Hi!
Thanks for making such a great app! I use it all the time, I am a lot more productive thanks to it, and none of the other apps I've looked at seem nearly as useful for my purposes.
Here is my wishlist for improvements I'd like to see, in descending order of importance:
1. Projects:
The way I would love projects to work is this:
- Projects have a title, and consist of a list of actions/"waiting for"-items, as is currently the case.
- The user can indicate, for each of the project's actions, which other actions/events from the project must have been completed before this action can be done.
- All of the projects actions that do not require anything else to be done or to happen before they can themselves be done, are automatically displayed in the "Next" list, whereas *actions that cannot yet be done are not*. (My preference would be for those actions to be displayed in the "Waiting" list, but perhaps they would simply not be displayed anywhere other than in the project's own list.) The "Next" list should automatically update to reflect which actions can now be done: Whenever the prerequisites for an action from a project are all completed, this action is then automatically displayed in the "Next" list (and deleted from the "Waiting" list if it was previously listed there).
This would make your app truly amazing for my purposes, and I don't see why I might be alone in this.
- Make it possible to hide actions until a certain date: E.g. I am currently preparing an exam, so there are lots of things I do not intend to get done until after that's over. I would like such actions to not clutter my "Next" list until then, but once the exam is over I want them to appear on it again. Likewise, some actions can only be done after a certain date. What I've done so far is to put such actions in the "Waiting" list and add a reminder to them, so that I can manually move them to "Next" once I get the reminder. It would be a lot better if this could happen automatically. I.e. in each action's settings, it should be possible to set a date as of which that action will be active and displayed in the "Next" list.
- Allow users to change the page on which the app opens. My "Today" list is empty more often than not. I usually want the "Next" list when I open the app. Ideally, I could configure the app so that it opens on the "Today" list whenever there are items on that list, and on the "Next" list whenever the "Today" list is empty.
- Location based reminders would be great. The app would need permission to access the user's GPS data. I imagine that fewer people would download the app if it automatically requested such permission before being installed. But I would think it should be possible to solve that problem by having this location-based reminders disabled by default, and allowing users to enable it in the settings, thereby giving the app the necessary permissions.
- I would like the smart app function to allow me to put the action in another list than the Inbox. It should still go to the Inbox by default, but just as the smart add function allows the user to quickly set a date, a context, a project heading, a priority and a tag for the action, I think it should also allow them to choose a list to directly move it into.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read all this :)
I am pretty sure you know how to contact me, but just in case, my email is sebastianchristophnickel@gmail.com
I would appreciate a quick (or not so quick) feedback on my feedback.
All the best
Sebastian
@SebNickel
Good post!
As for your first suggestion - relating to projects - I think you are exactly right that there can be one or more actions that all need to be completed before the other actions can even be started. A feature for managing this has been a frequent request. My personal favorite solution would be to simply have a horizontal line in the project, and if you drag tasks below that line they will not be visible anywhere except within the project itself - but once you have finished all the tasks above the line, the first one from the lower section is automatically moved up to the upper section and becomes visible on the Next list etc.
I disagree with your suggested use of Waiting for this purpose. I prefer to use Waiting in the GTD snese. A Waiting For action is simply somebody else's Next action, something I am "waiting for" (not doing myself). All the above should apply to Waiting For actions as well - in other words an uncompleted Waiting For action could block the whole project, and could itself also be blocked by other actions (Next, Waiting or Scheduled) that precede it.
As for hiding tasks until a certain date, Doit has that feature, and in Doit it is called "Scheduled". In GTD it is called "Tickler file". But it is the same thing. You hide premature tasks there until a certain date, but you do not necessarily do the task on that date. All you do on that date is decide where to put it - Next, Waiting, Trash etc etc. In GTD this is intended for tasks that are truly premature in themselves, e.g. decorate Christmas tree (it is now only September). For your purposes - if you simply have no time right now, but he tasks are possible to do - I would suggest using Low Priority instead to make those tasks easy enough to ignore on the Next list, but still have them available there if an unexpected context or situation comes up.