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Originally Posted by Toadling View Post
I was thinking exactly the same thing when I read that passage in the book. Maybe David Allen and I are just from different generations, or different subcultures, but I'd personally never imagine handling my task management with anything other than a computer. It's like the difference between a hand drill and a power drill.

I know lots of people get along fine with old fashioned paper, but I'm a digital guy. Every time I get out a pen and tablet, I keep feeling like I want to save my work and copy and paste. Heck, my handwriting has atrophied so much that my 5-year-old daughter has better penmanship! :-)

-Dennis
I have about 7 years of Daytimers. It is fun to look back at that time
early in my career. But when you see the Daytimers and there are 40 items for a day, you get backed up and before you know it you have 22 A1's, 11 B1's and a few C's, which means you have 22 items to get done today.
Glad one, as an example is "Modify market feed receiver front end to handle Multicast addresses along with UDP broadcast". Nice 2 week project! LOL.

Then of course you look at the next day and there are the same tasks copied from the day before. How painful. David pokes fun at the daytimer method
because it is too simplistic for our knowledge work.

There is something to what you point out about "paper" vs. "Digital". As an Engineer for 22 years I put everything on computer, but often keep a paper copy in a folder. Where-as the younger guys I hire for my team (Gen X, and some Gen Y) strictly use Electronic. No file folders at all please. I keep my
folder for a project with papers in chronological order of generation. I don't know how to integrate some emails, diagrams, papers, budget items, project plans, etc. in order electronically to keep an "audit trail". My engineers seem to be able to do this electronically. I suspect they keep that in memory and can come up with the same chronology. They had computers in K. I had a Teletype connected to a IBM 360 Mainframe when I was in Middle School. First Micro computer PC came out when I was 17.
So this may be the issue. So there is real evidence to support your statements.

I do almost everything on computer now. Multiple systems and I too could
not go back to an organization system that is not on a computer. I forget how we found things out before we had the "Internet". I recall R&D and
homework, college work being a lot more work! We lived without cell phones and PIM's. Don't ask me know... I don't know how people lived without Air conditioning.... OMG!

Thanks Again!
Mark
 
Just to throw in my own $0.02...

I also use the iPhone app purely as a "doing" and "collection" tool, rather than a planning tool. My MBP is normally with me anyway, and the planning is far better done on a real keyboard and screen (one of the rules for computing happiness: Never use a mobile device to do work that would better be done on a real keyboard, no matter what that work is).

Collecting on the iPhone was a bit of a chore until a couple of updates ago due to the iPhone app's load times, but that's recently been fixed, and you can now hit the "Inbox" button and type something in while waiting for other stuff to load. I am a fan of the "collect-now-process-later" methodology, so when I'm on the go, everything goes into the Inbox, and then gets reorganized and dealt with later during my weekly review.

The other method that I use for quick collection when I'm really busy on-the-go is Jott. While it's not a free service (anymore), it's a great way to dump things into my "Inbox" while I'm driving places, which is frequently when things occur to me. An Applescript and Mail.app rule collects these Jotted items and automatically dumps them into my OF inbox (courtesy of http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/200...and-omnifocus/ ).

On the desktop, I use about 6 key perspectives that live in my toolbar: Review, Strategic, Tactical, Urgent, Flagged and Home. Review and Strategic are project-view perspectives, while Tactical is my "doing" perspective that shows only available actions in their appropriate contexts. Urgent and Flagged filter based on either overdue/due-soon items (urgent but not necessarily important), or flagged items (important but not necessarily urgent). Credit actually goes to Fraser Spiers for this particular layout, which he posted in his blog a few months ago.

Home is a special perspective that limits my focus to my "Personal" folder, since I work from home and therefore much of what lands in my "Office" and "Computer" contexts is a combination of both work and personal items. Naturally, on the weekends, I don't want to be thinking about doing work-related stuff, but home projects still need my attention.

Perspectives are a missing component of the iPhone app that would certainly fit into the nice-to-have category, but thus far I've been mostly able to get by without them... The strategy for me has been exactly what others have suggested in terms of creating a more hierarchical context list so that I can easily group related contexts and drill up and down through them. For example, I had a top-level context called "Errands" and then sub-contexts for various specific locations, some of which are geotagged on the iPhone (another nice feature of the iPhone app). General errands go into the top-level context, while location-specific errands go into the appropriate location-based contexts.

Last edited by jdh; 2008-12-10 at 07:14 AM..
 
Thanks for taking the time to outline your use profile, and especially your most useful perspectives. I agree perspectives are very powerful. It is an ironic truth that most databases or applications are good or even great at storing information, but sadly many do a poor to fair job at presenting the data in a useful form. It has kicked off a whole industry of "data mining", which is really just a way to organize complex data sets in a way they can be useful.

The detail in your perspectives outline fairly reasonable "views" you would
want to see in the specific contexts you find yourself in. They are not unique
and are useful. I had a few perspectives, and I have adoped a few of yours,
added some new subcontexts, and created a few of my own perspectives that were just really more specific versions of the ones you mentioned.

Many thanks for this.

Happy Holidays
 
 


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