giving up on on-line todo lists?
I gave up on index cards for OmniFocus about a year ago. OmniFocus was pretty easy to deal with, and it meant I didn’t need to carry around index cards and a pen. Not too much later, I gave up OmniFocus for Hiveminder. Hiveminder was available from anywhere on the network, and its IM-based interface was fantastic.
Eventually I stopped using Hiveminder because I couldn’t use it for things to do “later today” because it didn’t do any smaller resolution of promised-by than calendar dates. That made it more useful for longer-term plans. This made me think I’d use it for bug tracking or managing simple projects like some of my free software, but it doesn’t support dependencies or publicly readable groups.
I put stuff into RTM, thinking that its support for timed events would help, but although it’s blazing fast, its UI is kind of mediocre, and it lacks a lot of the features that make Hiveminder so good. (Seriously, though, it is really fast.)
I’ve put some of my free software plans into LiquidPlanner, but they don’t let me make my plans publicly visible, so that’s no good.
I looked at some other ways to track bugs, but they all leave me unexcited.
I could manage reminders for specific times with iCal. It’s not really exciting, but it would work, and I don’t need them to be particuarly searchable or structured. I just need to be able to set them up quickly.
That leaves managing random ideas I have, features I want to add to things, and things I want to do eventually. Until I find something I can use to make these lists public, I might as well use the thing that’s the most convenient for me. It’s probably going to end up being LiquidPlanner or index cards.
I wonder how many people use productivity software that they didn’t design and feel like it’s really, really great. Maybe I’m just too obsessive or weird in what I want. Oh well.