Two Planning Tools Revisited
I’m not really using the Hipster PDA officially. I’ve got 15 or so 3×5 cards in a binder clip. I use the lined side for thoughts that pop up, and I use the white side to draw visual concepts and thinking, a la Dave Gray style. Is this working for me?
No.
What’s useful is that I always have paper handy for notes and ideas. But as an organization tool, it’s not working for me. Maybe if I invested the time in the Hipster PDA methodology and really learned it out, it might be useful, but I’m finding that 3×5 card planning isn’t really working for me.
My new holy grail? I want a to-do planner system online and free, that does tabbed planning in the way that Firefox does tabbed browsing. I want keyboard-level useful planning that lets me do the following:
- Each tab is a project or context or whatever.
- Within each tab are simple tasks, and the option to add deadlines, recurrence, or notes. By “option,” I can choose to never touch them.
- It’s okay to let me mouse-click the completed, but I also want to be able to do group actions. (I often dump projects whole hog).
Lifehacker pointed me towards Hiveminder. I like this app a lot. It’s got plenty of neato features, and the ones I don’t want to use are still fine, because most of them can be ignored. They give me a few ways to view tasks. It’s a web-based app so I can get to it whenever I have web access (and most of my important contexts are currently online). So, I’ve sent them email asking them if they’d consider adding projects/contexts to what they do. Jake’s Toodledo has contexts, and that’s really useful.
Do you use paper-based planning, like the fine products from D*I*YPlanner? What’s your take? What’s your current favorite web-based tool?
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Comments
Rob Slagle says on August 14th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Have you tried the GTD TiddlyWiki? It will even print out to 3×5 cards for you to carry. Or just keep it on a USB stick.
Usara says on August 16th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
My paper system of choice are Next Action Cards. (www.nextactioncards.com)
thierry says on August 19th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
The best tool I ever saw for managing to-do lists is “Remember the Milk” (in fact the only one to let me use a computerised system rather than paper, after years of looking for).
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/
or see lifehack article http://www.lifehack.org/articl.....nager.html
Eric Scalf says on August 31st, 2006 at 12:43 am
Thanks for the great idea. I’ve been looking for a project to tackle during the next couple of weeks. Thanks to an issue with my leg, I’ll be sitting in bed for a while. With laptop, php references, and a plethora of notepads by my side, I might just try to do something like that. Unless you can recommend someone who is fluent in both PHP and AJAX, it won’t be very stylish and web2.0, but it’ll get the job done.
No guarentees I’ll get this done, heh, but it’s a great idea if someone runs with it.