Good evening :) Wow, thank you so much for your plenty replies and the warm welcome! I feel like I've come to the right place to look for inspirational ideas on getting a bit more organized with my to-dos. I had a good look at the user manual today and also checked into some of the suggestions from your postings: The inheritance of settings such as contexts I already have found, but here I really do have a hard time to decide what is useful for me. I ticked that inheritance and ended up with all tasks being one or another context - not helpful for overview I guess :-) !
For now I mainly work with the outline view and my tasks usually revolve around 2 main areas (which I set up as folders): Computers and home. Okay, there is also a category for shopping, wish list (books, other house items, software ;) you get the point :) ) and one or two I found by looking at the templates from the program which I have to get used to, such as a backlog and that strange "inbox": I am not sure I know how to use these, as funny as it sounds! Since all of the things I do at the computer are rather projects that contain several steps/tasks and take some time, I almost have nothing but projects. And since those tasks contain subtasks, I feel I should set them to folders too, I am not sure whether this is useful? Tasks that are not folders and not goals, in other words, that have no icon at all beside the checkbox (right from it) somehow irritate me when looking at the list. For now I just see mostly folders and projects, but on the other hand, even when I have mostly only projects, that way I can keep track of all things at the same time, set weekly goals (for instance, one of the subtasks could become a weekly goal). I do feel that the category project fits best to most of the things I do. I guess I have to work with priorities much more to set things like daily tasks. When I still used paper and pen for my list, I used to have just a daily list and three tasks had to get checked off for the day (for instance, three household chores had to be done). I find it a bit of a pity there is no daily goal, because that would be fitting for setting the long term project tasks apart from the chores that need to be done. (One question concerning these: is there a way to set the words that are used for priority, importance and urgency? I feel these categories could be a lot more helpful if I could assign shorter words, or icons in place of the words). Another thing I would love to hear your ideas on is the use of icons. I found out you can setup almost any icon as a custom one. After playing around with the settings I realized that too many icons are not good for me - I for now tend to merely use the flags column to mark things aside the icons that are inserted for projects and folders. Today I took a very close look at the automatic formatting and I must say - wow! That opens plenty of possibilities too. But to be quite honest with you, I sometimes struggle hard when I have too many possibilities. That is one pitfall for someone with ADD. Everything is intriguing and needs to be looked into - and in the end you find yourself spending the whole day on writing and playing with your to do list ;) I mainly have problems with the mentioned icons (their positioning such as 0, 1, 2 etc is a riddle to me still) and deciding which automatic formatting is useful. Right now I have such a colorful list full of icons that my head is spinning just from looking at it! LOL. And two things about projects still remain unclear to me, even after I have worked with the settings now quite a bit: One is the usage of the strings for projects; does that have to do with the parsing in the rapid task entry? By the way, thank you so much for that hint, it was exactly what I had been looking for! Question number two is the setting of the required time for a project: No matter what I check or un-check, those boxes are not available for me. I was thinking maybe I could use that estimated time to sort all projects into short, middle and long projects. I guess it all boils down now to decide what is helpful to get a clearer view on things. And that is the point where your ideas and personal preferences are a good source of inspiration, thank you for that! I apologize for this scattered reply, but here comes my ADD and tells me it had enough of computer work today lol! warm regards, Brienne On Monday, July 16, 2012 7:48:11 PM UTC+2, Brienne wrote: > > Hi all, > I just joined this group because I am in the middle of my trial of this > program and have to make a decision soon on whether I should buy it or not > (as with everyone almost, budget is always tight, so we all think twice > don't we? ;-) ) > > I feel a bit lost with all the options, though I am also intrigued by the > complexity of this program. Oh and I hope it is ok that I started a new > thread? I just felt it would be impolite to hi-jack someone's "New user" > thread. > > First of all, before I start with my questions, let me tell you a bit > about myself and why I am so interested in a program like MLO. I have not > read any of the books mentioned in this forum. I am not (yet) familiar with > all the theories and methods of to-do lists, and I must say I guess I > missed something good! > > I suffer from ADD (yes, that attention thing ;) ) and my mind is > constantly on the edge of bursting apart from ideas, do-not-forgets and > what-I-always-wanted-to-do's. So I really really need a good way to sort > things out and get them on paper sorted in a way that fits to my needs or, > rather, thinking. I am very intrigued by the idea of having these contexts, > projects and goals. That would cover a lot of the things that are on my > mind; I had a bit of a hard time finding out how far automatic the program > gets though: Is there a way to automatically asign contexts for instance, > by typing an "@" in front of a word? Or are all these settings merely done > manually through the properties dialog? > > I also read somewhere that projects always have to be marked done > manually, is that right? Sounds a little odd to me, since I do see the > percentage changing with the subtasks getting done. > > And lastly, I'd like to ask, in this group, is there anything like a files > section where people share templates or something similar? I have often > read people talking about some other user's template but I have a very hard > time to find my way around these google groups. > > I hope this wasnt much too long for a first introduction, and please > excuse my mistakes in grammar and spelling. English is my second language > and my ADD does the rest to my spelling ;))) > > *waves hi to everyone* > Brienne -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mylifeorganized/-/Z08H7acuLAUJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. 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