Hello
Where is MLO evolving towards? I woke up in the night thinking that the ideal "task manager" application should be able to make "tasks" out of various things - simply by right-clicking on them from elsewhere. e.g. - documents (text, msWord Docs, spreadsheets, mind maps etc) - media (Images, movies, vector diagrams, flow diagrams, etc) - Emails & appointment & Contacts (i.e. msOutlook type data) For this to work, it would be good if all of the above (including individual emails) were available as individual external files in the operating system. i.e. It should be possible to *associate* more or less any external file with a new Task. And ideally with existing tasks too. Re-thinking "tasks" from the ground up... In order to make something into "a task" (i.e. "a thing that I intend to do"), there are various things that need to be associated with a task. Most of these already occur within MLO. (The only exception is Area of Focus - which is not a field as such in MLO). HOW IT FITS IN - Area of focus (areas of live) - Major Project name(s?) (maybe use a dropdown list?) - Sub-project name(s) WHEN TO EXECUTE IT - Due date - Start date - contexts (moods/mode/locations of user) - goal (time based) PRIORITY - stars (do today) - urgency - importance SEARCHABILITY - text tags (as done by Evernote) - Other users involved MARKUP (quick visual search within a screen) - flags - bold - colours OTHER - Dependency (other tasks that must happen first) - Review date (when to see/revisit it) - Recurrence data (when and how often it happens again) Within MLO one would then have have all manner of views and reports that the user can customize much like we currently have. (IMHO, the major thing currently missing would seem to be decent calendar showing Start Date and End Date for tasks, particularly if they are Goals). But "fair is fair" and I think any MLO Task should be readily accessible by other applications. Surely the simplest way to do this would be for each task should be stored in as a FILE in the O/S. Either that or all Task data is all stored in a standardised open source database (which in some ways is what an o/s "file" is in any case, no?) I guess what I am really saying is that I don't like the way that MLO and many other applications for that matter, have ring-fenced structures. It is stupid to have to send a copy of an email to MLO in order for it to be associated with an MLO Task. Surely it would be better to have a *single* master copy of each email - which should be editable and deletable globally. An alternative is of course to have a full-on, formal API for MLO and to allow other applications to see and edit all tasks. But that feels painfully clunky. After all, it's hard to imagine Wouldn't it be better to have "one file - one task" and no API required? Likewise as MLO expends, it is surely bonkers for MLO to have to re-invent it's own document editor in order to store text with fonts markup, colour, layout, URLs and ultimately embedded images/movies etc. And it also seems a bit bonkers for MLO to have to re-invent an entire Calendar way of viewing (Day, Weekly, Monthly views plus List views). And I don't think that just using Open Source code gets you there either. I think what I'm arguing for is to effectively have "Open Source Data" that is easy for other applications to edit and which conforms to certain agreed Open standards. i.e. To have "open data" / "open content" [??] that is open across any one user's PC / mobile device / cloud. The alternative seems to be that as MLO expands the reach of it's own universe (of data that it can us) it gets more an more bloated, with more an more stuff for users to learn their way around. AND worse, the user has duplicate copies off stuff (e.g. emails) all over the place. TBH, I am at the limits of my technical knowledge on this, and have no wish for a detailed technical discussion. I am simply arguing the case from *the user's *perspective. To what extent do I have a point? J -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/c2a0deb3-cfae-4410-b223-bc8087df222b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
