Outline for “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, by JK Rowling. [Via Chandler Baker]. Click the image to view her original.

Personally, if I wasn’t outlining electronically, I would go for the spreadsheet-like format (although it only gives you 2 degrees of freedom, I wouldn’t be able to cope with a looser organisation). I’d be interested in seeing how some of these would look electronically – Scapple and Aeon Timeline would be my choices.

Although I don’t use Wunderlist any more as part of my GTD toolkit (more on that at a later date), I still rank it as one of the best, free task management tools you can get. A lot of users were hoping that tagging would be included in V2 but, unfortunately, it didn’t make it in.

That said, there are ways and means to achieve the end result, even if it’s not ideal. After all, one expects to have to make a certain amount of compromise when using free tools.

When I needed to overcome this limitation I simply chose to include the context and any tags at the end of the task’s title. The following screenshot shows a task with the ‘email’ context. I chose to use square brackets ‘[' & ']‘ to enclose a context and curly braces ‘{‘ & ‘}’ to enclose a list of tags. I used these because I find it more readable than a more traditional @context and #tag markup. The picture shows a task with the ‘email’ context.

A task having the ‘email’ context

I then simply used Wunderlist’s search box to filter my lists for a specific context (by including the square brackets) or tag (by simply typing the tag name).

As I said at the start, this is a compromise and requires some work and consistency but, if you are looking to manage your entire GTD using Wunderlist – as I did – then you need to be prepared to forsake some efficiencies.

Have you integrated contexts and tags into your Wunderlist-based GTD solution? How have you found it? Is it worth the overhead?

I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments section, below.

Ady

David Hewson’s post argues the case for dumping Scrivener and using Word; Jamie Todd Rubin’s post describes how he manages edits in Scrivener.

I think both cases are valid: David’s is argued from the point of view that editors will invariably use Word; Jamie’s from the point of view of someone who understands this, but would rather manage the whole process in Scrivener.

The example Jamie cites is for a 12 scene work; his process of copying from Word into Scrivener seems viable for a work of this size. David’s example has over 100 scenes and I wouldn’t want to be copying and pasting between the applications for a work of that magnitude.

What do you think about these two different approaches to the editing process? What do you do? Please feel free to leave a comment.

The CorneliOS WebOS is an easy-to-use and cross-browser “Web Desktop Environment”, “Web Operating System” or “Web Office”. It’s also a powerful web application framework that can be used to build community platforms.

Here’s a link to the CorneliOS web OS & application framework.

From a ‘Getting Things Done‘ (GTD) perspective, email has been the one ‘inbox’ (in the sense of GTD) that has been incongruous to the rest in my system; I’ve found it really difficult to smoothly integrate emails in my inbox into my GTD workflow.

Amongst other methods, I’ve tried:

• Tagging emails with project and a ‘verb’ (“@action”, “@waitingfor”, “@sometime”)  (but this leaves me with more than one place to review items);
• Copying the email into Evernote (with tags), archiving the email and adding a task to Wunderlist (which works, but is ungainly and inelegant);
• Simply adding a task to Wunderlist (with tags), archiving the email and relying on the Mail application’s search features to find the email when the time comes to process the task (which is the easiest at getting me to ‘Inbox zero’, but has the potential to make later review that much harder).

(Although not explicit above, you can read ‘Wunderlist’ as ‘Wunderlist/calendar’.)

So it is with great anticipation that I await the formal release of a new Mail application (for Mac) – Mail Pilot (@MailPilotApp on Twitter).

Mail Pilot is a Kickstarter funded project which has garnered over 150% funding, such is the demand for an email application that has been completely re-thought from the bottom up. Rather than new emails coming in as ‘unread’ they arrive as ‘incomplete’. They remain in this state even after you’ve read them; only when you mark them ‘complete’, do they disappear from your inbox. If you don’t want to process (complete) the email there and then, you can mark it for review. Like completed items, items for review are removed from your inbox. When you mark something for review you can optionally select a date for it’s review (and on that date, it’ll pop back into your inbox) and whether to add it to a particular list, or not. Review items that are not dated can be manually reviewed in ‘Review mode’.

The re-imagining of the inbox as a to-do list looks great as a GTD tool; quickly complete short tasks, mark items for review later, assign to lists (sometime, never, contact-specific, project-specific). It still leaves a couple of holes, though. Firstly, it’s still separate from the other ways in which items enter the (GTD) inbox – word of mouth, text messages, actions from meetings, etc – although it may be feasible to make Mail-Pilot the single GTD inbox by creating notes or emails to oneself. Not sure that that’s the ideal solution, but the alternatives are either to copy actionable items from Mail Pilot into Wunderlist or to have 2 inboxes. The second hole is with reference material – this still needs consolidating into (in my case) Evernote (though this is no different to my current situation).

So in conclusion, I’m looking forward to being able to try out Mail Pilot. I hope it lives up to the praise it’s followers and beta users are bestowing upon it. I can’t imagine that it won’t be a great application – eMail client applications have been in need of a re-think for a long time and this is most definitely a massive leap in the right direction. I’m still undecided as to whether it fulfils all the GTD needs and I’m not sure that ‘the general public’ will go for a paid subscription model in order to have the ‘new mail experience’, but time will tell.

Have you tried Mail Pilot? Are you one of the Kickstarter funders and beta testers? If so, I would love to hear from you! Post a comment below and let me know how you’ve been getting on with it.

Ady

In a nutshell, there’s nothing to worry about and everything still works exactly the same as it did.

Ady

The iPhone app (automatic upgrade from the Greplin app, if you have it) is very nice and I will be trying it out for a week or so to see whether it’s all it claims to be.

Features in the new app include:

• An enhanced calendar – Cue provides an intelligent snapshot of your day by automatically connecting related emails, phone numbers, and addresses.
• Flight reservation management and check in, package tracking.
• See contact info alongside their recent emails and latest posts on social media channels.

For more information, Adrianne Jeffries has written a post on the Betabeat blog.

Meanwhile, users of the Greplin web-based search tool will be disappointed to learn that it is being discontinued. This is spoken of in Adrianne’s post, but I couldn’t find any reference to it on the Cue site or blog. I, for one, will be very disappointed if this vanishes. (For a start, it’ll make this post of mine redundant.)

What do you think of the change? Good? Bad? What’s greplin? Comment below!