Or 1 million tasks. How would one even begin to manage them?

That's part of what's clever about those graphics - there's very little to actually read, without zooming in.

Personally my brain absolutely HATES reading. And I find it really hard to get the big picture on all my stuff. So I remain rather intrigued by representations of all kinds of complex stuff using sophisticated layout (in 3D?) and colour/tone - rather than just text - so that you could SEE what they system is saying you need to focus on next, without first READING it all. Obviously one would need to be able to put various filters across the view(s) (with a quick drag & drop or keystroke or even a look of the eyes into motion tracking sensors - this is 2050 remember) so as to filter by GTD list and/or Context etc. But I do like the idea of seeing meta information about tasks represented graphically, so as to hopefully map the complexity and subtleties of what's going on inside my brain.

Fiw it could also measure how many time I had looked at items and tell me how many times I had put things off, just by tracking my eyeballs.

The idea of the secret police listening would be somewhat alarming. The may as well install a chip inside each of our brains!

 

[Oogiem]

I do find reading through all my tasks to be a significant problem with the GTD method. To get you to feel what I feel, imagine that your lists of task was say 10,000 tasks. Or 1 million tasks. How would one even begin to manage them?

Easy, at my typical reading speed of roughly 1800-2000WPM and a typical task of mine that contains 5-7 words it would take less than half an hour to read all 10,000 tasks. That's well within a normal weekly review time period. And for the record if I look at all my lists of current, pending and someday/maybe projects I would estimate that I am getting over the 10,000 tasks you mention. I rarely have to read all my tasks at a review, because many are contained in buckets that I know I have no time to deal with so don't bother reading at any given time. For example my current list of farm projects to do someday contains about 100 major projects, my knitting projects list has about 60, weaving about 150, scrapbooks closer to 75, books to read is around 500, writing projects is over 250 and so on. I have lots of that type of list and many of those projects are at least partially planned or that have been worked on intermittently in the appropriate season and may actually finish sometime in my lifetime. For most of those lists I won't review them except when I need to start a new project in that area or at my quarterly in-depth reviews. But even though I just finished a quarterly review this past week I felt a need to read through all my lists, it took me about 45 minutes and I did find a few that I decided to make active and some current ones that I could, upon reflection, let go dormant for a while.

Right now we are getting ready for lambing. I have one simple easy to work on knitting project I am currently doing. I have a simple brainless task to do that will further my current scrapbook projects. I've acknowledged that no weaving will happen at all as it's too hard to start and stop. I have to think as the loom is warped for an 8 harness twill with a complicated treadling pattern. No way I can do anything on that and drop it at a moments notice to run help a sheep or check a lamb. So my current weaving project is on hold till after lambing.

That's part of what's clever about those graphics - there's very little to actually read, without zooming in.

For me pictures provide very little information at all. So I'd have to zoom in to read it or it's just colors on a page.

Personally my brain absolutely HATES reading. And I find it really hard to get the big picture on all my stuff. So I remain rather intrigued by representations of all kinds of complex stuff using sophisticated layout (in 3D?) and colour/tone - rather than just text - so that you could SEE what they system is saying you need to focus on next, without first READING it all.

And I'd find that so jarring and unwieldy that I know it would give me a headache and I'd never manage to understand what was being represented. It might be pretty to look at, as an art installation, but totally unworkable to actually do anything in.

Obviously one would need to be able to put various filters across the view(s) (with a quick drag & drop or keystroke or even a look of the eyes into motion tracking sensors - this is 2050 remember) so as to filter by GTD list and/or Context etc. But I do like the idea of seeing meta information about tasks represented graphically, so as to hopefully map the complexity and subtleties of what's going on inside my brain.

I find that mapping complex project is easiest done with short bits of text. I do like to use Scrivener and the corkboard to move them around a bit but as soon as I have the structure decided on then text is critical or I will totally lose contact with what I am trying to do. So for me a graphical map is too distracting, complex and hard to use.

 

[Ship69]

Easy, at my typical reading speed of roughly 1800-2000WPM and a typical task of mine that contains 5-7 words it would take less than half an hour to read all 10,000 tasks. That's well within a normal weekly review time period. And for the record if I look at all my lists of current, pending and someday/maybe projects I would estimate that I am getting over the 10,000 tasks you mention. I rarely have to read all my tasks at a review, because many are contained in buckets that I know I have no time to deal with so don't bother reading at any given time. For example my current list of farm projects to do someday contains about 100 major projects, my knitting projects list has about 60, weaving about 150, scrapbooks closer to 75, books to read is around 500, writing projects is over 250 and so on. I have lots of that type of list and many of those projects are at least partially planned or that have been worked on intermittently in the appropriate season and may actually finish sometime in my lifetime. For most of those lists I won't review them except when I need to start a new project in that area or at my quarterly in-depth reviews. But even though I just finished a quarterly review this past week I felt a need to read through all my lists, it took me about 45 minutes and I did find a few that I decided to make active and some current ones that I could, upon reflection, let go dormant for a while.

Oogiem - I cant make your numbers begin to work. If you had 10,000 tasks and you seriously evaluated each one during your review, (e.g. to check their next actions or contexts) you might spend on averag esay 3 seconds on each. That would be 30,000 seconds ==> 500minutes ==> 8.3 hours. That's entire day per week(!)

I guess what you are really saying is that you don't seriously evaluate all 10,000 tasks in your weekly reviews. But in GTD theory I thought the whole point was to review ALL lists every week plus ALL Active ("do ASAP") tasks more than once per day.

 

[Oogiem]

Oogiem - I cant make your numbers begin to work. If you had 10,000 tasks and you seriously evaluated each one during your review, (e.g. to check their next actions or contexts) you might spend on averag esay 3 seconds on each. That would be 30,000 seconds ==> 500minutes ==> 8.3 hours. That's entire day per week(!)

I guess what you are really saying is that you don't seriously evaluate all 10,000 tasks in your weekly reviews. But in GTD theory I thought the whole point was to review ALL lists every week plus ALL Active ("do ASAP") tasks more than once per day.

10,000 tasks at 7 words per task is 70,000 words, divide by 1800 words per minute means it's about 38 minutes to read them all. I just did some timing of my reading my lists. My photography projects to do list of someday/maybe projects has 19 items on it. I just read the entire list in 6.5 seconds. List of things to learn has 24 items on it, I just read it in 10.9 seconds. I don't have to spend 3 seconds on each item because the only decision I have to make is whether there is time to do this now or not and that takes fractions of a second. If the answer is yes then it may take a bit longer but out of the hundreds of projects I have on my lists only a few will need that extra time at any given review.

Now lets look at a typical review of my current active projects, pending projects and on-hold but a lot of planning done projects. i.e. those that are in my Omnifocus system not in my longer term future project lists. Currently I have 387 projects with 1445 remaining actions in them in this system. I don't have a way to count the number of words in my remaining actions but the times are accurate as I track that every week. My last review, done on Friday, I spent 1 hour total going over all of those projects individually. That means I read the project title, and looked at all the actions I have planned. I crossed off as done some and added some depending on where I was in the project. I (heresy I know) even stopped my review to do a few less than 1 minute actions that would allow me to check off a project as done. I frequently avoid doing the after action reporting/documentation of completed projects and so I will sometimes interrupt my review to do them as I find them. I also reviewed a few of my someday/maybe lists, the farm one and the barn landscape one because we are doing a major barn project that will start this week and I wanted to see if I could stack any others into that same time as we'll have a contractor with heavy equipment here. It's most efficient to only pay once for move on and move off of the machines. I found several other projects that can get at least the machine work done at the same time so I moved those to my Omnifocus system and started them with their next actions. I also reviewed my scrapbook list looking for some projects that take very little brainpower because I need projects like that as we are going to start lambing this coming week. I haven't done much scrapbooking for several months and wanted to do some of that craft. I spent a further 30 minutes getting clear as I had a lot in my inboxes and 15 minutes checking my calendar.

And no there is nothing anywhere that says review everything every week, just review all the active ones weekly How often you choose to review your someday/maybe lists depends on how you store them and whether you have multiple layers of lists with different timescales.

 

[TesTeq]

To get you to feel what I feel, imagine that your lists of task was say 10,000 tasks. Or 1 million tasks. How would one even begin to manage them?

9'000 (or 999'000) Projects/Next Actions on my SMRY (Someday/Maybe Reviewed Yearly)
900 Projects/Next Actions on my SMRM (Someday/Maybe Reviewed Monthly)
100 active Projects/Next Actions on my Project and context lists.

Some math for you:
10'000 tasks / 168 hours per week = 59.5 tasks per hour (1 task per minute, even while you sleep)
1'000'000 tasks / 168 hours per week = 5952 tasks per hour (1 task per 1.65 second, even while you sleep)

Focus is THE solution. You can do anything but not everything at the same time. I am the second biggest fan in the world of the Someday/Maybe lists (first place is always reserved for David Allen himself ;-) ).

Some time ago I wrote here:

I think it is efficient to divide Someday/Maybe into the following lists:
1. Someday/Maybe Reviewed Weekly.
2. Someday/Maybe Reviewed Monthly.
3. Someday/Maybe Reviewed Quarterly.
4. Someday/Maybe Reviewed Yearly.

Personally my brain absolutely HATES reading.

Many people say that they hate math and the only reason is: they had bad teachers.

 

[Folke]

I use a similar approach as TesTeq - splitting things according to review frequency. I do that not only with Someday/Maybe but also with Waiting For and Next. Since I am neither using paper nor a regular "list" app (such as Wunderlist or RTM), but a so-called "GTD" app, I do not have the ability to add additional "lists" for Someday2, Someday3 etc, but I am instead lucky enough to be able to make use of a built-in data field (called Priority) for this purpose, which gives me the desired review frequency indication within each list itself (as a small color bar on the left; I can also sort by it). I find it extremely useful.

 

[Gardener]

Although my post was distinctly tongue-in-cheek, more seriously, I do find reading through all my tasks to be a significant problem with the GTD method. To get you to feel what I feel, imagine that your lists of task was say 10,000 tasks. Or 1 million tasks. How would one even begin to manage them?

I feel that you're assuming that everything is in the active GTD lists. (That is, the active projects and their Next Actions.) For me, I keep an absolute minimum in the active GTD lists. I have structures for project support material and "ideas" lists and lists of work tasks in specific categories ("Widget Database Backlog", for example), outside the GTD lists.

If you don't like to read, it seems to me that it would make sense for your active lists, the ones that you may read through several times a day, to be as sparse as possible. You'd read through more for your weekly review, but even then you don't need to read everything, IMO.

I see levels of data scanning frequency. For example, there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of garden projects that I'd like to do. They could (I say could, because I'm not yet happy with my organization) live in:

- Current projects (Daily): Two or three projects, each with an action or two, in my GTD lists. May be scanned daily.

- Gardening On Deck (Weekly): A list of projects that I may want to do soon. Limited detail-- I might scribble some notes about each one, but I haven't broken them down as tidy projects yet. When I have a new garden idea, I put it here. I'd look at these during the weekly review, to decide if I want to activate any of them and add them to my GTD lists, or move them down to Garden Dreams.

- Garden Dreams (Monthly or quarterly): A much, much longer list of projects. Once a month or once a quarter I'll go through this and move some to On Deck, move some of the On Deck projects back here, delete some that no longer interest me, and so on.

There are some tangles. For example, if I ever want to grow decent blueberries, I'm going to have to start the soil prep a long, long time ahead. But I don't want a "grow blueberries" project cluttering up my lists for daily scans forever and ever--even if I slap a future start date on it so it doesn't display in most of my views. So I'll probably break out "Acidify soil for blueberries" as a project and put it on the On Deck list so that I'm fairly sure of glancing at it once a week, and making it active when it's time.

Anyway, the general idea is to minimize the things that need to be scanned frequently, but create a structure to maximize the odds of catching something before it's too late for that something.

 

[Ship69]

And no there is nothing anywhere that says review everything every week, just review all the active ones weekly

I thought we were supposed to review all the Active (i.e. "Do ASAP") tasks at least once every day and review all Someday Maybe tasks in our Weekly Review, no?

Meanwhile, yes I do quite like TesTeq's idea of putting Someday-Maybes into different review frequency sub-lists. However I'll have to think how best to implement that, being as it will slow things down having another layer of Folder (if I'm staying with MLO) and there is no ability to add Lists to the List fields in GTDNext. Possibly I could use Tags in either application but that feels cumbersome and I want things to disappear by default until such time as they are ready for review.

PS To be fair, there is Review frequency in MLO but that feels cumbersome too having to go to a special dedicated field to set it up...