Category Archives: productivity

no more herding cats: schedule meetings online with doodle

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Oh the joy of convening meetings. Fifteen participants from different organisations. Some using Outlook, some Lotus Notes, some not quite sure what they are using. Some can never meet on Wednesdays; others work only on Wednesdays. City participants want to meet at the start or the end of the day. Country participants want to meet around lunchtime so they can leave and return home at a reasonable hour.

Sounds familiar? Online scheduling tools will not resolve issues of preference or availability, but they can minimise the time you spend finding out about them by sending emails or leaving phone messages all over the place. I have been using Doodle, a free browser-based scheduling tool, ever since my eldest daughter recommended it to me. Continue reading →

IQTELL’s beta as a GTD-compatible task manager

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In my previous post I introduced you to IQTELL’s virtual workspace, which brings together all your calendars, email accounts, contact information, tasks and notes into the one gargantuan browser-based application.

In this post I want to use a couple of screenshots provided by the IQTELL team to zoom in upon one of those areas and take you on a tour of IQTELL as a task manager. Continue reading →

IQTELL’s virtual workspace: productivity heaven?

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This post, dear reader, commences as a tale of mystery. A dark tale of late night tweets and skype calls across the continents. It all started with a tweet inviting Ozengo to become a beta tester for something called ‘IQTELL’ and proposing ‘a private session’. Now Ozengo knew about cold calling, but was new to the world of cold tweeting. Or should that be #coldtweeting? Anyhow, Ozengo’s curiosity was piqued sufficiently for him to fire up his trusted mac to unleash some serious research upon this whole IQTELL proposition.

It turned out that the IQTELL crowd claimed to have developed ‘a single, fully integrated application that allows you to manage all your needs‘. Ozengo’s initial response was one of scepticism. Most things that sound too good to be true are just that. However, it being a cold and rainy saturday morning in Melbourne, Ozengo looked further afield and came across consistently positive comments about this fledgling beta on user forums. Could this be true, a browser-based application that provided integration with your email, calendar, contacts and Evernote? That was steeped in David Allen’s Getting Things Done® (GTD®) methodology and fully customisable?

Having signed up as a beta tester, Ozengo set to work, quickly and methodically, and this is what he discovered:

Continue reading →

setting up a GTD workflow: evernote or zendone?

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One of the core principles of David Allen’s Getting Things Done™ (GTD™) approach to task management is that you need a ‘trusted system’ for capturing all the information, ideas and tasks that come your way. Evernote is eminently well-suited for the ‘collect’ phase of the GTD process: it provides an intuitive, versatile and robust repository for every shred of information that you may wish to collect, whether that be a business card, a recipe or a web page. You can sort your information in folders, tag individual items and retrieve your information thanks to a lightning-fast search function. Evernote is zenlike in its simplicity, but can it be adapted to support the more complex phases of a GTD workflow? Will it help you process all this information, organise tasks and review priorities? Can it help you to get things done? Or are you better off co-opting a custom-built application like Zendone, which was designed to provide a task management overlay to help you work with the information stored in Evernote?  Continue reading →

getting things done with gqueues

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GQueues is an attractive and powerful online task manager that integrates with your Google account. Its colourful and easy to use interface is built around folders that contain lists of tasks (called ‘queues’). You can drag and drop tasks, tag them and add notes or due dates. GQueues is highly customisable and can be set up to support a Getting Things Done™ (GTD™) workflow.

The ‘lite’ version of GQueues is free and provides enough functionality to be used for individual task management. The paid version costs $25 per year and adds full team collaboration, integration with Google Calendars and access to mobile versions for the iPhone and iPad and Android phones and tablets. Continue reading →

producteev introduces subtasks

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Producteev is an attractive and versatile web-based task manager that supports team collaboration across a range of platforms. It also comes as a free download for Mac and Windows desktops, Android phones and the iPhone. The iPhone app runs on the iPad, albeit in small screen format. Producteev is free for up to two users per workspace; $20 per month buys you unlimited user access for as many workspaces as you want. This independent review explores the Producteev browser app as a tool for individual task management. Continue reading →

using omnifocus and evernote to keep track of literary awards

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findlay alley, melbourne, 2008 (image: ozengo @ purplezengoat)

Does this sound familiar: you subscribe to a newsletter because you are interested in a topic; the newsletters start arriving in your inbox, brimming with superbly relevant information, yet after a while you feel overwhelmed rather than stimulated. You face a forest of factoids, a twirl of tweets, hystËricÅl hyperlinks – you feel like abandoning your 1,274 facebook friends and retreat into the cave of caveats. You, my friend, may be suffering from informatosis.

This post describes how I am trying to turn the tide of information overload and chaos in one area of my life by using evernote and omnifocus to keep track of literary awards that I learn about via twitter or newsletters. How can you capture snippets of information, regain an overview and build a platform that you can use for action? If literary awards are ‘not your thing’, you may still be interested in the principle of storing information in evernote and tracking associated tasks and deadlines though omnifocus. Continue reading →

set up a project template in omnifocus

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No matter how varied our lives, most of us can probably think of a series of tasks that we need to repeat from time to time. This could be a standard process for providing information or a service to customers, the steps required for making your favourite recipe, or even just a list of things to pack for your next trip or holiday. A ‘project’, after all, is nothing more than a group of related tasks.

In this post I want to show you how easy it is to set up a project template in omnifocus. Once you have mapped out the tasks that make up your project, you are only one right-click away from turning it into a template that you can use over and over again. Continue reading →

what do you want from a to-do app?

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Fools rush in, they say, where angels fear to tread. I thought I would create a diagram, using XMind, a free mind-mapping program, to ‘shortlist’ selected task management programs from a couple of user perspectives.

There are no winners: most of the listed apps have the capacity to boost your productivity enormously. Choosing a productivity app is largely a matter of personal preference – you have to feel comfortable with how data are entered, with the views on offer, with the workflow and the colour scheme. Some of that takes time; an app that dazzles you in the first week may feel suffocating and uninformative once it needs to handle a couple of hundred tasks.

You can question many aspects of my diagram. For example, most of the listed apps support various degrees of customisation; I have only listed omnifocus, gqueues and toodledo as being extraordinarily versatile in that area. For ‘bug free’ I have set the bar equally high.

There are also gaps in my diagram. I have not included apps that I have never explored (call me traditional), nor apps that are primarily geared towards note taking (such as evernote, that swiss army knife of productivity) or team collaboration (such as basecamp or flow). I have not included other parameters, such as whether file attachments are supported. There is only so much that will fit on a page.

My aim in posting this is not to provide complete or authoritative advice, but to provide a couple of pointers for people who are trying to find a task management app that may work for them. I would appreciate constructive feedback!