Things
My quest is continually on for a good Organizational tool. For a while I have been using iGTD, a variation on the Getting Things Done methodology developed by David Allen. It is a great to-do list organizer and I found it very useful but I have been looking for more of a to-do, notes and general means to organize all my ideas into one place.
The to-do and notes in Mac Mail doesn’t cut it, nor do the little free apps that just allow you to do sticky notes, or to-do lists. I also looked at SOHO Notes, which admittedly is a great notes organizer. It allows you to build project pages, with links, videos, images and lots of rich text – a great way to organize ideas. It has an iPhone app too. But I am a big list user too, so I need to-do items with alarms. SOHO doesn’t do this unless you also purchase SOHO Organizer, and now things are getting expensive at $40 each, and probably a little overboard.
So, at the recommendation of a friend, I began to use Things. This is a free beta right now, but will cost $40 in January when it hits 1.0. I like it. It’s simple and effective. You can organize your to-dos by project, by area, by date, or just throw them into the “someday” bucket. It supports alarms, tagging and automatically floats items to the today folder when they are due so you can use the inbox methodology to organize yourself. It supports notes tied to to-dos which is great for capturing the details relevant to your tasks.
However, what it lacks for me, is the ability to build comprehensive and lengthy notes that are not attached to a to-do. It would be nice to have my projects, to-dos and notes all in one place where I can capture all my thoughts before and during my tasks, and keep them for later searching. Of course I could use external text files, but that takes more effort. An all-inclusive solution would be nice.
Things 1.0 promises greater functionality, but I have yet to find a list of features to look forward to. They seem to be keeping mum about it, which is not fair when you are expecting users to shell out hard cash. Hopefully the feature list will turn up before I am forced to hand over the money.
You can sync to iCal and your iPod (but not iPhone??) as well as multiple macs, but I haven’t tried this out yet since I keep my home projects separate from my work ones. An accompanying iPhone app would be great. It is my organizer of choice right now and I eagerly await 1.0
