Productive Organizer

How many of you use an electronic device with a Getting Things Done software to practice effective GTD?

I know I am one of those. Currently my set up is to use Google Calendar together with Toodledo. But due to work, I use a monologue notebook to record my to do list.

I came across this post on lifehack.org that makes a lot of sense. It gross over how many people new to Getting Things Done will spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect platform to practice GTD.

I know the feeling of first finding out Getting Things Done through reading David Allen’s book and learning that there are so many software on Windows, Mac, iPhone that allows you to make yourself more productive.

Like what was mentioned in the article you either

1. spend a lot of time trying to find the right application
2. spend a lot of time entering and planning your action lists

I been through that stage and safe to say I seldom fell off the Getting Things Done wagon.

Taking a break from electronic GTD

But it wasn’t always like this. I tried so much applications, review so much applications that I forgot what is most important about GTD.

Its about being well rounded and executing each stage of the GTD process well.

What does that mean? You can’t just focus on one area of GTD. If you focus on collecting and planning and don’t review and execute, you end up pilling up your tasks.

Similarly, tagging everything based on context and not switching to them when you change context, you will end up pilling up your tasks as well.

Not reviewing your tasks, is the most dangerous. I fell off so many times because of this.

So what is my advice? Take a break from using an electronic device. Record your actions and collect them using a paper notebook.

What it does is to go back to square one and focus on the most important thing: The process.

When I went back to practicing Getting Things Done on paper, I realize a lot of short comings of not having things electronically

1. I cannot keep my list clean. There is no erase and edit. Instead I have to make sure I use a mechanical pencil and eraser and use very nice handwriting.
2. Maintaining a projects list is difficult. My main lists are list of my location context, agenda context with certain users and person. How can I relate those tasks with project? It is that difficult.

But having paper GTD has its perks. For one, my task collection and context switching Is much easier. It also lets me focus on the process of collecting tasks, planning them, doing them and reviewing them.

It makes me appreciate what I can get on a iPhone and Android To Do List app as well.

If you are confuse about Getting Things Done after some time, why not go back read the book again and review how you can practice that process on paper? I am sure you will learn a lot from that experience.

The Apple iPhone 4S presentation was largely a disappointment for a lot of folks, but for me the highlight was SIRI, the personal digital voice assistant.

Voice recognition is not something new. Google’s Android have this in their Android to replace text input or carry out search.

But Apple’s presentation looks really neat. Apparently I found out that SIRI exist as a startup before Apple decided to integrate this into their OS after buying over. 

But can Android do something similar as well?

1. It integrates narration of incoming text messages when put into a narration mode. Android has that too but its not integrated this way.
2. Replies to text message through voice. Android is not integrated this way yet.
3. Switches application context from text messaging to music playlist through voice command.
4. Understands that you are currently in an application context and continues to be in that application context.

Till today Android have VLingo which does the same thing. It is free over at Android Market and well rated.[Get it here]

SIRI actually marries 2 concepts

1. Instead of text commands to invoke switching between apps, it users voice. For text command apps on the desktop do take a look at Google Calendar’s Quick Add Feature [illustration here]
2. SIRI maintains a set of voice commands. These voice commands could be 5 different voice sets to bring you to a single application context such as Reminders or Calendar, as we bring it up differently.
3. SIRI then marries this with your own variable data input.
4. The second powerful concept is the AI to recognize voice and translate to data or commands better than the competitors

Why SIRI is better than Android’s current offering is the AI portion is really well worked out.

1. SIRI started off in 2003 as CALO, a DARPA funded project with 300 researchers. It has 8 years of development and a lot of money invested. Basically Apple is now bring a really advance voice to text and text to voice AI system to the mainstream consumers.
2. The system will clarify after voice input to make sure you send or input something according to what you want.
3. The conversion from units or time zones is going to be a very big feature.
4. Integration with Wolfram Alpha as well.

The question now is that as Asians, not all of us have English names. In past voice recognition systems this have been a problem.

Will SIRI be a racist application? We will only find out when we get hold of one and try it.

The next question is: How is Microsoft and Google’s technology in this voice recognition area? Will they be able to compete?

As a blogger and occasional developer,it is pretty stupid that it took me this long to setup my dual monitor rig.

I have always been working with one 19” monitor for 5 years. For me, I don’t really see the productivity improvement in having a 22” or 24” monitor and you have to drag the windows all over the place.

And it seems I am not the only one who thinks that way. Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror thinks that using smaller multi monitor displays enables you to work in a windowless environment.

Users of 30-inch monitors face the terrible, terrible problem of how to effectively use all of that space. You don’t often want to maximise a folder or document window on a screen this big; either you’ll end up with a lot of white space and important program buttons separated by a vast expanse of nothing, or you’ll get lines of text 300 or more characters long, which are difficult to read.

My setup is cheap. I got an acquaintance whose brother is offloading a 19” analog monitor for $50. Yes, its stupid to get an analog monitor these days,but my objective is that I do not want to spend greater than X amount of money on a new one or a relatively new one.

Due to a previously botch deal, my actual price of this setup is only $30.

Let me just say the productivity improvement just went up many times! I can craft this article while referencing another article without alternate tabbing.

I can occasionally, play a video drama on one screen and surf net on the other.

I do encourage most of you to do this. The recommendation is to go on Craigslist and find a cheap monitor.

1. Monitors have longer lifespan than you think
2. The bigger monitor you get the more electricity consume, so that’s why I am perfectly fine with a 19”
3. It is difficult to get a super faulty monitor that you cannot make use of second hand. Most of the time its button faults. Even with one deal pixel it is very functional.

Scale up productivity further with windows splitter app like WinSplit Revolution

What I further recommend is to install this nifty freeware call WinSplit Revolution.

What is it for? WinSplit Revolution is a small utility which allows you to easily organize your open windows by tiling, resizing and positioning them to make the best use of your desktop real estate.

What can it do? WinSplit is especially useful for high-end LCD screens with high resolutions because it helps you to efficiently manage many active windows. For example WinSplit is useful for owners of the Dell 2407FPW monitor. As you can see in the screenshots above, the advantages of using WinSplit is that it saves you from having to drag and drop windows by allowing you to snap windows into specific tiled configurations using simple keyboard hotkeys.

The game changer is when you tie it to desktop shortcuts or hotkeys.

You can use custom templates to setup

1. where you position the windows. anchor it to a side of the screen.
2. the size of your windows

Best of all it works on dual monitors! Take a look at this video to understand it better.

I urge everyone to consider setting up your desktop setup this way. What do you guys think?

Last week, we received this announcement from Samsung that they are coming out with the Galaxy Note.

Perhaps it is appropriately named this way because at 5.3 inch, we do not know whether to call it a smartphone or a tablet.

On top of that it comes with some awesome specs

1. high pixel density – 285 pixels
2. dual core 1.4 MHz processor
3. 1 GB of RAM

Personally I find this awesome. If you realise, communication have changed from voice and SMS to video and data messaging. The device will become a small portable computer to make us more productive.

1. I always wanted a device that can squeeze into a pocket or a pouch.
2. Yet I want it big enough to read PDF books properly.
3. 4.3-4.5 inch is good but I believe 5 inch is the optimal size.

What do you guys think?

Toodledo is a web to do list application that enables you to assess to your tasks and sub-tasks wherever you can access the internet.

What is great about it is that it has an API that allows many iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android and WebOS applications from synchronizing their tasks to this platform.

It is free to use although I recommend you give its Pro account a try as it is only USD 12 per year

The one thing that I do not understand is why for such a flexible to do list, it looks so bad. The interface looks cartoonish and the people that use to-do list for management are more professionals who would prefer a more functional interface that is cleaner.

The folks over there finally did a redesign of their web application and suffice to say I like this tone down neutral color theme.

The changes are mostly aesthetic how ever I really appreiciate a lot of re-organization changes

View By List to the Sidebar

This section is more cleaner and well placed. It enables the user to change the view to quickly review by lists,due-date or tags.

Most people will like this sidebar compare to the old one.

Dropdown Sorting Bar

Filter gets separated from other functionalities.

The main user interface is now less cluttered. You can see how you can sort your current view list.

At the next part you can see whether you want to see the details or not.

How has this new Toodledo interface been for you?

I am getting in the mood to be wary of security on the internet. I think it is a big issue because sooner or later we are going to want to access a lot of our documents, spreadsheets and presentations on our smart device.

The best integration currently belongs to iOS with QuickOffice and Google Doc or Dropbox.

However the integration is minimal. There are some glitches that makes you NOT TRUST the system.

But what many professionals are looking for is checking their work documents and security and privacy is an issue here.

In this recent report by Symantec, it compares iOS vs Android and seem to think that iOS is less prone to hack but when jailbroken is pretty weak. Android is more secure than your windows operating system but very prone to malware.

It looks like your typical windows operating system debate and what I can say is that this will only be another money haven for the security firms.

Symantec says that mobile devices definitely do offer improved security over their PC counterparts. But unsurprisingly, given that Symantec sells mobile security solutions for enterprise, the firm also found that “major gaps remain” in the overall mobile security picture, especially when it comes to securing enterprise assets. Still, even given the company’s bias in this matter, the results of its comparison between iOS and Android reveal two very different approaches to safeguarding mobile users.

In the 23-page report, Symantec outlines how iOS specifically offers “strong protection against traditional malware,” due mostly to Apple’s app approval process and the way the company vets iOS app developers to identify and eliminate attackers. Google, on the other hand, doesn’t employ this kind of screening procedure, which Symantec agues has “led to today’s increasing volume of Android-specific malware.”

Jailbroken iOS devices, however, represent a system just as vulnerable to attack as home PCs, Symantec cautions. Of course, that just means that if you use a jailbroken iPhone, you should be extra careful about your browsing habits and about what software you download and install on your device. In mobile, as in traditional home computing, the most effective barrier against malicious attacks is always the user.

If you asked me what is the one function that I like about Remember The Milk it is not the great javascript UI or its everywhere but it Is the saved search function.

Recently, I realize that Evernote, my main note taking application was able to do that as well.

What you can do is

1. Do an advanced search by trying to find specific text in title, in specific tags, in specific notebook, with to do (checkboxes) at a certain longitude and latitude. (for more info on how specific or flexible you can search, refer to this guide)
2. Review the search result to see if it is showing what you want and save the search.
3. When reviewing at your iPad, iPhone, Android Device or Desktop, Click on these saved search list to review them.

Evernote highlights a few saved search ideas:

• created:[datetime] – Search for notes by date of creation using the format YYYYMMDD. You can also search by time period (for example, day-30 will pull up all notes created in the last 30 days).
• intitle:”name” – Search within the title of the note (ie: intitle:”restaurant” will pull up a note titled “French restaurant”).
• resource:image/* – Search only for notes that contain images.

You can always use the global “find in Evernote” desktop hotkey. On Mac, the default hotkey isCtrl+Cmd+F. On Windows, the default hotkey is Win+Shift+F .

Now this is a great effort on Microsoft’s end to reduce the switching cost between Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail to Hotmail.

One thing that I really enjoy is using # on my Gmail to delete mail. So if I switch over to another mail client I am unable to do that anymore.

Now in Hotmail, they will allow you to use other mail client’s keyboard shortcuts

Outlook

• Delete a message – Delete
• Create a new message – Ctrl+N
• Send a message – Ctrl+Enter
• Open a message – Ctrl+Shift+O
• Print a message – Ctrl+Shift+P
• Reply to a message – Ctrl+R
• Reply all to a message – Ctrl+Shift+R
• Forward a message – Ctrl+Shift+F
• Save a draft message – Ctrl+S
• Flag a message for follow up – L
• Mark a message as junk – Ctrl+Shift+J
• Mark a message as read – Ctrl+Q
• Mark a message as unread – Ctrl+U
• Move to a folder – Ctrl+Shift+V
• Open the next message – Ctrl+.
• Open the previous message – Ctrl+,
• Close a message – Esc
• Search your email messages – /
• Check spelling – F7
• Select all – S then A
• Deselect all – S then N
• Go to the inbox – F then I
• Go to your Drafts folder – F then D
• Go to your Sent folder – F then S

Gmail, Yahoo Mail

• Delete a message – # – Delete
• Create a new message – C – N
• Send a message – None – Alt+S
• Open a message – O – None
• Print a message – None – P
• Reply to a message – R – R
• Reply all to a message – A – A
• Forward a message – F – F
• Save a draft message – Ctrl+S – Ctrl+S
• Mark a message as junk – ! – None
• Mark a message as read – Shift+I – K
• Mark a message as unread – Shift+U – Shift+K
• Move to a folder – None – D
• Open the next message – J – Ctrl+.
• Open the previous message – K – Ctrl+,
• Close a message – U – Esc
• Search your email messages – / – S
• Select all – * then A
• Deselect all – * then N
• Go to the inbox – G then I – M
• Go to your Drafts folder – G then D
• Go to your Sent folder – G then T

 

To set this open the options page in Hotmail:

Under options, select keyboard shortcuts listed under customize Hotmail. Here you can turn off shortcuts and select the short cut set you want.

One of the most popular category of app on the smartphone devices are To Do list applications. It is no secret why they are so in demand since

• most users have their phones with them just like their wallet
• with that, they are able to collect new tasks and review which tasks to carry out

Developers on the iOS have come up with great todo apps and in the process many of the most popular ones such as Omnifocus, Things, Toodledo and Appigo ToDo advocates users to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done to make sense of task management.

In a certain sense, Getting Things Done puts you in the role as the project manager and your job is to ensure the completion of many mini projects.

These apps work great for most people but for folks who does project management as a profession or plan projects at work, it may be lacking.

Some of the reasons why this is so:

• Projects managed typically defined by a start date and end date. Not all GTD task list does that.
• Projects can have infinite level of sub projects as defined by more granular milestones. Only Actionlists on the iPhone and iPad does this.
• Milestones affect main projects start and due date and they would have to adjust accordingly.
• Manpower resources needs to be allocated to tasks.
• Most todo list is not made for extensive review. Project management involves alot of review, adjusting start and due date and quick inputs. GTD todo list do not provide a eagle eye view on milestones and tasks to do that effectively.
• Most GTD task app syncs to the cloud but for most project managers they still use MS Project.

Being a project lead in software and system maintenance, I do acknowledge that task management app are found lacking in these area.

That is where SG Project comes in. The folks at SG Project came up with a very comprehensive management app for the iPad platform to carry out project management.

What SG Project does

To be honest I am astounded why there aren’t alot of third party developers who would tale advantage of the large screen size to create such a planning app.

SG Project comes in 2 versions SG Project Pro and SG Project 2.

SG Project Pro costs USD 39.90 and is made up of SG Project 2 (USD 9.99), SG Action Log(USD 5.99) and SG Risk Log(USD 5.99)

SG Project 2 is the task planning gantt chart review portion of SG Project Pro. My initial thought is that this is what i need only so if you want an app that can help you review big projects like how you would do it in MS Project then buying SG Project 2 could be enough.

SG Project Pro is able to do the following

Manage projects and sub projects

At the bare minimum, a project management app should allow the user to create milestones and sub milestones to it. SG Project does a Good job with that as you can freely indent and outdent your tasks.

Group tasks as their milestones or projects and have a clear overview

Easily reorder and delete tasks and projects

Specify greater detail for each task. This includes

1. Start Date
2. End Date
3. Duration
4. Notes
5. SG Project Risks
6. SG Project Action Items
7. Owner
8. Predecessors

Indent and Outdent, or add new tasks easily in the main task planning screen

Easily change the duration of each tasks or project on the main task planning screen

Easily complete tasks on the main task planning screen

Create dependencies for tasks constraint by other tasks

Set Predecessors so that tasks with dependency can be linked

Coloring and Predecessors enables user to view which tasks are constrain to only start after certain tasks.

Review in Gantt Chart

These nested task will be presented in Gantt chart format which can be maximized or minimized with a button.

You can move the timeline, that is, your start date of these tasks by dragging the task activity bar on the Gantt chart.

I find that the best view to review your Gantt chart is on a landscape view because you would be able to view more task details such as dependency, completion and manipulated them there and then instead of navigating within each task to carry them out.

Attach manpower to tasks

Often that is not provided in most To Do List app is assigning owners to the task or delegation.

SG Project allows you to assign a single owner to it

SG Risk Log Pro

Risk Log Pro enables you to create, manage the risk asscoiated with the project so that owners take a reponsibility in how they are handled.

It allows you to

• Document multiple risks for each project
• Set an Owner and Due Date for each risk
• Categorize risks into 4 main risk management strategies
• Quantify by assigning likelihood and severity values to each risk
• Sort and Filter the risk list for a project
• Maintain an organized history of notes for each risk
• Export a risk report to PDF and email from directly within the app

SG Action Log Pro

To be honest, I don’t really get the main difference between an action item and a task. I suppose if you use the concept of Milestones and Action Items, this will work well because Action Log will be linked to the milestones created in SG Project Pro

• Document multiple action items for each project
• Set an Owner and Due Date for each action item
• Set the state of each action item to move through a simple lifecycle
• Quantify by assigning a priority value to each action item
• Categorize action items into up to 10 custom-named groups
• Sort and Filter the action item list for a project
• View compressed view of the items using a pinch gesture
• Maintain an organized history of notes for each action item
• Export an action item report to PDF and email from directly within the app

Where SG Project Pro didn’t do so well

Duplicating tasks

We wish that duo locating tasks is easier as in the course of preparing this example I have numerous tasks that I would need to do that.

Collapsing tasks and milestones

All tasks are expanded and when reviewing, you really wish that you can collapse the tasks to view them on a high level

Limited colors to choose from

It would be better if they have more color tagging choices as for bigger projects these colors can easily run out.

Exporting to MS Project XML

Instead of exporting to a native ms project XML format, the app only allows you to export to ms project XML. The limitation is transiting between windows desktop and iPad will be a problem since most people do not save their document in XML.

Conclusion

SG Project comes across as a competent iPad app. This is the first iPad project management app reviewed and certainly I can envision myself managing tasks with a defined start and end date instead of processes on it.

The ability to review and see dependency not to mention delegation are pluses.

My gripe about it is that there are occasional crashes that is irritating me which I hope can be ironed lout in future releases.

Read my Getting Things Done series today!

Now at WATODO! we are trying to integrate with Toodledo. Why we choose Toodledo is because they provide us with a very nice and comprehensive API. Toodledo strives to be very extensive in what you can do with tasking, be it nesting, repeating and scheduling.

But what a lot of people yearns for is for Google to really focus on making their Google Tasks great. Google finally listen to what we want and started taking in view and opinions of what we want for Google Tasks.

on May 11,2011, Google released their Google Tasks API. The question is whether this will be better than Toodledo.

I will have to do some exploring and my start a new project on this.

The API is available in Labs and can be activated for your project through the API Console. Get started today by trying the Tasks API yourself using the API Explorer and taking a look at the documentation.