Thinking Rocks
I've got lots of stuff to do, a lot that I'd like to do and a lot that needs to be done. I have no illusions about ever getting everything completed. But I like to capture ideas for when I may have time and energy to develop them further and I like to organize projects, todos, etc. in ways that I don't have to think about them much and can just pick-up and work on a task at any time without worrying about where I am in the big picture and without frittering away activity in the 80% of the stuff that only produces 20% of the results. I also don't like to keep all this in my head, I like open sky up there. Or at least wide expanses of rolling plains that doesn't obscure the view of sunsets and the occasional orangutan.
Being a firm believer in strategic delegation, I've cajoled, beaten, modified and, as a last resort, written software to bundle various aspects of organizing these ideas and activities. Initially I did it with notebooks, and I have boxes and boxes of spiral notebooks with odd diagrams and illegible scribbling. I did that until HTML was available, then I moved into building my own private storeroom of pages for notes with hyperlinks to related concepts, mini-search engines and classification schemes. A quick scan of my personal web on disk shows around 10,000 individual pages, hyperlinked with others, dating back over 10 years. I've experimented with tons of software: journals, tagged notes and notebook software, visual maps, etc.
Each of these have various strengths and weaknesses. But one area where they've all fallen short is in organizing tasks. Sure you can make todo lists, link them to projects with more detailed information and the bigger picture; you can kind-of sort them in various ways but they are missing some behavior that is critical to doing this effectively.
What's missing for me is this. I want something that does more than store, organize and classify information, I want something that controls and manages it. Something that understands the construct of a "project." Not in the hokey "project management" sense like Microsoft Project; but in a more fluid way. It should be able to hold projects and the big picture objectives, for both home and work, and organize these in actionable steps. So that for a daily view I can see next tiny step I need to take in whatever context I want. I can move projects from active to future or parked status and I can also whip out single actions that need to be done by certain times, when necessary, without the larger project contexts. It also needs to be able to capture random ideas than I can sort later into one of these categories. Or just hold information, that may later become something I do about.
The ultimate goal is to be able to focus on my daily activities, based on time, energy and motivation while knowing that the little bite-size tasks I'm clicking off are moving larger agendas inexorably forward. Pretty cool. I can tweak the big pictures, but don't have to review or think about them daily. And here's where ThinkingRock comes in.
It's free software. The site doesn't look like much, but the vision in the software is well executed. I've been playing with it for a few days, using the latest release for windows, and it executes the requirements outlined above pretty well. You can see your daily picture, filter by work or home or whatever contexts you setup. If your project has multiple steps you can define the first few and it puts one on your action list until it's checked off and then moves the next one in automatically. You can break bigger projects up into sub-projects and capture stuff you may want to do sometime later as future projects.
If you have lots of stuff you want or need to do, but don't want to spend much time thinking about it, it may be worth a look. Here's a nice article about it with a bunch of screen shots. It's not "whiz-bang fancy" but it seems to implement what it does do pretty well. The final results of this method is not to follow priorities blindly, like traditional "to-do" list approaches, but to help focus on what's important to you. Like a gps system in a car. Plug in your destination and all you need to worry about is what the next turn is; meanwhile you can enjoy your tunes with a clear conscious.
(The site seems to go down occasionally, kangaroos are probably disrupting their wifi, try it again later if the link borks.)
Being a firm believer in strategic delegation, I've cajoled, beaten, modified and, as a last resort, written software to bundle various aspects of organizing these ideas and activities. Initially I did it with notebooks, and I have boxes and boxes of spiral notebooks with odd diagrams and illegible scribbling. I did that until HTML was available, then I moved into building my own private storeroom of pages for notes with hyperlinks to related concepts, mini-search engines and classification schemes. A quick scan of my personal web on disk shows around 10,000 individual pages, hyperlinked with others, dating back over 10 years. I've experimented with tons of software: journals, tagged notes and notebook software, visual maps, etc.
Each of these have various strengths and weaknesses. But one area where they've all fallen short is in organizing tasks. Sure you can make todo lists, link them to projects with more detailed information and the bigger picture; you can kind-of sort them in various ways but they are missing some behavior that is critical to doing this effectively.
What's missing for me is this. I want something that does more than store, organize and classify information, I want something that controls and manages it. Something that understands the construct of a "project." Not in the hokey "project management" sense like Microsoft Project; but in a more fluid way. It should be able to hold projects and the big picture objectives, for both home and work, and organize these in actionable steps. So that for a daily view I can see next tiny step I need to take in whatever context I want. I can move projects from active to future or parked status and I can also whip out single actions that need to be done by certain times, when necessary, without the larger project contexts. It also needs to be able to capture random ideas than I can sort later into one of these categories. Or just hold information, that may later become something I do about.
The ultimate goal is to be able to focus on my daily activities, based on time, energy and motivation while knowing that the little bite-size tasks I'm clicking off are moving larger agendas inexorably forward. Pretty cool. I can tweak the big pictures, but don't have to review or think about them daily. And here's where ThinkingRock comes in.
It's free software. The site doesn't look like much, but the vision in the software is well executed. I've been playing with it for a few days, using the latest release for windows, and it executes the requirements outlined above pretty well. You can see your daily picture, filter by work or home or whatever contexts you setup. If your project has multiple steps you can define the first few and it puts one on your action list until it's checked off and then moves the next one in automatically. You can break bigger projects up into sub-projects and capture stuff you may want to do sometime later as future projects.
If you have lots of stuff you want or need to do, but don't want to spend much time thinking about it, it may be worth a look. Here's a nice article about it with a bunch of screen shots. It's not "whiz-bang fancy" but it seems to implement what it does do pretty well. The final results of this method is not to follow priorities blindly, like traditional "to-do" list approaches, but to help focus on what's important to you. Like a gps system in a car. Plug in your destination and all you need to worry about is what the next turn is; meanwhile you can enjoy your tunes with a clear conscious.
(The site seems to go down occasionally, kangaroos are probably disrupting their wifi, try it again later if the link borks.)
Pretty cool, I personally use MS Outlook's calendar. I find if you put in when you need to do things and a lot the correct amount of time then you stay on track and can see at a glance what all you have to do that day...lol
ReplyDeleteThen again, I take a single minded approach to things...
Still laughing at the hypothetical rock egg salad... btw
Can't you use the gathering framework within David's "Journal" ?
ReplyDeleteDo you worry that the 2 files it adds "outside" the package might have registry "share" entries?