Today is not a Box

PRO

Folke 11/09/2013 02:34

Platform:All

Having a Today list is wonderful! It helps you gather things that you are going to get done today, or expect to get done today, or want to think about to today, on one short page. This is great!

But the way Doit has done it is:
- unnormal and unfamilar (no one else does it in the same way)
- unpractical and annoying (creates unnecessary extra work)
- not GTD

UNNORMAL AND UNFAMILIAR

If you look at apps such as Google Drive or Gmail, or look at task manager apps such as Nirvana, Toodledo, Getitdoneapp, Zendone, Appigo, MyLifeOrganized, IQTell, just to mention a few, you will see that the normal function of starring an item is:

- making it more visible in its list (by turning the star yellow, as opposed to the others in the list)
- making it visible on a special list also, usually called Starred, Today, Hotlist, Focus, Dashboard etc

None of these other apps moves the item to another place or makes it invisible on the list it was on. It just gets visible in two places. But Doit moves/hides the item from the list it belongs to, and this is very, very unfamiliar.

UNPRACTICAL AND ANNOYING

If you want to see what would be possible for you to do now (today), you would expect to find all those things neatly summarized on the Next list. That would be practical and logical (and that is also precisely how it works in other apps). Or, similarly, if you want to look at what other people have undertaken to deliver to you, you would look at the Waiting list to get the full picture. Etc.

As it is now, this does not work in Doit. As soon as you star an item it is immediately removed (hidden) from its list. You no longer have at all the things of a certain kind (Next, Waiting etc) available on one single list, as you would need to have.

NOT GTD

GTD has a similar and optional thing called the "white index card" where you can make an excerpt (copy) of what you want to carry with you during the day. But just because you copy something to the white index card you do not remove it from your Next list (or Waiting For list etc.)

In GTD a Next action is what it is, until it is done - it is still a Next action even if you copy it to a white index card. The same applies if you copy some other kind of item (Waiting, Someday, calendar, tickler, subsequent project action) to the withe index card. Putting something on the white index card does not in any way change the item's "home position" - it only means you have decided to consider it carefully today or even get it done today.

Please fix. This is an error that causes people to say bad things about Doit. And I personally find it annoying, too.

LongNguyen post on 11/09/2013 12:57#1

PRO

I totally agree with this post. I think a Today list with the upcoming feature to plan your work day is great, but the way doitim has done it sometimes breaks your workflow and creates unnecessary step to get things done
wendy_only post on 11/10/2013 05:51#3

PRO

@Folke @LongNguyen

Hi,

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback!

It is really a big issue for us. Please give us some time to consider it seriously.

Shall you need any help or have additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact me back.
Thank you for your support!

Best regards,
Doit.im Team
Folke post on 11/13/2013 14:37#4

PRO

@wendy_only

I fully understand if this is a big issue for Doit. In part, this may be a big issue for sheer engineering reasons (amount of work etc), but I suspect that it is probably a big issue for more fundamental reasons as well.

It is apparent that the Doit team has a strong "grand vision" of how task management should be done, and I truly admire and respect a strong vision, as I believe that a strong vision and determination are necessary for success. You are fortunate enough to have all of that.

My impression of Doit's vision is something I might try to describe as "extreme time management with a GTD flavor". The whole philosophy of Doit seems based on determining in advance when you will do your important and urgent tasks, displaying these neatly in a calendar, and evaluating afterwards (using your "review feature") how punctual you have been in doing those tasks on exactly the day you had predicted. This is time management in its purest form - trying to turn your life into predictable and reliable Swiss watch.

Time is important to all of us. The GTD approach is not to try to predict it, but to try to make the best possible use of each moment and to remain flexible when sudden things happen. (This why features such as quick & flexible filtering and priorities are so important for "advanced" GTD use - being prepared for virtually anything that comes up, and having only true hard appointments etc scheduled in advance.)

The implications of this difference (Time Management versus GTD) is, among other things, that:

To a typical Time Manager the Next list is just a list of "spare" tasks, not very important or urgent, because if they were important or urgent you would already have scheduled them. They are things that you can do if you have spare time (unscheduled time). To a typical GTDist the Next list is the "heart". It contains all the things you could choose to do right now, and you will make those choices as you go, on the fly, based on the situation (what GTD calls context, energy, time and priority).

To a typical Time Manager the Today list is "the law". You definitely WILL do these things today; anything else would be a personal failure. To a typical GTDist the Today list is just a "handy short list" of the main things you can predict that you probably will want to consider later today.

I believe it is possible for Doit to be an outstanding app for both extreme Time Managers and extreme GTDists and anything in between. As far as this particular discussion ("Today is not a Box") I think a convenient multi-purpose solution is this:

- a preference setting for choosing between "Hide starred items" or "Show starred items". This setting would then apply to all the main "Box" lists - Next, Waiting and Someday (and Scheduled and Inbox?).

- invisibly hidden within the software itself there could be an underlying structure that allows for both of these options, i.e. a fundamentally "GTD" structure where each item truly "lives" on the main "Box" lists and nothing at all ever "lives" on the Today list, but where all starred items are always SHOWN on the Today list and are optionally also SHOWN on the list where they "live".

- in the special case of Scheduled items scheduled for today, I see no reason why they could not be considered to continue to "live" in Scheduled and still be shown on both lists.

- auto-starring could continue to take place just as today, i.e. items are auto-starred both on the scheduled date and on the deadline date. (And it should be possible to remove the star without changing these dates - they could even be shown as late on the real list where they actually "live".)

I truly hope that you find these thoughts and suggestions to be constructive and helpful. We may have a slightly different "grand vision" for task management, but I can assure you that I truly admire your fine work, and I do believe it is possible for Doit to cater for a very wide range of different kinds of users.
wendy_only post on 11/14/2013 09:55#5

PRO

@Folke

Hi,

Thank you for your suggestions. They are really helpful. We will look into this issue and find a best way to make it. But we do not have enough time to make it in the version which will be released in this Winter

Best regards,
Doit.im Team
panther28 post on 11/20/2013 22:12#6

PRO

i initially agreed with your comment, however, after looking at my own setup, i wondered how that would affect the process that i'm using. I am also using pipedrive to manage sales and deals, and i sync the tasks from pipedrive to google calender automatically, and then the tasks appear in my today in doit, which i find perfect. It means i can use doit to manage my tasks and things to do.

Hopefully doit can open up their api so we can use zapier.com to integrate with other services and apps, and allow a complete customization of the interface which looks like its already happening.
wendy_only post on 11/21/2013 06:20#7

PRO

@panther28

Hi,

We have the plan to open the API. After we release the new version,we will take time to do this thing.
Folke post on 12/23/2013 15:47#8

PRO

@wendy_only and all,

This discussion has fresh additional input here: http://help.doit.im/topics/2429

That thread started as a simple bug question about the missing star in the new iPhone app, and it turns out that Doit have decided to go even further in the "wrong" direction (from my point of view). They have decided that since the Star - in Doit's own very unusual opinion - means exactly the same as "calendar scheduled for today", we do not even need a star anymore - we can just edit the "start time" instead.

This is both good and bad. The good is that "calendar scheduled for today" is something well-defined that does not really need a star. This is totally true, and I totally agree thus far. (These tasks really should "live" in scheduled, and can be listed in Today, too).

The bad is that we have no star at all anymore for "attention starring" like we are used to from other apps, and which we used to "almost" have in Doit's previous version - Doit's star has always manipulated the dates and "boxes" in an illegitimate way, which caused us all kinds of problems, but at least we had a star.

I think there are many good and easy solutions to this. Some are described in the above referenced thread. In brief:

Alternative a): Change the whole behavior/philosophy of Today/Star and do like all other apps do.
Alternative b): Implement a user preference setting for using Today/Star either in "Normal mode" or in "Doit mode".
Alternative c): Implement a new starred list that behaves like a normal starred list, and let the user select in preferences which lists to hide. (Just as we can hide Tomorrow and other lists even now, I would like to hide the "calendar scheduled for Today" list, and instead star these few tasks for my attention on the "starred" list.).
mahony2k post on 01/02/2014 17:25#9

PRO

Thanks Folke for speaking up against all that nonsense.

Doit.im is very well done, but on every corner there is some detail that's making trouble. The star is one of them.

So please dear Doit.im engineers:
Listen to Folke, he knows these things! ;-)
hntopper post on 01/02/2014 18:33#10

PRO

@wendy_only @folke
+1 I agree with Folke
MihaStrcelj post on 01/02/2014 20:03#11

PRO

I also agree with Folke and the others about the necessity of a star. It is very simple to look at most other apps and "make a copy" of the usual meaning of star. Doit should not deviate too much from the mainstream of gtd philosophy - that is why it has been considered successul and interesting so far.
Folke post on 01/08/2014 17:39#12

PRO

@wendy_only and the whole Doit team

Let me give you an example - actually two examples - of how the star is normally used in other apps. I'll begin with Google Drive (a very general example) and then continue with other task management apps:

In Google Drive, say you have a folder called "Family photos" that you are now looking at. You can see a lot of files listed there. One of of them is called "Wendy_at_the_bus_stop.jpg". On the left is an empty star. What happens if you click the star?

- Does it automatically jump to the folder "Business photos"? No.
- Does it disappear at all from "Family photos"? No.
- Is its star yellow? Yes.
- If you check its revision history, does it have a new "last modified date" or any other change? No
- If you look at the "Starred" list, do you see it? Yes
- If you look at the other items in the "Starred" list, can you see files from other folders than "Family photos"? Yes
- In the Starred list, can you see which folder each file actually belongs to? Yes
- Have any of the other starred files in the Starred list been removed from their original folder? No
- Does anything really "live" only on the Starred list? No
- If you unstar a starred file, is there any trace of this in the file's revision history? No.
- If you unstar a starred file, does it jump anywhere? No, It stays where it always was, but can no longer be seen in the Starred list.

In Google Drive, starring only means two things:
- the star is changed from white to yellow, so that you can see the file clearly marked in its list
- the file is now also visible from a special view called Starred

In normal GTD and other task management apps, the exact same principles are true (for example: Toodledo, Nirvana, Things, Appigo, Zendone, IQTell etc):
- tasks do not jump away from Next or Waiting etc just because you star them
- all such lists (Next, Waiting etc) are still complete and correct
- starring/unstarring does not change the task's date or revision history (last edited etc)

The normal purpose of the star is to give the user convenient access and high visibility to selected items. The special view (list) where all starred items can be seen together can be called Today or Starred or Focus or Hotlist - it does not matter.

Doit's star is not a normal star. It is better described as a "Quick Move" button. It moves tasks from the list where the task belongs to a completely different list. It is too "powerful". It destroys information.

One of the very good and convenient uses of a normal star is to mark tasks that you want to consider or review more carefully later today, but not necessarily do (complete) today, for example:

- Next actions that you believe you may have a particularly convenient opportunity to get done today (should still be visible in Next)
- Waiting For actions that you may want to consider complaining about if the expected result does not arrive (should still be visible in Waiting - somebody else is still doing the task, not you)
- Waiting For actions that you may need to be reasonably available for (e.g. a courier delivery or an important expected phone call; still something you are Waiting for OTHERS to do; outside of your direct control; still visible under Waiting)
- Someday/Maybe actions that you want to do a special viability review of (still Someday/Maybe until you decide otherwise or rephrase it etc)
- future calendar actions that you feel that you may need to double-check, e.g. if the date is correctly understood or whether it has been cancelled (still Scheduled for the original future date until you explicitly change it)
- and, of course, the same star should be used to make today's calendar actions visible on the Today list 8auto-star at midnight)
- and other actions (Next, Waiting, Someday) that have a deadline today (auto-star at midnight)
- and any of the above that are past due; not completed (auto-star at midnight)

I hope that helps. It is actually a simplification of Doit that we are all asking for. A simple "visibility star", not a "quick scheduling star".
MihaStrcelj post on 01/08/2014 20:31#13

PRO

@Folke,

Great explanation!
Doit team, listen to Folke's proposals, it will help you make your product better. Optimization of workflow is something that needs many year experience and profound knowledge of various approaches. Folke, obviously, has great experience and knowledge so make use of them!