Oh dear, I think there is something wrong with me! Is there a name for a compulsive disorder which makes you pathologically incapable of resisting playing with new variations on the task management theme?
I downloaded The Hit List earlier today, and have just got all my complicated repeating tasks set up – and I think I like this app better than the others. It’s buggy, of course, being a beta, but so far it seems the best match for what I want a task management app to do. I have got a bit fed up waiting for OmniFocus (which I bought) and Things (which I didn’t buy) to implement features I want which they say are in the pipeline. The Hit List doesn’t have everything on the list, but it comes closer than the others.
Yeah, The Hit List is very nice. I’m still using Things but have been trying out THL. It is very much in beta but it seems to combine the best of OmniFocus and Things. I like the minimal design of THL. Like when entering a date you are just presented with a text box and you type “every other saturday” and a recurring task is set up. It’s the little touches…
True, The Hit List is very nice. Very elegant design, well thought out, flexible, very simple to use. But the price is high: $ 50 for now, $ 70 after the launch of version 1.0.
I suspect a lot of people just got the hit list in the latest macheist bundle. Which would mean that for many, cost isn’t an issue.
I ran into some bugs when I started using it which caused constant annoying popup error messages, and a loss of all the data I had entered. But since I own a licence, and kept baulking at the cost of Things, I will probably use it once it switches out of beta.
For those of you using these programs–Things, Hit List, Task Paper, OmniFocus–do you actually work from the computer screen? Or do you print to paper first?
My inclination is to print, but I haven’t found any of these to do a very good job. Which winds up leading me back to to hand-writing on paper.
I wonder if Scrivener itself wouldn’t do a decent job as a task manager if you jiggered it around a bit…
I went paper-based as well, after trying all the usual suspects. I just have a small deck of index cards labeled Chores, Errands, Garden, Magazine, Book, etc. They’re clipped together by the pen, and kept on my desk when I’m at work and in my pocket when I’m not.
A lot easier to keep track of short-term things. Longer, more involved projects go into either Scrivener or the poor abandoned revenant called Mori.
I tried Things, and switched to The Hit List as soon as the beta was available.
Nested folders is the main feature that makes it better than Things. THL also has a less restricted work flow. The user decides the names of folders, for instance.
I use it all the time and I rarely print anything. The big improvement will be when the iPhone app is done. Then it will be portable.
Over on the outlinersoftware.com forum we call this ailment CRIMP… standing for Compulsive Reactive Information Manager Purchasing. Those of us with this disease are called CRIMPers, and the act is called CRIMPing.
I bought the $39 MacHeist bundle for WireTap Studio and a couple of other programs. Now one I wasn’t even interested in, The Hit List, is becoming a very interesting item. The more I play around with it, the more I can see its usefulness. It just might make me drop my notebook. I almost gave it away to friends, as I did a couple of other programs but now I’m glad I didn’t.
It’s missing a few things that I really need like full project meta-data (I don’t mark tasks as repeating/due/et cetera) and the ability to archive projects. I guess they are called lists in THL. It seems the only way to get rid of a list you are done with is to delete it. I document as I work, completed tasks are therefore of more value to me than uncompleted tasks. I suppose I could document in another program and just use THL for the actual ticking off of things, but that seems a little too unnecessarily stripped apart, especially when THL has such a wonderful facility for documenting as you work, the index card view.
One thing I really do like is the smart, almost UNIX style interface. Single keystroke short-cuts for nearly everything, and rapid navigation. It makes OmniFocus feel like a click-fest.
But yes, OF it still is for me. I went back to it after the 1.5 & 6 releases which substantially improved a few factors for me, and in the past two years that has been the one application that I consistently return to and have probably accomplished more things in it than with anything else. It doesn’t look fancy, but it handles my 400 task per month work pace without blinking.
I’m glad that I have a THL licence (MacHeist customer as well), because I think if a few things about the application were tweaked, I’d be willing to subject it to a full scale test.
Not only that, it doesn’t run on earlier versions of Leopard, either. I got burned by that aspect as my home computer doesn’t have Internet access and unless I feel like transporting a gigabyte of Apple updates to it somehow, it will remain that way. So it doesn’t run THL as well. I hope that is just a beta condition. I understand relying on certain Apple tools to get things done, tools that are not available in older versions of the operating system, but it seems reliance upon a specific version sub-number is a bit limited.
I’ve used Things before and find it a good system. However, I would get sucked into spending more time entering and organizing than doing. I am intellectually attracted to the “write a list on a sheet of paper and review it daily” method, but want to keep it all on the computer. To do so, I’ve installed Quicksilver (blacktree.com/?quicksilver), a launcher/automator/espresso maker/do-it-all program. One of the options Quicksilver has is “Append to text file”. So, I have a trigger set that brings up a box into which I can type whatever to-do comes to my mind. It is silently appended to my “todo.txt” file. Takes about 2 seconds, so it is very non-disruptive. I also have a trigger to open that file, so I can review it. Since new items are appended to the end, if I want to organize the list in any way, I can do so. Simple, but that’s good for me. It is also free.
The one place where this doesn’t work so well is email, as it is nice to have immediate access to the message when dealing with it. For that, I use MailTags and MailActOn (indev.ca/). Not free, but reasonably priced. MailTags (works with Apple Mail) allows me to tag a file with a due date (along with many other labels that I don’t make much use of). After I tag a message, I file it appropriately and use a smart folder set up to show messages due in the next 2 days to see everything that needs attention. I also have a “pending” smart folder to show messages with any due date assigned. You could do this without Mail Act On, but MAO gives the convenience of a few quick keystrokes to assign a due date of one week in the future (obviously, you could set up all sorts of different time frames). It also allows filing by keystroke, so I can attend to messages very swiftly.
Both QS and Mailtag/Mail Act On can do much more than what I’ve described. Indeed, their flexibility is a little intimidating at times. But, I’ve found them both to be great organizational tools, in addition to their other benefits.
