Blorg

Succumbing to Content Creation

OK, that’s a fairly glum title, but it’s true: I finally decided to start a proper YouTube channel. And I have mixed feelings about it. 😄 I have actually wanted to make some cocktail-related videos for a long time now, but time management, procrastination, and self-doubt kept it on the back burner… until now. Except somehow I ended up talking about non-alcoholic stuff instead! 🤷‍♂️ It’s something I’ve been getting more into and it feels like an interesting niche.

It takes a lot of time, and I’m not totally happy with the results yet. I’m also still working through that “OK but who am I to have an opinion on the internet?” impostor syndrome feeling. But hey, I’m doing it! And it does feel good to do something, you know? I have felt a sort of pent up desire to “create” for a while, so I had to try.

Having said all that, hopefully you still want to check it out! Please do, and let me know what you think.

https://www.youtube.com/@zeroproofhomebar

Toward a volunteer/work-trade/pro bono approach to consulting

I am writing about this while it is still fresh in my mind, but I don't feel quite as articulate as I'd like. Nonetheless it feels valuable to speak to recent experiences while they are "alive", so to speak.

I have offered consulting for some time, and have worked with several very interesting clients in the past few years on that basis. But it turns out the people I most want to work with often can’t afford the market rate for my skillset and interests. These are people whose work I love and respect, who are doing things in the world that I want to support and enable! I have a decently paying full-time job, so it’s really not about the money for me, but I also don’t want to undervalue my time or that of others doing similar work. Do those concerns matter? What, exactly, does it mean to “undervalue” your time? And how do you decide if you’re getting enough “value” in what you do, whether your compensation is monetary or otherwise?

Over the past year I have been experimenting with how to navigate this, working in particular with small business owners who, as I mentioned, often can’t afford full consulting rates for high tech projects. Yesterday marked the culmination and amazingly successful launch of one of those projects, and being a part of it really crystallized that this approach feels right for me. That you can know, definitively, that your time is well-valued and well-spent, even – and perhaps especially if – it is largely not compensated with money. And also that the way in which I choose to value my time is essentially mine to decide, and I can’t accept responsibility for how others might feel about those choices, how they might feel it reflects on the different way in which they have chosen to value their time. This may seem like an obvious thing to some, but in the tech world such an approach is rare, in my experience, and money (or proxies for it) seems to often be one of the largest considerations in deciding how people spend their time.

Had I went with the norm of charging market rate for my services (or even a consistent, discounted rate), these projects and my work with these interesting, inspiring, deserving people simply wouldn’t have happened. The folks I have worked with in this past year wouldn’t have had the support I was able to offer, and I wouldn’t have been able to celebrate with them and enjoy the feeling of helping someone, and maybe even being an integral part of important changes in their life! This, I imagine, is part of what being a good coach feels like, at times (the best of times).

I have no doubts about the value of having spent my time this way. I have built friendships through this process, and found the right path between us for healthy and sustainable compensation as well. Sometimes it’s work-trade, sometimes sharing of something special, and occasionally good, old fashioned cash. I imagine it may look different for each person or group I work with, and that’s a good thing. It keeps it interesting and ensures the right fit for each client’s needs and means. But what matters most is being able to work with people you believe in and who are doing work in the world that you want to support.

Sometimes the investment of time needed can become a challenge without some more tangible compensation, and when some funds are available to do that, it helps balance things out. Stepping back from the project is also an option, though potentially non-ideal, even though it is still satisfying knowing I helped to some degree. Navigating all of this continues to be a challenging but rewarding process, one which I think I’m getting better at (I certainly hope so!). It’s a good problem to have, in any case. I can help others when my time and energy allows, appreciate and consider (and often enjoy) any compensation they can offer (whether material or monetary or otherwise), and step back from it when other things take my attention and focus.

I’ve written more on this sort of thing in a collective, organizational concept over in my digital garden if you’re interested:

https://garden.oshyan.com/t/a-volunteer-based-technology-services-organization-for-small-businesses/241

I started a digital garden…

Hey, so I haven’t been posting here all that often. Sorry about that… But guess what! I found a solution: I created a “digital garden”. What the heck is that you say? I wrote (er, started to write) a thing about that!

Basically it’s a different “frame” for content and creative output in general. It changes the dynamic for both author and reader away from a focus on presumably polished, “finished” piece of content, and toward works-in-progress, change, and improvement over time (one might call that “growth” 🤔). The metaphor recalls the idea of cultivation, of “growing” one’s ideas, writing, and other creative output.

As a result it has a much lower barrier to “publishing”. A piece of content does not have to be “finished” to be made “public”. This has advantages for creators and consumers (or perhaps more like “interactors”) alike. Again I’ve written more about that in the “garden” itself.

You probably don’t know it, but I have numerous half-finished blog posts in the back-end of my blog. Maybe there are some interesting ideas in there, but you’d never know until and unless I have the time and energy to finish writing, polish them up, and publish. 😱 Yes, for some of us, publishing feels like kind of a big deal, even on one’s own website. So… the digital gardens concept is a way around my own sense of perfectionism, and thus far it has been really freeing.

I now expect a majority of my new creative work to show up there first, and I hope you’ll head on over and check it out. And comment! I’m not sure what I’ll do with my blog and main site in general, and I still intend to produce “final” or “polished” pieces from time to time. But for now the gardens should be your first stop if you’re interested in what I’m thinking and writing about lately.

How to choose a task or project management tool

Born out of discussion in The Productivists community and my own (ongoing!) search for an ideal task/project management tool, I thought it could be helpful to try to define in broad strokes how to start your own journey of selecting the best tool for you. This can apply whether you’ve never used a task manager before, or are simply switching tools.

From this point on I may refer to task/project management by “T/PM” to save time/space.

Preamble

My goal is to make this an easy and fairly comprehensive reference of the things you might want to keep in mind when evaluating and deciding on a T/PM tool. In reality there are a ton of things to consider, and I hope to touch on most of the important ones. So this guide will be a little longer than I might prefer. And while the following may feel like a somewhat exhausting (if not exhaustive!) list, fortunately you don’t need to pay close attention to all of it. It’s simply intended to make you aware of options or criteria you might not have considered otherwise, or which it might have taken you a while to become aware of through trial and error (as I did).

So this is my humble attempt to share the insights of my own long search for the ideal T/PM tool. Feel free to skim and take from it what is most useful to you!

Process

Get the Overview

If at all possible, I recommend reviewing the below before you dive in to big lists of tools or review roundups, etc. Hopefully it will prime your mindset to help you focus on the options most likely to be relevant to you when you do get into sorting through the many that are available.

Evaluate the Market

Once you have an overall familiarity with these criteria and differentiators, and have hopefully put them into a rough order of personal importance, then you can evaluate any options you come across against your personal criteria and make a shorter, more relevant list of choices for yourself. Ideally this will become a semi-intuitive process based on the internalized categories and criteria here, and any other criteria you have come up with.

Seek Real-World Examples

One thing I strongly recommend is to seek out videos of the actual interface and workflow of any given tool you’re considering. Often the UI may look nice in screenshots, but the actual workflow is clunky, or they even used mockups on their website, and the interface itself looks different (this is a particularly shady practice in my view). The best sources for real-world looks at app UI and workflow are their official documentation, and YouTube (or other) videos, either from the company itself, or better yet from reviewers or users doing instructional videos.

Test

In the end nothing can substitute for personal experience! Fortunately a majority of tools out there offer some form of free version, demo mode, or at least short-term free trial. Even for those that don’t you can often get one simply by requesting it from the author.

But I encourage you to not spend too much time on testing specific apps when you’re still early in your search process. Narrow your options first, if you can. Try to focus your actual testing time on the most promising candidates.

What is Best is Personal (Context is King)

When choosing a T/PM tool it’s important to keep in mind that there is no “best” overall tool. There are only tools that are better for one person or another. So the critical thing to do is to really figure out what you want, and that starts by asking yourself why you want a T/PM tool in the first place, and getting a clear understanding of the context you’re coming from in your search. Are you new to T/PM tools, or trying to find a better one than what you already use? Do you want to structure your life or your business or both? Do you have a lot of tasks and/or projects, or just a few? Are you more or less tech savvy or inclined to use in-depth, sophisticated tools? Etc.

This will help you connect with and prioritize much of the following criteria. For an obvious example, if you want something solely for personal use, it will largely eliminate collaborative features as a significant consideration for you. Likewise if you are picking something for a business, you may be able to expense it, which might affect how much you’re willing to pay. Etc. Just do your best to think about your goals in adopting a T/PM tool.

Tool Proliferation

We are living in a golden age of productivity tools. Nowhere is this more prevalent, in my experience, than in task and project management. There are literally 1000s of such tools. Maybe the number of note taking apps would beat it, but only because many are extremely simple and even unmaintained.

So we have 1000s of options, but realistically should only use 1 or at most a couple of tools at a time. That presents a huge challenge to actually picking a tool for ourselves. The key then is to actually put as much focus as you can on eliminating options as fast and as simply as possible, so that you hopefully end up with a much smaller pool of possible candidates, which you can then evaluate more in-depth.

How To Narrow Your Options

Prioritize

It’s difficult to consider criteria without a way to rank or compare them. When you’re evaluating a given app and you end up with two competing criteria (e.g. an app that meets all your needs but is more expensive than you want to pay), you want to have a way of deciding which is more important to you.

So in reviewing the following list of criteria, consider their relative importance to you and try to create your own personal ranking. If possible decide whether each one is a “deal breaker”, too, i.e. if the app does not meet that criteria it is automatically disqualified, or if it just heavily reduces your likelihood of choosing it. You can make reviewing the below list faster by simply skipping over any category of criteria you already know isn’t important to you.

Evaluate Criteria

There are many broad categories you can use to narrow your list of options. Let’s start with the easy stuff, which I view as the largest and most simple factors to consider, i.e. there is generally a clear yes or no, vs. evaluating more qualitatively. For example, “do I need offline collaboration functions and does this tool have them” should be pretty simple to determine, even if the details may have some complexity.

For most people I think these are generally the biggest considerations:

  • Price
  • Platform(s)
  • Collaboration
  • Design
  • Organization and Structure
  • Integration

Price

This is a fairly straightforward one: how much can you afford to or are you willing to pay? If you imagine your ideal tool, what would that be worth to you?

Pricing Model

Another related factor might be the pricing model itself.

  • Monthly fee (SaaS)
  • One-time fee
  • Free
  • Open source I realize open source is not strictly a “pricing model”, but that is one component that can be considered here

A majority of new tools these days are SaaS, in other words you generally have to pay an ongoing monthly fee. If this is an absolute deal-breaker for you, then you eliminate quite a lot of tools from the beginning. The same is true if you really prefer open source. But you do want to be sure that you absolutely would not consider a monthly subscription or other pricing model that you don’t prefer.

Platform(s)

Obviously if the tool you want doesn’t run on the device(s) or OS(s) you have, then it’s not much good to you. As a Windows user I’ve had to ignore a vast array of awesome-looking tools that are Mac-only, like Things 3, Omnifocus, Tinderbox, and more. For most people a change of platform is simply not an option when considering adoption of a new software tool.

Web

This is clearly the most broadly available way to make an app and its functionality available, and this is probably why many – if not most – modern task managers at least start out web-based. But there are some limitations to this approach, including challenges implementing offline features, poor interaction on mobile devices, lack of notification functions on some platforms, etc.

Mobile

For those of you who live on your mobile device this can be a huge deal breaker, and is one of the reasons why platform considerations are high on the list of criteria to consider first. With mobile in particular it’s often important to evaluate not just whether they have a mobile app for your platform, but how mature and polished it is.

A good example of why this is important can be seen with ClickUp, which by many user’s accounts has had a buggy and slow mobile app for much of it slife. They recently (December 2020) released a total rewrite, however some early reports are saying that many features are missing (which is often the case with ground-up app rewrites). So the quality of the app can be as important as its mere existence on your platform of choice. You can get some idea of this of course by reading reviews on the respective app stores, or ultimately testing yourself, but the latter should be a last resort since it can take a lot of time to find the rough edges.

Desktop

Windows, Mac, Linux, that’s basically it. You could argue ChromeOS maybe, but nah, let’s not. 😉 So it’s as simple as determining whether there is there an actual, dedicated, stand-alone app for your desktop operating system of choice. This can provide better performance, more integration with other desktop tools or functionality, and other advantages. In short, a more “native” experience. But this is not critical for everyone by any means and only a subset of the available tools have desktop apps. So if this is a key differentiator for you, congratulations, you’ve just narrowed the field considerably!

Design: UI, UX, Navigation, and Aesthetics

I’m going to lump all of these together here because the borders can be fuzzy between these concepts, and even when they aren’t, for the end user it often boils down to how it “feels” to use the tool.

Navigation

Basically, how do you get around in the application. This obviously relates to many other things both in this category, and others (e.g. Organization and Structure), and it can be surprisingly personal as far as what people prefer. Usually I find this to be fairly easy to determine just by looking at some documentation or demo or review videos of the app in question. If it “clicks” and makes sense to me intuitively, then it’s likely to be a tool I’ll enjoy using. That said, sometimes for a tool that is good in most other respects, it can be worth getting used to a more idiosyncratic navigation scheme, but I think it’s generally the exception rather than the rule.

Aesthetics

This is extremely personal and also hard to quantify or necessarily even compare. But for most people “you know it when you see it”. You can generally look at a screenshot of a tool, or at least a video, and say whether you like how it looks or not.

“Feel”

This is essentially the interactive version of aesthetics above, and often requires that you actually test the tool in question. It can come down to microsecond differences in responsiveness, the size of clickable areas for buttons and other interactive elements, or good vs. bad placement or existence of things like “toast” notifications, pop-ups, tool-tips, etc. Often times you’ll know within just a few minutes of starting to use an app whether you like how it feels or not.

Natural Language Processing, “Command Palettes”, etc.

Although both of these are relatively new concepts in UI/UX, they can both be tremendous workflow enablers, either one of which can make many of your interactions with the tool faster, easier, and more seamless.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

When it is used in task managers this usually refers to the ability to create tasks, set dates and reminders, etc. simply by typing in more “natural” language, e.g. “Take out the trash at 9AM next Tuesday @Chores” would be automatically converted into a task in the “Chores” category, set for 9AM next Tuesday. This can make it much faster to enter in your tasks, especially on mobile.

Command Palettes

These are interesting and useful interaction and navigation tools that take a variety of forms and are becoming quite popular lately. Generally they are triggered by a hotkey or easily available button, which pops up a simple text dialog into which you can type what you want to do, and you’ll get a list of matching commands. These may be contextual based on where in the interface you are when you trigger it, and they can have other sophisticated functions as well. But in general they all aim to give you a single point of interaction to quickly perform a variety of common (or not so common) functions. They often implement NLP as above as well.

Dark Mode

While “dark mode” is a design aspect, it has a highly functional role for many people, so it’s important to consider separately if you are one of those who prefer to have the option.

Integration and Interoperability

For some people, connecting their task manager to other apps they already use or want to use is critical. For others it’s not something they care about at all. But this can be a huge differentiator and ought to help you narrow things down if you can determine one way or the other. Do you want your task manager to connect to your calendar, your Apple ecosystem, your smart speaker?

Integrations With What?

For those with a strong existing app or device ecosystem, this can be one of the most significant factors: does it work with what I already use and own? This is highly personal, and sometimes it can even be difficult to realize whether such an integration would even exist or be possible before you’ve seen it on a feature list somewhere. But yes, your smart speaker can (sometimes) connect to your task manager (e.g. “Hey Google, set a reminder for 9AM tomorrow”), your note-taking app as well, along with your email, and much more.

Perhaps start with a list of the tools and devices you already own, then imagine whether it would be nice to have some aspect of your task manager connected to them, either for sharing data (e.g. calendar integration) or functionality (e.g. create task from your smart speaker).

Integrated How?

This is a consideration with two different meanings, and they can often overlap or be otherwise related.

First, what forms does the integration take, what features does it have? In other words what aspects of each integrated system are actually related and connected? What can you do using the integration?

Second, you can consider how integrations are supported from a technical or functional standpoint, e.g. are they “native” (developed by the creator of the tool), or from 3rd parties, are they built-in to the tool, or do they use Zapier or some other external integration platform. This may seem largely irrelevant to many people, or hard to understand the importance of, but it can definitely affect what you can do with the integration. So this consideration can actually inform the above “what form does it take, what can it do?” question.

Synchronization

One of the most important considerations in integration is whether the data connection is bi-directional, e.g. your tasks can show up on a 3rd party calendar app (like Google Calendar), but you can also make changes on the calendar that show up in your task manager. In most cases bi-directional integration or sync is ideal, though in some cases it’s not critical.

Collaboration

This is simple in concept, and hopefully simple to evaluate, but can be complex in implementation. Essentially, does the tool have formal options for involving multiple people in task/project management. Almost any tool could be used this way by e.g. sharing a login, but generally you want multiple users, to show who did what, who is responsible for a given task or project, who wrote a comment, etc.

Most of the time it’s pretty clear which tools accommodate this and which don’t.

Offline Capability

This is not important to everyone, but for those who do value it, it can be a huge consideration. Anyone with spotty local internet, or who travels frequently, among other reasons, may really value good offline support. This is most commonly possible with desktop and mobile apps, but some web apps also feature it.


Now we get into criteria that may be a little more difficult to evaluate and compare, but are nonetheless useful to consider.

Organization and Structure

This can take many forms, but one of the most common is how many “layers” of organization does the tool offer. In other words, do you just have “task”, and all tasks are represented as equal, at the same “level”? Or are there folders, Projects, Lists, or some other type of organizational scheme? Here’s a basic outline of some of the common organizational concepts in T/PM tools:

  • Workspace
    • Department/Project/Space
      • Folder
        • List Mainly ClickUp
          • Task
          • Sub-task
            • Check-list

Note: Some systems consider check-lists to be entirely separate at another level of hierarchy

Generally speaking, when well implemented, at least some of these levels will be clearly exposed and “expandable” in some kind of hierarchy view, often the classic “tree view” as exemplified in common file managers like Windows Explorer or Mac’s Finder tool.

Your basic task is to decide how many levels of – or options for – organizing you need. Do you want to have every task categorized in numerous hierarchical ways? This might be influenced by the sheer number of tasks you have to manage, or the amount of differentiation in the areas these tasks occur. If you have few tasks or you are mostly interested in managing tasks for yourself in your daily life, you might be OK with a more flat organizational system that divides tasks in just a few simple categories, or not at all.

Workspaces

A “workspace” is generally the highest-level container for a set of work (or task) information. It often includes many tasks, folders, views, etc. In other words it encapsulates all work related to a particular area.

Depending on the application, these may be handled differently, for example some tools let you view multiple workspaces at once in a single view. Others only have 1 workspace per account or email, or no concept of a workspace at all.

Often times workspaces are the easiest way to define permissions, i.e. whether a given user belongs to a particular workspace or not.

Department, Project, Space

Another common – though certainly not universal – type of organizing concept is that of a “department” or “project”, sometimes called a “space”. You can have multiple of these within a given “workspace”, and whether they’re called “project” or “department” is often simply determined by whether the tool is oriented toward work or more general purposes. Some tools even have both.

Folder and Folder Equivalents

Folders are perhaps the most common and familiar way of organizing things for most people. Many T/PM tools implement them, though they are often called different things, or they serve multiple functions. For example ClickUp has Folders, but it also has “Lists” which can exist inside of folders and are in some basic sense a form of folder-like organization. But Lists also have other properties that a folder may not.

Many tools also allow folders within folders, sometimes to a near unlimited degree. Other systems simply forget about trying to classify each level of organization and just call everything a “folder”.

Tags, Labels, etc.

Some tools allow you to use the now-familiar idea of tags to organize your tasks, projects, etc. In certain cases this is the only way of organizing, which can be highly flexible, but for some people is also limiting or otherwise too lacking in clear structure. Labels can work differently, but are often similar or identical to tags.

Other Organizational Functions

There are also tools like ToDoist that implement other functions for helping to organize, for example “dividers” which are basically visual, labeled dividers within a list of tasks (inside a Project). They do not “contain” tasks, they simply divide them visually within an overall list, so they are not visible outside of your view of that list of tasks.

Notes on Categorization

In many cases these names are simply for convenience, to differentiate different parts of the hierarchy. In some systems they have functional differences, but in others they are just different “levels” of what are essentially folders.

It’s also important to note that different tools often use varying terms to refer to similar types of features and functionality. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in organizational tools. Additionally, not all of these organizational options exist in each tool.

Finally, keep in mind that you don’t necessarily have to use each organizational function in the way it is named. You may want to use “Workspaces” to differentiate between different companies you work with as a private consultant, or you might simply have 1 workspace for your entire consulting business, and use “Departments” or “Spaces” or even “Projects” to differentiate them.

Scheduling and Planning Features

Although it is not absolutely critical to every task management tool, the availability and usability of features to set dates, times, and reminders for these can be a very important differentiator. Different tools approach these functions in various ways. I’ll touch on just a few major aspects here.

Repeating Tasks

This one is a deal-breaker for some people, and only supported by a sub-set of tools (though an increasing number). The specific implementation of repeating tasks can also have important differences, some of which can frankly be a little difficult to understand or use. If it’s important to you, it’s worth getting really clear about how the feature works in practice in any app candidate.

Calendar View and Interaction

This is one that I didn’t realize at first was that important to me, but became a critical differentiator for my personal task manager needs. What I wanted to be able to do was drag-and-drop tasks around on a calendar, and have those changes reflected also in list views, etc. For some people this is totally unnecessary or just occasionally useful, in which case perhaps a simple calendar integration will work. But for others the calendar may be the primary way they interact with or reference their task list for the day, week, etc. I found this particularly diverged between people who are trying to either plan ahead more than a week, or plan out any given day in a more structured way (see “time blocking” below).

Gantt or “Timeline”

These views are familiar especially to seasoned project managers, but as they are implemented into more and more tools, they are becoming potentially useful to a broader range of people. While they are arguably of most critical relevance to someone trying to balance workloads and overlapping projects, they can also help people understand how and why their lives may be busier than they want, and perhaps facilitate some adjustment in an intuitive way.

Time Blocking and Other Features

Time blocking is a way of organizing your time within a day that essentially sets aside “blocks” of time for particular activities or (most often) types of activities. If you’re consultant and blogger, you might focus on writing in the morning if you feel most creative then, followed by client work in the afternoon and billing after that. Perhaps you end by doing scheduling. These are not necessarily specific tasks you’re doing, each block might involve multiple tasks that you accomplish and get archived, but you plan to do the same type of work at the same time very day, for example.

This is just one way of approaching or structuring your time, and there are many others, e.g. Pomodoro method, Eating the Frog, etc. Some apps give you specific tools or modes to facilitate one or more of these ways of working. A good example is Amazing Marvin, which has a wide variety of “Strategies” that can be enabled (or disabled) to add specific functionality or modes of working.

Reminders and Notifications

Some would argue that a huge part of the purpose of a task manager is to “remind” us of things, but this can take many forms. For someone who keeps their task manager window open all the time, all day, and is at their computer all day as well, or someone who carries their phone everywhere and has a habit of checking it regularly, then “active” reminders (e.g. pop-ups, alarm tones, etc.) may not be strictly necessary. So some task managers only implement minimal “active” reminders, either because it seems unimportant to their users, or it simply hasn’t been implemented yet (the latter is true in the case of e.g. Fibery, as of the time of this writing).

Most of the time, though, you want at least some options for active reminders. And then it’s just a question of your preferences as to how that works. Maybe you want pop-ups on your phone, but not your computer. Or maybe you want pop-up notifications, but no sounds. Figure out what will best help you get things done and then look for apps with those options and features. Sometimes this can be an iterative process though, for example when I first started looking for a new task manager I thought I really wanted active mobile reminders for everything, but once I actually experienced using them, I found it to be not that helpful and now I just keep my task manager open all the time for reference, which the occasional active reminder only for specific things.

Task and Project Features

This is obviously a very broad category and can be at the heart of a T/PM tool’s functionality, but it is also one of the hardest to directly compare as implementations can vary so much between apps.

Note or Description

A note or description is generally in addition to the “Title” or name of the task. This seems like a pretty basic feature, and yet not every task manager allows you to make any additional note or provide a description for your task. Many people don’t need that, or may be content using a workaround, but it’s important to consider whether this is important to you.

Attachments

Can you attach one or more files to a task, project, etc., and if so what are the limits on file size, type, quantity, etc? This is one I essentially never use myself, but can be important to some.

Comments

A useful, if not critical way of augmenting your task info, comments can be especially important in the context of multi-user, collaborative environments. But they can also be used in other, more personal ways. For example I use them to keep track of notes for each time I complete ongoing, repeating tasks, and they are better for this vs. the Description or Notes above because they generally include the date written, and each entry is separate.

Support for Specific Methodologies, Strategies, etc.

Some people have a specific project or task management system like Getting Things Done (GTD), Eisenhower Matrix, or OKR that they want their tool to support in some way. This may take the form of certain specific features or configuration options, or – more often – it may simply be a particular way of using and interacting with the tool that enables the desired workflow or process. It is a minority of tools that actually have formal implementations of specific systems and methods like GTD, but if you search for any given app along with the name of a method, you have a decent chance of finding any resources on implementing that system in the tool in question. This information can sometimes be found in official documentation, but is perhaps more often discussed in user communities and 3rd party guides, tutorials, etc.

Having said that, even if there are few or no existing resources on how to use a particular method in a particular tool, it doesn’t mean that they are inherently incompatible. Often times, due to the huge variety of different tools and methodologies, it’s simply that no one has published anything about that specific combination. So in some cases you have to determine yourself, but searching for existing resources can at least be a quick shortcut to finding out whether a given tool is well known or especially suited for particular methods. ToDoist and GTD are commonly associated, for example, and they have even published an official guide to implementation.

If you’re new to formalized productivity methods, they can often be as important as the tool you use, if not more so. But they are certainly outside the scope of this article. ToDoist has a decent overview of some common options to consider, but I encourage you to look at some newer methods as well like PARA, PPV, etc. This is just to get you started.

https://todoist.com/productivity-methods

Other Features

There are many other things that various T/PM tools include in task or project “entities”, or in the application as a whole, to augment their functionality and utility. These additional functions are especially hard to compare cross-app because they tend not to be standardized. Examples might include “workflow”, e.g. what “state” is task in beyond done and not done (in ClickUp this could include “in progress”, “researching”, and even custom states), or the concept of an “Activity stream” which may show all the changes across all entities (or items) in the entire app or a given Workspace.

Development, Road Map, and Support

A tool’s ultimate utility in the long-term is only as good as its support and development, in my view. Whether it is something as simple as supporting a new version of your operating system, fixing bugs, or implementing new features, not to mention helping users with their problems and questions, clearly the actions of the product team play an important role in the benefit we get out of our tools.

Development

Primarily this concerns both the pace and quality of development output, as expressed in bug resolution, feature releases, and other improvements. In the case of fairly mature tools you might see fewer major releases, but you still want to see ongoing improvements, ideally speaking. But issue resolution (i.e. bug fixing) may arguably be one of the most important things, and is not always easy to evaluate. Look for change logs, either posted on the company’s website, or perhaps in their user forums, in change notes on an app store entry, or even within the app’s “About” section or some other in-app change log equivalent. You can also look for user discussions that mention changes, improvements, and fixes. An app without changes for 6 months or more is a definite warning sign.

A more positive sign, generally speaking, is clear identification of who is on the development team, and better yet, strong interaction from one or more members. To some degree the holy grail of dev team interaction arises where one or more of the developers or other founders often interact directly with the public, either on Twitter, or other social media, in their official user forums or discussion groups, etc. Connor White Sullivan of Roam Research is a prime example of this. And this can be really great! Just don’t mistake it for true transparency (see Road Map below).

Support

You obviously want to get good support when you need it. This can be hard to evaluate if, early on, you don’t have a lot of unanswered questions (and for simpler task managers this is often the case, in my experience). But where possible you can look through any public support outlets they do have, or see if any reviews have mentioned testing their support. This can also connect with Community below, as many apps’ best support actually comes from other users like you.

Road Map

It can be very helpful, especially to some people, to know where a tool is “going”, what plans the developers have to improve it, what they’ll be working on next, and perhaps in rough order. This is where a “road map” or similar outline of planned features and development work comes in. Even better can be if you can directly interact with, “vote” on, or otherwise help influence that road map. Only a subset of development teams are public about their plans, and it should not be considered absolutely critical, but it can definitely help establish confidence in the team’s vision and the potential longevity and continued relevance of the tool.

Team Size

This is one of the harder things to determine in many cases, and isn’t necessarily a strong indicator of anything. However in general a larger team will be able to provide better support to a given number of people. For this reason knowing the general popularity of the tool can also be helpful in considering this factor. But I don’t personally feel it should be a strong determining point. Ideally you can determine from their actual pace of development output and responsiveness of support whether their team is effective within the size of user base that they have. Then they just need to maintain that over time as they (hopefully) grow!

Features and Other Updates

In general I actually don’t think this should be a major factor, mainly because I advocate people looking for tools that already do what they want and need, rather than putting much stock in future plans. Hopefully there is at least one product already on the market that does what you want. You simply can’t put too much faith in future plans, no matter how good the developers. But it’s still something that is of interest and can be worth evaluating, especially in cases where an important feature is coming soon, being shown or tested in beta, etc.

The general pace of feature development and release can also be a helpful indicator of team, product, and overall company health. Just make sure there is a healthy balance of new features and bug fixes. Too much of a focus on new features can often result in a very feature-rich but buggy application that’s not actually pleasant to use.

The “Ecosystem”: Extensibility, Community, Documentation, and More

I lump all these things together under the heading of “ecosystem” to refer to all of the additional support structures that exist around an app/tool that help it succeed, provide value, have longevity, etc.

Documentation

This is pretty straightforward, and the need for it varies quite a lot from person to person (and tool to tool). Some apps are just really simple, and some people just don’t care for documentation and would rather experiment to figure things out, or refer to the community for help and guidance.

Extensibility: Plugins, Templates, and More

Another interesting aspect to consider are the options for extending the tool or getting it setup more quickly for complex workflows. Both can be facilitated by the community, either through plugins and things like CSS and Javascript hacks, or with templates, or both. Notion is a good example of the latter, with a huge number of mostly community-generated templates, while Roam is a good example of the former, with a “hackable” architecture that has given rise to a wide range of user-created themes, Javascript extensions, etc. (some of which are remarkably sophisticated).

This does also connect back up with Integration and Interoperability in that some of these tools implement or consist of that functionality. But here I am more noting extensions of functionality that are less about integrating with other tools.

Community

This again can be important or unimportant based on personal preference (as well as tool complexity). Being an active or passive part of a community can be enjoyable and instructive for many. And for those of you for which this is the case, obviously start by looking at what community aspects exist for the tool itself. Facebook groups, Discord or Slack chats, dedicated forums, etc. But also consider 3rd party sites, dedicated blogs, YouTube channels, etc. How much content can you find that is not from the app developer/publisher itself when you search for its name?

Even if you don’t care much about being part of the community, the existence of a strong one can also be valuable, both as an indicator of and support for the longevity and success of the tool. And that’s one of those otherwise unpredictable things that would ideally be a factor, but is hard to consider objectively (whether the tool will exist in, say, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years). The health and and activity of the community can often be a useful “proxy” to help determine potential longevity, i.e. revenue or motivation for the developers to continue.

Import/Export

Getting data in, getting data out.

Import

If you are moving over from an existing tool this can be extremely important. If not, it mostly isn’t. In the former case, quite simply, does the new tool support direct import from or at least import of formats that the old tool exports to?

Export

This is also generally less important to many people, but is worth considering for two reasons. First, in the age of everything-SaaS, although cloud infrastructure is generally reliable, many people understandably want to have a local backup of their data. Export options can allow for that, at least to some degree.

Second, if the sheer number of possible tools and their rapid advancement leaves you unsure of your choice of tool to switch to, it can be a comfort if it allows some kind of export to hopefully migrate to other options if needed. In general, however, unless the export is something very common like Markdown (and in that case it often will not preserve everything, e.g. task dates), then the likelihood it will be supported by any given other tool you might move to is relatively low. In which case you have to hope (or search specifically) for specific import support in whatever tool you move to next. Still it can be nice to have export as an option…

Wrapping Up

I only used this heading because I’m writing this on Christmas morning for some reason, and I like puns. You’re welcome. 😄

Hopefully by now you’ve been able to determine which of these criteria are important to you, and perhaps how important they are in relation to each other. Obviously it’s a lot to consider! But focus on that high level to start and it should help point you in the right direction.

Additionally, although I did mention a few specific tools along the way, this is largely devoid of pointers to particular tools or even lists of tools. I’d love to add at least some good reference lists at some point, but lots of those do exist and can hopefully be found quickly with a quick web search. My intention here was to help you make sense of and navigate those lists, to avoid getting lost and frustrated by trying to navigate the vast and choppy sea of all the many app options out there. I hope I’ve done that to at least some degree.

I’d love to know what you think, if I missed something, or if further clarification/info is needed. So if you’d like to comment on this article, head on over to my new digital garden!

Is “Science of Cocktails” more about brands than science?

Last year I went to The Exploratorium‘s “Science of Cocktails” fundraising event for the first time. It’s been running since at least 2014, and from what I’ve heard it has had some great demos and cocktails in the past. However I found my 2019 experience to be fairly disappointing. I’ve been to a number of other cocktail events around the Bay Area and the best of them were generally focused on specific bars and bartenders, featuring particular ingredients or products. But the product reps were not generally the ones developing or mixing the cocktails. However, in the case of Science of Cocktails 2019, I found it almost entirely dominated by brands, and the cocktails were on average mediocre at best (with some a bit unpalatable to me, to be frank). Worse still, there was only minimal science, which feels like a bigger issue given the billing of the event.

After the event I got an email thanking me for my attendance, with the contact info of Akemi Yamaguchi, Philanthropic Engagement Manager at The Exploratorium for any “questions about Science of the Cocktails”. I had some thoughts to share so I sent her a fairly lengthy email. Unfortunately I never heard back. I started to get notifications about the 2020 Science of Cocktails event just recently and after my previous experience I was a bit hesitant to go again, so I emailed asking if anything had changed from last year. Again, no response.

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When Stencils Come to Town

I’ve recently been experimenting with colorful, edible powders, inspired by the idea of a Holi-themed cocktail. Holi, you know, the festival of colors? Right, so I got a bunch of brightly-colored and edible things in powder form, like dragon fruit, matcha, turmeric, etc. and have mostly been chucking them around over the top of egg white drinks and having some good fun.

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How’s it Hanging? 3M Command, That’s How

What follows is a review of some of 3M’s “Command” series of damage-free wall hanging devices. I’m honestly a huge fan, and most people I know don’t use them and even seem unaware of them. So I figured it’s high time I write about them, because seriously how crappy are most shower caddies? I do also wish they had a different name though. “Command”? Not surprising that most people have no idea about this product line or what it does. Also, I’m sorry about the title, I couldn’t help myself.

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Value in the many paths to a “personal wiki”

A few weeks ago I talked about discovering Notion as the latest in a nearly life-long pursuit of the ideal personal information management tool. I’ve discussed in brief some of the info I use these systems for, both in that article, and over the years in-person with people. But I’ve never felt like I had a really good way to show people how useful and powerful it is for me, without directly showing them my own structure. But, since there is a lot of personal info scattered throughout my systems, I’ve also often been reluctant to really share with that level of specifics and detail.

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Nexcare Waterproof Bandages

After writing a draft of a review for 3M’s “Command” series of wall-adhesive strips and the things you can mount with them, I couldn’t quite bring myself to post it (you can now find it over here). Recommending and reviewing products is still new to me, and even though these are all heartfelt and unpaid reviews, it feels a little like sales, which I really don’t want to be doing. So I thought I’d move on to something more familiar, something everyone needs once in a while: bandages (i.e. “band-aids”). Maybe that’ll feel less like I’m trying to sell you something you don’t need? I sure hoped so. Ironically, though, as I was looking into my preferred bandages, what should I come to learn but that they, too, are manufactured by 3M! Two of the first products I choose to review and they’re made by the same company. Talk about schilling. ????

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If You’ve Got the Notion

How I Found Notion, i.e. The Endless Road to the Perfect PIM

In the Beginning

My dad was a programmer and as a result an early adopter of a lot of technology, from the first Mac and IBM/Tandy computers, to early public Internet access. When I was growing up he used a Personal Information Manager (PIM, a term that seems to have fallen out of favor somewhat) called AskSam to keep track of most of the important information in his life. So as I moved through my early years of adulthood I found myself wanting a similar central repository for all my info. Somehow it was only recently that I realized where this desire may have come from.

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