Productive Organizer

Here is an interesting use case: Suppose you have a fixed set of table columns and rows that you want to appear at every print area. This is not the header section. How would you do it?

Apparently Work Your Office have the solution! How great is that! [Guide here]

I still have a love hate relationship with Evernote, mainly because I still have not really make sense of it yet.

But while I complain about it, what you like is to subscribe to a cloud app that is continuously value adding. And this update is rather small but provide something that many would appreciate.

I compose some of my notes on the go and before I actually save and upload the notes, I may stop halfway and get on the bus and my accidentally close the Evernote Android app.

This version of Android Evernote provide a feature to manually save when you are composing really lengthy note.

Small but really helpful.

Back some time ago, German based wunderkinder released a to do list app on the web, iphone, Android that took the task management community by storm.

What happens is that we have a to do list that

• looks beautiful and elegant
• works on the Mac, Web, Windows, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone
• simple tasking nothing complex

What I like about Wunderlist is that I do not have to worry about migrating to another platform. Based on my experience with WAToDo! is that if the to do list have a set of generic functionality and looks awesome, people will have time for it.

But what I do not like is that it is just too simple. As a GTD user, I can’t really do much with it.

It turns out that Wunderlist is a test platform for Wunderkinder to each critical mass, as well as to test their idea for the money making app that they intend to release.

What we do know that the open beta of their new task management app Wunderkit will be releasing in early February.

We were updated that they intend to release their web task management platform before releasing for other platforms.

How good do we think it will be?

For one thing it does look very awesome like Wunderlist. And it does have a social element to it. Lets see what we can derive from the very little released

1. Eventually it will be ubiquitous (on many platforms). This means that you can go ahead and buy another platform smartphone without worrying you cannot manage your tasks
2. A separation of notes and tasks seem to indicate that you can clip or take down notes in a manner not like most to do app. Perhaps rich text format?
3. Collaboration through social means. It would seem you can follow your friends or interesting people and build to do list together
4. Inbox concept
5. Priority through starring
6. Repeating and recurring tasks
7. Sub-tasking
8. Single level project

This looks really promising. However, I do see tagging missing. What would really complete it is a good search engine and tagging. I am sure then a lot of people will play around with it.

Advance to do folks like me would love it because we can tinker to match our work flow. As long as you provide

1. Task Description, Notes, Due Date, Status
2. Repeating or Recurring Tasks
3. Sub-tasking or parent child concept
4. Tagging
5. Extensible API
6. Ubiquitous

A lot of advance folks can make it work.

What would really break it for me

For me, Wunderkinder could succeed but could fail as well. They do have a lot of people to learn from

1. The pricing model needs to offer a good freenium that most users can use. Evernote took off in such a way because they went the alternative route to make their base app and smartphone app so usable you do not have to pay for it. Only people who are really attached to it will pay for it. True enough at the end a lot of people grew attached to it because it became their brain.
2. They need to make it a platform. They need to offer ways people can extend it.
3. A search engined and saved search looks very important the more I think about it. What made Evernote and Remember the milk great was the way search can be carried out and saved.
4. It needs to look great and simple for folks looking for a simple list.
5. The smartphone applications must be well invested. Meaning they shouldn’t suck! We have seen so many examples where the main app is great but the rest doesn’t add up. For example I don’t want to see a case where they offer subtasking but on the Android because of api limitation they cannot offer that. It’s a fail for me.
6. It needs adequate funding. Without knowing that this cloud is going to be around for some time not many will adopt it.

We certainly can keep our fingers cross. But personally I do not have high hopes for it.

The topic that Productive Organizer talks about more so then others are task management. In fact I even have a whole set of tutorials to carry out task management the Getting Things Done way (see here)

The problem is that there isn’t much tutorial taught in school how to manage your to do list (amongst other things like finances and keeping healthy)

The Wall Street Journal have a great article today talking about why people don’t complete their tasks.

Among the different problems faced are such

• Kat Nagel, a technical-communications consultant in Rochester, N.Y., used to let her to-do list balloon to 14 pages and "it was never up-to-date," once causing her to miss a project deadline
• Kris Paige, a veterinary technician, used to keep her to-dos on sticky notes, "but the glue failed,"
• Kim Bauer’s long paper lists of all the tasks and goals she hopes to accomplish sometimes "get completely out of hand," says the Vancouver, Wash., writer

The problem with not managing well normally boils down to

1. You do not collect everything in your head outside. You don’t always have your list. When you want to write down you forgot them already
2. Your list is so jumble up that you do not know which one to do first
3. Your tasks are not well describe and are so big that you do not know how to start!
4. When you are at the place you want to do something you don’t have your list with you
5. Your tasks are too vague!
6. You don’t trust your list at all!

Why I advocate Getting Things Done is because I believe it address all these issues. It is not a fad but an education of how you can manage tasks and calendaring.

The smartphone and web is probably the best thing that happen to task management.You can now collect tasks wherever you are because you always have your cell phones (unless like me you work in a situation where you cannot bring camera devices haha)

Do read my Getting things Done Tutorial or To do list review on the side bar

There are more helpful thoughts from experts in the wall street article so do read it as well.

What is your greatest problem with task management?

The first item on a highly successful to-do list: Make a better to-do list.

With the new year comes the urge to accomplish all the things that were meant to be done the year before, and it often starts with long to-do lists. The lists themselves can fuel anxiety, says Sasha Cagen, an Oakland, Calif., life coach and author of a book on to-do lists. She sees many new clients at this time of year and often advises them to put more tasks on their list that they genuinely enjoy. Some 23% of list-makers spend more time making the lists than doing the tasks on them, according to a 2006 online survey of 600 people conducted by Ms. Cagen.

There are, of course, all kinds of ways to stay on top of tasks. Some people like the tactile experience of hand written to-do lists on paper, embellished with doodles or designs. Others think more clearly when they type, sort and store tasks in computers, tablets or smartphones, and they like the mobility of programs that update lists on all their devices.

Even with so many methods, it is still easy to muck up list making. Kat Nagel, a technical-communications consultant in Rochester, N.Y., used to let her to-do list balloon to 14 pages and "it was never up-to-date," once causing her to miss a project deadline. Ran Barton, an operations analyst in Wilmington, Del., wrote his to-dos on pieces of paper—which he sometimes lost.

Kris Paige, a veterinary technician, used to keep her to-dos on sticky notes, "but the glue failed," she says. She started writing up to 20 tasks on her bathroom mirror in dry-erase marker so she would be sure to see them, but the method sometimes caused embarrassment when she forgot to erase the list before visitors arrived. Using a digital app to enter tasks in her phone and computer reduced the mirror list to two items, says Ms. Paige, who owns a Livermore, Colo., llama ranch.

Kim Bauer’s long paper lists of all the tasks and goals she hopes to accomplish sometimes "get completely out of hand," says the Vancouver, Wash., writer. Rewriting and prioritizing them becomes an excuse to procrastinate. Now, she forces herself to condense them into a single, more realistic list, and it "makes me feel more organized."

A well-maintained list is "an essential tool for staying grounded, for saving your energy and for doing things rather than trying to remember what to do," says Julie Morgenstern, a New York author and expert on time management.

Effective to-do lists are limited to specific tasks that can be tackled right away and finished fairly soon, Ms. Morgenstern says. Instead of listing "solve client issue," write, "spend one hour defining the scope of client problem."

A list should reflect a time estimate needed for each task. And it should be integrated into a calendar or schedule, to avoid "planning 17 things for tomorrow which, if you added them up, are going to take 20 hours," Ms. Morgenstern says.

There are strategies for tackling dreaded tasks as well. Ms. Morgenstern tells of a computer consultant who was energized by appointments with clients, but stalled with administrative tasks like paying bills, writing proposals or planning strategy. She suggested he assign start and end times to mundane tasks as if they were appointments, and break them up with activities requiring contact with people. The new approach stopped his procrastinating.

To prevent getting mired in mindless make-work, some software helps people measure tasks against broad life goals. Ms. Nagel, the Rochester consultant, uses Life Balance by Llamagraphics. The software has her start with a master list of goals, such as doing fulfilling and financially rewarding work and volunteering for community causes. These are prioritized and broken into tasks, with details about the time and effort required and where and when they must be done.

Using this data, the app assigns eight to 12 items to Ms. Nagel’s to-do list. She hasn’t missed a deadline since she starting using the software, which has helped her shift plans to balance work demands, singing in a choir and volunteering at a food bank.

[Full article @ WSJ]

The use case: You have 3G mobile data connection on your Windows Phone, how do you share this with your other device which are wifi enable?

MakeUseOf have revealed it is build into the Mango release of Windows Phone 7.5. Yet it was released with little fanfare.

1. Make sure that Data Connection and 3G Connection is enabled in Settings

2. Slide to enable Sharing and specify a name so that other devices can discover your phone’s connection.

3. Go to your device and find this SSID name, key in the password and you should be connected.

I tell my readers that my favorite ubiquous note taking application is Evernote.

Here is why I like about it

1. It is ubiquitous. Its found on the desktop, Chrome browswer, firefox, safari and IE. Its found on iPhone, IPad, Blackberry, WP7, Android. I don’t have to worry which device I own because I know I can have access to my notes.
2. Taking notes is easy. I can clip notes on my desktop. I can take voice and picture notes from my smartphone. I can now sketch on my picture notes.
3. Its got rich text input on desktop client. Its got rich text input on its iPhone and Android app! how cool is that. The key to being able to take notes effectively is to be able to come up with bullet points and I Can do that with Evernote.
4. The guys at Evernote are trying to build Evernote into a platform. They are opening up the API so that third party apps can interface to Evernote.
5. The network is getting bigger and bigger. The more people in the network the greater the value.

How did Evernote come about? Read their story here

[The evernote story >>]

I have subscribe to the Google network a fair bit. This means that I use

1. Gmail as my main email client
2. Google Reader as my main RSS feeds reader
3. Google Calendar as my consolidated calendar
4. Google Contacts as my main contact manager

The advantage of subscribing to Google’s cloud services or network, or whatever you want to call it is that

1. It is extensible. You can link data to your data easier than other platform. You can export data away from Google should you feel dis-satisfied with it
2. Because it is extensible and API is open to developers, many desktop,smartphone and other native device developers can build applications to increase productivity and performance
3. Google continues to innovate in their products to accommodate to a large number of users with different ways of calendaring, contacts management, reading and managing email

But the downside for using Google’s product

1. The look is always very ugly compare to Microsoft and Yahoo’s offering
2. Because applications are always in Beta, some people will feel turn off about experimental things and why it doesn’t have certain features

Google have taken a lot of efforts to address the UGLY portion. In the last year, their web applications and Android and iPhone applications have undergone a drastic beautifying.

Now there is a consistent minimalist white theme for almost all their applications. They have cut out a lot of the clutter and have given enough whitespace to enable the user to focus on the right subject.

Good user interface attracts users to come back and want to use it, and the more a person use it, it enhances them better.

The new Gmail resizes better when you change it to a smaller window. The email conversations look better with the picture of the person you are talking to next to it and overall feels more like a chat conversation.

The problem with Google Reader had been that it always look strange and its really not great at focusing on what matters – the content! This redesign removes a lot of the boundaries and ensures the user sees clearly between controls and content.

There is also a tighter integration with Google Plus which is good to grow the Google Plus social network. The more ways you make it easier for info sharing the more it becomes important.

What do you guys think? Do you like the new changes?

Since computers have become popular, people have created budgeting and investment applications like Quicken and You need a budget (YNAB) to help them make sense of their financial well being.

However, how can you tell what are some of the important criteria that make a product suitable to be purchase or subscribe to  help you manage your money?

Create multiple savings, cash and investment accounts

Users normally do not put their money in one accounts, usually they will have multiple accounts. And then they would have their credit card accounts as well as other loan and checking accounts.

The sub requirements here is

1. Able to specify different kinds of accounts (e.g. Savings, Cash, Investments) and not be seen as a generic account.
2. Accounts behave or presented differently based on their account type.
3. Able to create virtual cash accounts for each of your spending objectives

Here Quicken does a good job because it lets you

1. Categorizes different type of accounts
2. Presents them accordingly
3. Create virtual cash accounts for each of your spending categories

Create 2 level budget categories or tags for your transactions

One of the main purpose of tracking your expenses Is so that you make sure you spend within your limits.

So effective categorization of your spending patterns are important.

A functional personal finance budgeting application should allow you to tag your transactions.

These tags or categories should be presented in 2 levels, a Master Category and a Sub Category for better organization.

YNAB does a good job here since one of their strengths is budgeting and ensuring you spend within your limits.

Set up scheduled / recurring transactions and transfers

One very important criteria for me or other international users is

1. the ability to schedule a transaction periodically and able to recur
2. whether it is a payment or an account transfer
3. recurrence able to go on indefinitely
4. able to amend the recurring transaction
5. able to review the recurring transaction and trigger the entry at your control

Why is this important for international users? Because international users do not have the ability to download transactions automatically into their applications, they require a quick and easy way every month to enter transactions that will always occur.

Quicken and YNAB 3 are 2 of the applications that does this well.

• Quicken provides a Scheduled Bill/Transfer Reminders for you to manage this.
• YNAB’s implementation is to provide multiple of these at each accounts. At each account you can schedule the recurring transactions flowing in or out of the account.

What I understand is that most of the web based personal finance application are not able to do this well. They either generate the recurring activities in advance, doesn’t include account transfers or just don’t implement this.

We know that the biggest of them all, Mint.com, does not have recurring transactions.

Import and Export of Transaction Formats

Users are always afraid to be tied in to one platform and the greatest tie in cost for personal finance software is transaction data.

Thus, what differentiates good personal finance application from bad is the support to import and export of different formats.

The common formats are as follows:

1. CSV.Very portable very flexible but the users will likely need to match each fields to the software they are importing into.
2. OFX.Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a unified specification for the electronic exchange of financial data between financial institutions, businesses and consumers via the Internet. OFX is not a financial institution.
3. QFX.A QFX file is a standard OFX file with additional fields to support a licensing fee paid by institutions to Intuit. In contrast, the standard OFX format is a free and open standard.
4. QIF. A older Quicken transaction export and import format.

If you want to import and export from 2 different programs, such as YNAB 3 and Quicken or GNUCash, the format to import and export seem to be QIF.

Manage Investment Portfolio

The next stage after you put your financial house is in order is to put your money to work to beat inflation.

The use case for investment management includes

1. Creating multiple portfolios based on investment objectives
2. Define security based on online information or manual information
3. Add assets and debts to the portfolio
4. Update prices, whether through automatic means or manually should your security is an international asset which is not from the United States
5. Update asset transactions such as buy, sell, dividends, rights issues and bonus issues

Quicken and GNUCash are very well advance in portfolio management. I have been using Quicken to manage the portfolio for 8 years, monitoring by updating transactions that are mentioned in point 5 and updating prices in point 4.

Ubiquitous budget. portfolio access

Technology have shifted so much since 10 years ago. Gone are the days where we only review and input transactions on your desktop computer or MAC.

Mint on the web

Mint on the Android smartphone

Mint on the iPhone Smartphone

Mint on the iPad

Now you can find budgeting application on the

1. Windows desktop
2. MAC desktop
3. Android smartphone
4. iPhone and iPad
5. webOS smartphone

Could we have a software platform that we can assess whether we are on our smartphone or in front of the computer?

The best solution are web personal finance applications like Mint.com, Wesebe. A web application stores your personal finance data on the web and you can assess it whether you are on the phone or computer as long as you have internet assess.

These web application also may have smartphone native applications that enable the user to enter the transaction wherever they are.

Conclusion

So far I have not found an application that satisfy these 6 criteria. Mint looks to be the closest, but it is only suitable for US users. For international users it’s a pain.

Almost all personal finance are centered around US. It would be great if we have something like Mint.com that is for international users.

Should you be able to find a personal finance solution that matches these criteria do drop us a comment here and we will be very thankful for your contribution.

If you are a fan of streaming English subtitled Animes, you would enjoy the use case of

1. Watching Anime in between commuting
2. Not having to bother about downloads
3. Watch for Free

Now we know that sites like

1. Anime Shippuuden
2. Anilinkz

Aggregates Anime episodes so that you can stream and watch English version of them. But can you stream and watch them from  your smartphone over 3G?

I believe you cannot do it for iPhone or iPad because Flash does not work on iOS platform. However, that’s where Android comes in because you can stream from a mobile browser window to watch these Anime.

What I tried was to watch an episode of Gundam Age on my Samsung Galaxy S2. The superior performance of the phone, plus the Dolphin browser makes the whole process rather enjoyable.

How do you guys find this use case?

How does the smartphone change the way we shop? For one thing QR code makes getting product information, product data easier, so how does that help in shopping at your latest supermarket? You don’t! The supermarket goes to you!

Here is the use-case:

1. You are a busy working adult with limited time per day
2. You have things to buy but prefers to browse and be able to see what you want to buy

What these creative Korean’s did is to bring the supermarket to the subway. Tesco in Korea is called Home Plus.

How do they compete with the main incumbent supermarket store?

Take a look at this video

Do you think you will shop this way?