Is that (a) “pissing off” as in “I am pissing off now” as in “I am leaving”… which is what you would do if someone much larger than you told you to “piss off”?
Or is it (b) “pissing off” as in “you are pissing me off”, as in “you are making me very angry”… the end result being that you would be “pissed off” by something, or “pissed” for short?
Which incidentally is also a term for being drunk, as in (c) “you’re pissed”, most likely as a result of being “on the piss” too long at a recent “piss up”?
By now you’re probably pissed at me taking the piss - as opposed to vic-k, who is no doubt just pissed - so I think it best if I just piss off.
Taskpaper: simple list of (often generic, and not terribly important) things to be done which are not tied to an exact moment in time (buy pencils, clean bathroom, call Mum).
iCal with alarms, for important things tied to an exact moment which I might forget (dentist, important meeting with colleague, interesting TV-program).
Scrivener! All my Scrivener projects have a document called “Done”, in which I describe (often in detail) all serious things done in relation to that project, and another document called “To Be Done”, which speaks for itself. And the first is no less important than the second: for I’m working on various documents contemporaneously, and if I don’t write down exactly what I did relating to a certain project, after a month or so spent working on another project, I don’t remember anymore what I effectively did relating to the first project, and what I planned to do but didn’t do.
To some this may seem rather strange and / or complicated, but in my case it works well.
Some bright spark thought he would strike a blow for freedom of thought and communication, and perhaps cause a tidal wave of change in the Chinese government’s attitude to these things, and posted a photo of the Tian’anmen incident on Flickr. The simple result was that the powers that be here promptly blocked access to Flickr – farm3 has come on line since then so is not blocked – and so no one here can access Flickr farm1 or farm2. BBC news has been blocked for ever as has Wickepedia, as well as many bizarre things like Qdea.org, the download server for updates of Synchronize! Pro X …
I am told that currently ask.com and YouTube have been blocked here since the events in Tibet, but I haven’t tried them.
Doesn’t sound the least bit strange to me. That’s exactly why I designed those job sheets I use, so I could tick off exactly what was done without having to review an entire project every time I come back to it
Ah - sorry, I misinterpreted you. I thought you meant Flickr was blocked by the message board, not where you live. That’s why I was so surprised. I can’t honestly say I’m surprised that the Chinese govt has blocked it, because… well, let’s not go there. Nobody wants to hear me rant about human rights and so on
I have no problem with hearing your rants about human rights.
The Chinese government is a brutal regime. It crushes opposition and does unspeakable things to those who seek enhanced human rights. Their attempts to censor accomplish nothing with those whose eyes are open.
Sadly, I have little hope for positive Chinese/American relations in the future. If we did not have endless warheads pointed at them, Taiwan would long ago have fallen. It is only a mater of time before things go very badly.
I think I’ve found a satisfactory way of working on my (rather complex) plans.
First of all, I lay down my main job tasks into a Gantt-type diagram (I use Merlin for this). This lets me see if there are too many concurrent activities, and eventually place them to a different time window. The resulting plan is then reported to my boss, with whom I’ll be discussing the deadlines.
As soon as I’ve all things of my main job in place, I can see where all my other tasks can fit. I complete the Gantt diagram with them, and tell possible dates to my other clients (or collaborators in the movie and theatre affair).
This done, I mirror all tasks in as much detail as possible into a GTD-type To Do list program (I stopped by Circus Ponies’ NoteBook, with whom I feel at home). This lets me clean up my mind of all those colored lines, creating sort of an acid trip on Merlin’s window, and focus on the activities of the next two days. Current tasks with a far deadline (like a long translation or a spec requirements document) are updated day by day, with the name of the next chapter to do, or things to check with others, or people to get in touch with, considered as activities.
My activities requiring a meeting with someone else (like a weekly company meeting or a talk with my lawyer) are then sent by NoteBook to a calendar (iCal), where I can have a general look on the important dates, and be prepared to them in time. iCal also sends these events to my cell phone, in case I’m out of my office when an important date is nearing.
also, the above lets me see in a scientific way, that my life is demanding for a simplification. Maybe I need an additional program for this.
A brief update on Things, for which I’ve been a (completely self-appointed) evangelist.
It now handles recurrence, the absence of which was an early concern. It also now synchronises nicely under Leopard with iCal, which opens up several possibilities, including the use of Anxiety (http://www.anxietyapp.com/) as a translucent, corner-of-the-screen HUD and input pad.
Good points, I’d forgotten all about this thread. Things (and Cultured Code themselves) continues to impress, and I have no qualms about using it despite it being a beta - I haven’t had a single problem with it, and source list drag and drop is now the only thing left for them to do that I care much about.
(I was away during the ‘whoops expiration’ debacle, so even that didn’t affect me )
It’s a little bit buggy, yes, particularly relating to Postponing tasks. But it’s SOO good. I really like the way, it’s so flexible. I mean, I like the GTD method, I really do; but I much prefer the way this is so loosely based on it.
And tagging is brilliant. The way you want things to get structured is open to your interpretation - don’t want to use the concept of contexts; ok then don’t.
But there’s one thing that’s the killer for me.
Printing - this prints beautifully. This is really important to me. If you try to loosen the grip computers have on you - then a computer only GTD program ends of useless - hence why I got fed up with iGTD and stopped using it. With Things, you can use it to check in once in a while, and actually do a lot of it on paper.
I was thinking of investing in the iPhone version and maybe the desktop version as well.
As usual there’s a few other apps out there in competition and I would like to know if anyone has any experience and reviews of Things, maybe in comparison to its competitors.
I have the pre release version and found it pretty easy to get on with, and I like the general look and feel of the app.
Desktop version can’t be beat. I’ve trailled Things & OmniFocus (using Things exlusively for writing projects & OF for everything else). I’ve just paid for a Things licence and am now thinking of transferring everything to Things from OF. The only thing is that I prefer the iPhone version of OF to that of Things but they have a new release in the pipeline which I am waiting to see.
On balance I’m edging towards Things. Just need to bite the bullet and go through the pain of moving all my tasks across. But then I like having one application that is exclusive to my writing…
Things struck me as very well put together, and for a span of about three weeks I nearly considered switching from OmniFocus. In the end I decided not to. The main reasons were philosophical. I just think too much in terms of clustering actions together, and Things works better for a set of lists, rather than a set of sets. The other reason was that even with only 1/3 of my OF task list imported into Things, I was feeling the edges of how useful some features were not going to be. Namely, the “Active Projects” folder had become completely useless to me. Put 100 complex items in a single folder and then try doing anything with it other than staring at it in a bewildered fashion.
Both applications are going to be serving a very similar need; they both do it in extremely different ways. Things is more from the “new school” idea of ditching hierarchy as an organisation concept and using nothing but meta-data and flat lists. If you can work in that environment, then it might be a good match. As for myself, while the concept is appealing, in practice I’ve found a mixture of hierarchal organisation and cross-axis tagging is best when scalability is a concern. There might also be a bit in the equation for scale and complexity, too. If you todo list has basic or short-length needs, then I envy you, and Things might work perfectly as its philosophy doesn’t start to break down until quantity and complexity hit it. The thing is, with GTD, if you actually following the book, the concept of suddenly coming up with a thousand things is really not that absurd.
I haven’t been completely happy with OmniFocus (and it runs a bit slow on PowerPC chips), but I haven’t found anything compelling enough to make me drop it. I do use TaskPaper for projects which require a lot of commentation and documentation for future reference. OF isn’t so good for heavy documentation; and neither is Things for that matter. TaskPaper on the other hand is perfect for tasks embedded in 8,000 words of explanation so that the next person can figure out what to do. It’s also nice that I can compose TaskPaper documents in Scrivener—or pretty much anywhere else for that matter. Since OF can export to TaskPaper, I’ve found the combination of these two applications to be nearly perfect for what I need. A huge database cruncher for all the thousands of “throw-away” tasks, and a comprehensive text file parser for comment heavy projects with archival merit.
I’m holding myself back from purchasing Things. Personally I found the tag system nicely flexible and the interface Zen-like. However, Omnifocus has more synchronization options and can tackle Sub-projects, folders and rearranging of items. Thus, for the time being, I stay with Omnifocus but future features of Things might iron these “flaws” http://culturedcode.com/things/wiki/index.php/Future_Features
Yes, forgot to mention the synch differences too. As someone who works on three different computers and one iPod Touch—having an up to date copy of my entire todo list everywhere without ever having to think about it is quite nice!
I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it as well. I do think the ‘feel’ of the application is superior to OF in many ways. It’s good software, it just doesn’t quite work the way I need it to, so far.
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