Re-posting here from Dwight Arthur!
============ As a happy user for the last 5 days or so, I can't really say yet what will be most useful for me but I can tell you what made me buy MLO. I have previous experience with MSProject and similar tools, I have been managing my personal queue of things to do using Blackberry "to- do" synced with MSOutlook Tasks. Until last week I never heard of GTD. Way too much of my time has gone into finding things due today in my task list that aren't really ready to do or that aren't important enough to work on right now, and rescheduling for some arbitrary future date. I decided that what I really needed was an ability to create task dependencies so I could reschedule one trigger task and have it take the rest with it. So I set out to find a collection of products that would 1. Support a to-do list with dependencies between the tasks 2. track effort per task and reschedule tasks for over-committed resources 2. Sync Windows-Blackberry 3. Not break the bank I was surprised how many popular and well-respected to-do list managers (some even calling themselves project managers) do not support dependencies. I was close to settling on Zoho Project when I ran into the issue that resources are tracked by the day and that the smallest task is one day. I considered buying an MSProject license and using EasyTaskSync to get the schedules to Blackberry but even with used licenses on eBay the cost was too high. Then I found MLO. What do I like: 1. A reasonable but simple set of task dependencies. 2. same product on Windows and Blackberry, and the sync between them seems to work quite well. 3. Sync with Outlook: not that I want to ever do it again, but it let me capture the several hundred things I was keeping there. 4. Affordable 5. This amazing guy Andrey who seems to have a vision, the energy to realize the vision, persistence to stay with it over the years, and an idea of how to listen to his customers. I used to love Lotus Notes because Ray Ozzie brought those same qualities. Hey Andrey, if you get a call from IBM or Microsoft, don't take it. 6. Although it doesn't seem to have resource leveling (or maybe I just didn't discover how to do it yet) it has this brilliant concept of contexts. Ok, I understand that Context is vanilla GTD but it's all new to me and I love it. I'm using contexts to do what I wanted from resource leveling and it's meeting the need quite well. 7. Computed score. It's the idea of it I like most, because I haven't really figured out how to make my tasks show up where I want them. I keep finding urgent actionable stuff that's computed to a position well below some someday/maybe stuff and I don't know why. Maybe because the someday stuff is part of a project with a lot of steps already completed. I'd really like a way to ask, how did this get way up (or down) here? But I'm getting into recommendations, which I don't want to do until I'm a bit less of a newbie. 8. Hours. Totally brilliant to define the hours each context is actionable (ie open). I think I am going to have a number of suggestions about making context hours more flexible and easier to use, but again, it's too soon for that. Meanwhile, I'm deliriously happy over the ability to assign, for example, yard work to a @yard context that's only open weekend daytime and not have to see all those blasted uncompleted yard tasks peering out at me whenever I look at my tasks. 9. Not sure but I think that the Blackberry app is surprisingly compact, which is important because space on my blackberry is very tight. In fact, when I imported about 450 tasks from outlook to mlo and deleted them from outlook I think I ended up with more free space on the blackberry even though I installed mlo for bb in the meanwhile. I was beginning to think about moving to Android to get more memory, but now I don't seem to have to. 10. Control of shortcuts on both Windows and Blackberry means I can set up reasonably consistent keyboard shortcuts. Thanks -Dwight -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized?hl=en.
