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! ; )
Action Method Online is a project management application that is geared towards teams rather then being a straightforward todo or task manager.
The core of Action Method revolves around the Action Sthtml Entwurf kanban boardep. This is basically a todo or task. However, the idea behind the tool is to incorporate some of David Allens “Getting Things Done” methodology in which there are no real todos just next steps you need to take. So, whenever you create a task or todo, think: “What is the next step I need to take to get this done or move it forward? And what is the outcome I want to achieve?”
Action Steps can have the following properties:
You can filter your tasks with the following options:
You can manage your todos by either editing them or drag-and-dropping them.
As I mentioned before, there are a lot of features that try to make your usage of Action Method more productive:
Discussions are conversatione between people within your organization or team. You get notification as soon as someone posts something new here.
Backburners are ideas that you do not want to act on now – however want to keep them in mind for later.
Events are dates such as milestones, due dates and so forth.
References are simple documents that can be reviewed and edit by everyone in your team.
References and discussions can have files attached (docs, pdfs, images) to them. However this works only in the premium account (12$ per month and user).
Furthermore there is an Activity Feed with an overview of the latest activities in your project, a list of all your contacts (team members) and a possibility to send short messages to your colaborators.
All your actions steps are grouped into projects which can be anything you want them to be – think of them as tags. You can also combine projects into groups.
For a better overview of your current project you can switch to “project view”. Here you get a good impression of what is going on in your project. You can see action steps, discussions, backburners, events and references all in one place.
You also can assign your projects priorities: In “Energy Line” you can set them to high, medium, low or idle.
Even though there is a desktop tool (via adobe air) which you can download for both Mac and PC – the interface and speed is just the same as in your browser. There is also an Iphone App available.
The features all seem to make sense when you work in a team – however, the tool itself becomes very crowded – a lot of things are going on. This results in lack of focus on the actual stuff you want to get done: Your actions, todos, tasks. There are tools for all of those extra features and maybe you do not want to integrate them all in place.
Also the user and work flow does not seem quite intuitive when navigating the features – it seems that sometimes they could be better integrated into one another.
Feature Rating: 3/5
The overall look and feel is quite appealing. On first glance it is calm, not too much clutter or visual noise.
When you go into detail though, there are a couple of things that are confusing. The hierarchy navigation for example is misleading, because you have your project categories (actions steps, references, etc.) above the project navigation.
Also the main navigation changes when you navigate to different features of the app. Which is a bit of nuissance because you have to navigate back to do something new.
As said before, there could be a bit more of a flow to going through the application. Due to the feature density this surely is not as easy to achieve.
The performance within a certain page is quite decent. Some of the interactions are done without page reloads and thus reload quickly. However, when you switch between features, almost always a page reload is required, which slows the performance down quite a bit. (Navigating to the premium sign-up page even took almost 10 seconds – which seems like quite a bummer.)
Design Rating: 3/5
Being target to teams and corporations and more complex processes (such as discussions, file sharing, and so forth) rather then being a real todo or task manager.
Most of the features seem quite appealing and the overall design is appealing even though it could support your work flows better.
Overall Rating: 3/5
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Here are more screenshots over at the Action Method site.
If you are interested in the Action Method Iphone App – take a look here.
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If you are interested in simpler todo manager check out our review of wunderlist.
Email is big part of our everyday workflow. Getting hundreds of emails daily is a normal thing these days. Different people, different contexts, different actions make even harder to stay on top email.
In an interesting free paper by Getting Things Done author David Allen, the classic GTD approach is applied to email:
Now your inbox should be empty.
A very similar approach is presented by Merlin Mann with “Inbox Zero” over at google:
After getting your inbox to zero or emptying it you still have a lot left to do: Check the folders you have created regularly:
If you are a gmail user you might like our article on getting productive with gmail priority inbox.
We have been thinking about what todo management actually want to achieve and instead of writing a post about it, I thought a tag cloud could actually illustrate our ideas quite well.
(you can click on any of the links to get to a more or less relevant page/article/video on that topic)
If you get a lot of emails and have trouble deciding which emails to read and reply to first, google mails new priority inbox might be the right thing for you:
It sorts your emails into two categories (you can even set more) important and everything else by following criteria that are displayed as seperate blocks beneath each other:
You even get a new navigation item called “priority inbox” so that you can switch to you standard inbox any time.
To turn it on, just go to your settings –> “priority inbox” tab. You can adjust your settings any time.
If you are familiar with Merlin Manns “inbox zero” concept or David Allens Getting Things Done methodology, you might be wondering, whether “priority inbox” actually keeps you from getting things done.
Both todo management strategies rely on you not having to decide what to read and what not, but just going through your emails or todos and either archiving, delegating, making an action out of it or just doing it. The goal is to get your inbox empty.
Priority Inbox on the other hand seems to put emphasis on certain emails instead of others. This “everything else” part could not get enough attention and eventually grow over time until becoming unmanageable. Thus being an annoying stress factor in your todo management strategy.
Have you tried gmails “priority inbox” and what are your experiences?
I will try it out the next couple of weeks and report on mine :)
[via avc.com]
[via lifehacker und Gmail Blog]
As we develop our own task management tool, we of course ask ourselves what features it should incorporate. I stumbled upon two articles. Here is a summary of the features that a perfect todo or task management tool should incorporate:
Of course there are many more feature wishes out there. We will be on the lookout for more inspiration for our tool.
Feel free to post your feature wishes, ideas and suggestions in the comments.
Kevin Purdy over at lifehacker.com writes that the right todo manager should be very quick. That is why he suggests using a text file as a to-do list.
Even if you have high-speed internet connection, working in the browser with a web app will always come short of well programmed desktop tool.
There sure is a point to this argument. However, it seems to me, that it is a lot about getting the user experience right. Even though your web app such as rememberthemilk (which I currently use) might be slower than a desktop application, the actual user flow might be done smarter and thus quicker. For example: I use the gmail widget of rememberthemilk, which let's me add todos on the fly in a very useful context, which is open all day long anyway: reading my emails.
Another thing Purdy is not happy with is the speed on mobile devices.
I have tried several tools for capturing my tasks and todos and come to love the note taking android app www.catch.com. It is free and the guys have put a lot of thought into the mobile interface.
It is actually so fast that I use it for every mental note these days: One click to open, input with tag-capabilities, one click to save. Done.
And reviewing your notes in the browser is almost as easy. Due to a very clean and reduced interface.
Purdy suggest todo.txt as his tool of choice. It works as a pimped-up text file with dropbox synchronisation (for more details check out his post).
I actually very much understand the idea of availability and backups as a reason to use a text file:
However, I see some disadvantages:
I am not saying that a text file cannot be a great tool to some extent.
It always depends on your needs, your work flow and in the end discipline to use the tool. However, if done right, a web app can be a great tool to manage your todos, actually get things done and thus make you more productive.
So, what works for you? What kind of tools do you use? Feel free to share your experiences!
