The Escapers (makers of Flux, Stuf and more) have an interesting new task management service called Instruktion. Or maybe it's called "New York Minute", it's not clear to me. It is cross platform and the apps are free. It requires a $20/year membership which sounds like a good price.
It looks very nice on all of the application platforms and works offline too. I'm an OmniFocus user but I'll keep an eye on how this evolves.
This post at NPR is interesting on so many different levels. It’s about Leonardo da Vinci’s todo list. It has left me a sense of being normal. Here’s a few thoughts I had during and after reading this.
<li>Many Todo's are to learn something new from an expert</li> <li>Text <em>and</em> doodles are always better than just one alone</li> <li>He didn't segregate subjects. He just kept a list of how he wanted to get better or things to make</li> <li>Amazingly, he was successful without strict adherence to GTD<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" rel="footnote">1</a></sup></li> <li>Given enough time and research money a standardized test can be created to measure creativity<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" rel="footnote">2</a></sup></li> By way of Kottke
Interesting deep-dive on an OmniFocus use case by Andrew Miner
In light of my previous post about controlling my work environment with Keyboard Maestro, I thought I would share a few more handy macros for OmniFocus.
Clean and Sync This is a pretty simple macro. Most of the work is done by two lines of AppleScript. The macro tells OmniFocus to clean-up the front window and then perform a sync. It's simple but handy.
Get to the tasks This one I use whenever I sit down at my Mac to clear some tasks out of OmniFocus.
I think Seth Godin writes some thought provoking pieces. I worry that he is following the recent trend of embracing hyperbole to fill a blog with fluff. Typically, hyperbole is just a waste of the reader's time. Sometimes it is actually bad advice.
It's great to try to encourage people to push themselves to do new and difficult things. The reality is that some success is from hard work and some is from good luck.
I agree with Eddie's recent post about using a Windows machine as just another tool or context. However, as a registered Spootnik user, I can tell you that web access to my tasks in OmniFocus is very convenient. And to Eddie's point that installing OmniFocus on every computer I work on would be a drag, Spootnik means that I don't have to. Web access means that I can use OF on any device I feel is appropriate at the time.
I really loved the OmniFocus CLI posted over on dirtdon.com. I loved it so much that I decided to build my own, but instead of a shell script, I wanted to explore a solution in Python. I solve quite a bit of my own little problems using Python. I’m no expert, but I like this scripting language for small solutions. I also wanted an excuse to learn more about Python’s Natural Language Processing (NLP).
You can bet I will be hacking around with this awesome work. Some clever little tricks. I love when people make awesome tools to solve their own problems.
By way of Simplicity Is Bliss
After listening to David Sparks’ OmniFocus video series, I’ve been rethinking how I use due dates for tasks. Well, actually, I’ve been rethinking it for quite sometime. Usually when I’m postponing due dates.
Forecast I love the OmniFocus for iPad’s Forecast mode. It’s a custom view into tasks, that presents them in a timeline with past due tasks colored red and near term tasks colored orange. This is a great way to see what you are up against for the coming week or check out what slipped through the cracks.
I bought into the Simplenote world from the moment I read John Gruber rave about it. Since then I have relied heavily on the Simplenote platform for both personal and professional note taking and list making. The beauty of Simplenote lies in its unique restriction to plain text. I have been tempted by the luxuriousness that is Evernote. However, after a brief project to extract all of my notes from Evernote into a file structure that would outlive the hosted service, I realized that there was safety in simplicity.
