GTDAgenda – Day 3

And so begins day 3 of GTDAgenda testing.

Since I’m an animator at heart (even though I do more managing and meetings now), I decided to try adding tasks to make notes of each fix I wanted to do on a shot I’m currently working on.

I created a project specifically for this shot, and then started listing tasks.

I went stream of consciousness to add as many tasks as I could, just scrubbing back and forth over the animation, adding a task for each.  I was able to add a lot of tasks relatively quickly.  Click Add Task, type, click Save.  Not too bad.  It could be faster if I could enter a bunch of tasks at once, but it’s certainly not a deal-breaker.

The problem came when I went to then order the tasks so I could tackle them most efficiently.  I couldn’t find a way to order them quickly and easily.

In fact, I don’t think there’s any way other than editing the task and changing priority. It literally takes 4 clicks to change the priority from 1-5 of a task.  The other tough thing is that you need to be aware of all other task priorities to make sure you set this task’s priority correctly.  Is the eye tweak a higher priority than the nose tweak?  They’re both facial priorities, so maybe they both go under a priority 3.  But then there’s another eyeline change I want to tackle.  So that’s priority 3 as well.  The big problem there is that I can’t re-order within that level 3 priority to plan my attack.  Very frustrating. * See the update below for a faster workflow!

This is quite the problem for me, it means I really have to think about the tasks as I log them and make sure I do it in the right order.  I don’t want to work that way.. I want to tackle the order of tasks as when I’m in the mode of processing them and figuring out what I have time and energy for.  I could just sort of skip around through the task list itself, but that means that I have to keep re-evaluating each item to see what I have energy for.  I’d rather make the plan once, and then just go through tick tick tick.

I’m hoping that I am missing a feature somewhere, or that the Developer is working on this.  It could certainly make it tough for me to use GTDAgenda to handle shot tasks.

Anyway, here are a few other thoughts that came up throughout the day.

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• Notes per task – need more room than just 1 line.
• Really missing the ability to create a whole bunch of tasks at once.
• Too much mouse traffic with the clicking on Add Task, filling out all the data, and then having to click Add Task.  Would much rather a system where I do quick-add & add @contexts and .Projects at the same time.
• The ability to submit tasks via Twitter is really cool.  It allows me to enter tasks much faster, and then head to GTDAgenda to edit them.
• You can also apply tasks via email.  The subject is the name of the task, and the body is the note.  I don’t know if you can automatically assign the email tasks to projects or not.. it would be great if you could.

Hope people are finding these posts useful!

Update –

Dan contacted me with an update to some of the notes I have above.  I thought I’d include his reply here because there’s some really great news for you gtdAgenda lovin people! 🙂  I don’t know when these issues will be released, but the fact that Dan is working on them is great!

One of the next features that will be released is the possibility to insert multiple tasks at once.

Regarding changing priorities, it can be done faster if you select the task(s) and then use the drop-down menu (More Actions) for this action. No need to edit.

When you send tasks by email, it’s not possible to assign a project to it, or context. However, each project and context has its unique email address too, and if you send tasks to its email the task will be added to that project/context.