Wednesday, September 28, 2011

David Allen on Interruptions, Focus and Use of the Inbox in GTD

Great Productivity Pattern when Dealing with Interruptions

as shown in a short video by David Allen, author of the great productivity book “Getting Things Done”:

As soon as an interruption appears you stick whatever you are working on into the inbasket or inbox. You can continue working on what you dropped there, whenever you have ressources to deal with it.

And don’t forget to make sure you empty your inbox! ; )

Friday, September 2, 2011

Review: Get Paprika – Simple, Personal List-Based Todo and Notes Management

GetPaprika is a very simple tools that let’s you organize your todos and notes in a single list.

getpaprika - list based todo management - view mode

Feature Set: Everything in one Editable List

The core concept of Get Paprika is quite simple and quite different from other todo tools: You can create projects and every project has one editable text page associated to it.

When you switch from view to edit mode you can capture notes, create todos, tags, dates and format your text using basic formatting options via textile.

getpaprika - todo management with a list - edit mode

Once you save your document you can then mark todos as done, filter and search for tags, dates and projects.

There is also an option to share the document via a link that you can send to anybody and they can edit it without signing up. However there is no history or an indication as to who wrote what.

As far as a personal easy-to-use dump for notes and todos GetPaprika does quite well. When working in a team you would wish for more options, more work flows and automation. Such as assignments, automated priorization, reminders and so forth.

Feature rating: 3/5

 

Design and Usability: Fast Capturing, Slow Working

It only takes a couple of minutes to get to know the concept and basic textile commands to use GetPaprika. So you can start working straight away.

The one-list concept for both notes, todos, dates and tags also helps you get started capturing your stuff pretty fast.

On the other hand, once you have captured your stuff and you want to work with your list, you will find yourself regularly switching to edit mode to either remove, reorder or edit your stuff.

The overall design (look and feel, performance and usability) is very well done, straight forward and low-noise. Quite fun to use, actually.

Design and Usability rating: 3/5

 

Overall Impression: Great Approach for Capturing Your Stuff

GetPaprika is free, easy and fun. It allows you to quickly capture and format your notes and todos. No real hassle, no complexity. If you are looking for a personal brain dump which still allows you some degree of todo management, GetPaprika seems like a good choice.

If you need more features, more workflow or better collaboration you should maybe take a look at our review of the task manager “flow” or our review of “action method” – a project management tool.

Overall Rating: 3/5