The perfect is the enemy of the good

I realized my posts were devolving into "dear diary" crap. I couldn't find a way to truly delete them so I did this instead. In retrospect it was a dumb move because I'm drawing more attention to myself when I wanted to draw less.
 
bcmyers2112;111620 said:
I realized my posts were devolving into "dear diary" crap.
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I think your posts are often quite interesting and provocative - good topics for discussion.

In this case (this thread), the title alone (which you could not erase) says a lot: The perfect is the enemy of the good.

I think we all agree with that. But it is based on an unsolved question: What is good? People have such different difficulties in their lives, and I think differences of opinion on many issues often boil down to some very basic differences in personality and habits. For example, as regards app features:

At the one extreme we might have the "extensive mind sweepers" who every day generate long lists like "buy cat food", "call Jim about the party" etc. For this type of people I assume that context filtering - being able to batch tasks by context - is the most important feature. They may not even need projects; they ARE going to buy that cat food, soon, and it would be an academic luxury to even bother to classify that as belonging to any particular project or AoR or anything.

At the other extreme you have people who cannot help themselves from thinking far, far ahead. Say, they are keeping their eyes open for a house to buy. They plan to buy it, renovate it, and rent it out, and it suddenly occurs to them (even though they haven't even found the house yet) that at that point they will also need to advertize it, and they get no piece of mind until they have written that down somewhere. Since "advertize the house" is an "action" type of "data item" it is natural for them to want to write it down as a task in their task manager rather than write it on a powerpoint slide or mind map or Evernote note or a sheet of paper etc. For these people, a way to organize their tasks - hierarchically, sequentially and/or otherwise - can be crucial for their mental calm and their ability to conveniently review their tasks and move them down the pipeline.

Most of us probably are somewhere between these extremes, but still with big differences between us. And our requirements will vary accordingly. We all want it to be "perfectly simple" for whatever it is we struggle with.
 
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