Landing page redesign
Posted: June 30, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »I redesigned the landing page for new users a bit. I haven’t had time to test it on different browsers, so the layout will probably go wrong for some people. Let me know if that’s the case for you, and make sure to mention what browser you’re using.
Before anyone else mentions it: yes, I ran out of time. No, it’s not ironic that I ran out of time when developing a time-management tool. The whole thinking behind TaskMaster is about realism, pragmatism, and not attempting to deny your limitations. Having to accept something that’s OK but not perfect is all part of this.
New help text and tooltips
Posted: June 22, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »I’ve updated the site with a whole bunch more help text and tooltips. Hopefully this will go some way towards making it more obvious how the thing works.
The only trouble is, I don’t know which bits of it are hard to understand, because I’ve been working with the site too long. I imagine the most important thing to get across is the motivation of why things work the way they do, but at the same time I don’t want to drown the interface in unnecessary text. It’d be great if some of you would write in the feedback forum to let me know what you think needs explaining.
Taking a week off
Posted: June 19, 2011 Filed under: Site Leave a comment »So it’s been a slow week for me in terms of working on TaskMaster—in fact, I pretty much took the week off. I don’t manage to spend that much time working on it even in active weeks, but as a part-time project in addition to my full-time job it can be pretty exhausting.
Among other things, I used the extra time this week to catch up with some emails from old friends I’ve been out of contact with. It struck me that this was a very good “live” example of a task that’s important but not urgent. From what I can tell I’m not the only person who finds it difficult to keep current with people I haven’t seen in a long time: every time I see them I remind myself how much I want to stay in contact, but a few weeks later there’s a stale email thread and bringing it back to life seems like altogether too much effort. What seemed like a great and really important idea in the abstract becomes a bad idea when faced with the realities of the task.
I have to say, TaskMaster worked really well for me in this case. If nothing else, it forced me to face up to the apparent contradiction between the importance the task had when I created it and the ease with which I’d dismiss it when the time came to carry it out. With the deadline upon me, saying “I’ll do it tomorrow” wasn’t an option—either the task was worth doing on the schedule I originally set, or I was wrong to schedule it in the first place.
But this isn’t intended as a paean to keeping in touch with old friends. Maybe I was wrong when I scheduled the task, and keeping in touch with that friend wasn’t that important to me. It’s quite possible that letting the contact go and spending the time on something else would leave me happier and more fulfilled in the long run. If so, I could have learned my lesson and avoided planning to spend time maintaining the relationship in the future. Either way, the choice is a difficult but important one to make, and one that will never be achieved where the cosy denial of perennial deferment gives an easy way out.
What traditional to-do lists get wrong
Posted: June 11, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: to-do list Leave a comment »It seems to me that ordinary to-do lists go wrong in at least three ways:
- They don’t encourage thinking about achievability of tasks when you’re adding to the list
- They don’t have effective support for tracking tasks that are important but not urgent
- When you get beyond a certain amount of backlog they start to act negative rather than positive motivation
The most fundamental of these is the first, which tends universally in my experience to cause us to overload our to-do lists. I think this happens for various reasons: some people feel that listing more tasks will help them to get more done, some add trivial tasks to procrastinate from more unpleasant tasks, and some lack the skill to triage incoming tasks or the assertiveness to admit to their colleagues that they’re over-stretched.
But all these scenarios have a common pattern. Tasks get added to the list that ultimately don’t get done. There’s no hiding the fact once the deadlines have sailed past, and if we’re honest with ourselves it rarely comes as much of a surprise that jobs get left undone. Why don’t people learn from this?
I think one reason is that straight to-do lists don’t encourage you to think about your planning, or reflect back afterwards. By and large, estimating a schedule for a complex set of tasks isn’t an innate skill, it’s learned through experience. The only way to improve your ability to estimate is to pay attention while you do it and reflect on your success and failure. But that’s a hard path when your tools don’t encourage it, your peers don’t do it and there’s an ever-present excuse for failure in the form of blaming your job, your colleagues, your customers or your boss.
This is an experiment
Posted: June 2, 2011 Filed under: Site Leave a comment »I’m aware that it might come across that I’m taking myself too seriously. I’ve given this small site a rather grandiose name, “The TaskMaster System”, and I’m already feeling uncomfortable about it. It makes it sound like the sort of thing that would be taught in a seminar held at an airport hotel, which I’ve just been pre-selected for a special discount rate for if I book in the next 7 days.
The truth is, when you’re developing any software project, or probably any project at all, you have to give it a name before too long. You need a name for the directory, and for the revision-control system, and for a domain name, and so on. Too often I end up at the other extreme, with a possibly great idea that I don’t get started on because I’m dithering about what to call it.
In any case, this is a roundabout way of pre-empting accusations that I might be overly enamoured of my own idea. In fact, I think of this as more of an experiment, in at least three ways:
- It’s an experiment with technology. I’ve never run a web-based service that any number of people rely on, and I’ve never used Ruby on Rails. My initial motivation for making this was as an exercise to learn the technology before working on my real project, which as it turns out I haven’t thought of a name for yet.
- It’s an experiment at adapting a task-management system that has worked for me, to see whether it will work for other people.
- It’s hopefully a platform to experiment with even better ways of organising task lists.
The third one is potentially the most significant. The product I’ve created at the moment might not change the way we think about task management, but if I can get a reasonable number of people together who have an interest in trying new ideas then we should be able to try out further refinements in a somewhat methodical manner. The vision is that I might have a system where half the users can try one tweak to the system and half can try another, and people can say how they useful they found it.
I’m not certain I’ve got the ultimate solution yet, but I know there’s a lot of room for improvement over static to-do lists. I can’t wait to get this rolling.
What this is all about
Posted: May 28, 2011 Filed under: Site Leave a comment »I’m a software engineer, and I’ve long been frustrated with traditional to-do lists. As an engineer, when I see a system that doesn’t seem to work that well, I try and figure out a way to make it better. I believe I’ve done that with the TaskMaster system.
It’s a system that I developed for my own use, and seems to work well for me. I started turning it into a web application primarily as an exercise to teach myself the web technology Ruby on Rails, but I figured the end product might be useful for more than just me, hence starting this blog to explain the system to the world.
It’s still very early days at the moment, but you’re welcome to sign up for an account and have a look around. Probably nothing will make sense at the moment, since I haven’t written any help text or spent much time making the interface easy to use. Over the coming weeks I hope to explain more on this blog, and to improve the interface. In the mean time, please send any comments to tim@asymptotic.co.uk.
