Now that I'm refreshed and recharged after a nice long work-free weekend, I've been researching how to get control of my internal to-do list. This is not nearly the first time this has happened, and I've never really found a satisfactory answer in the past. Outlook tasks are... not good. The pen and paper based organizer stuff was never my style.
For work items and bugs we use Trac at TalentSpring, and I'm very happy with that. For things related to product scheduling, release load balancing, developer load balancing, and so on it is a great tool.
However, that's not the same thing as a to-do list. Not everything I need to do for the business is a dev work item, so I'm looking for a way to organize my work and personal tasks that are outside the code jockey details of work items and bugs that Trac does well.
I just tried Backpack from 37signals, and by extension Ta-da List. Nice tools, but too simple for what I need. I know their philosophy is to keep things as simple as they possibly can, and I do like that, but it depends on slicing the market just right.
Let's say that you have a core piece of functionality that 90% of your overall target audience uses. The simple thing is to do that core piece and leave it at that, right? But how many of them use only that core piece? If most of that 90% use that core piece plus something else, but that something else is only the same for 5% of that group each, you've now implemented something that isn't good enough for most of them but contains the core of what 90% of them want.
So you can say "We're focusing on what 90% of people want" but in reality, to really satisfy that 90%, you need to do a bunch of little 5% things to complete their scenarios. The trick in that case might be to find the top N extra things that would help fully satisfy half of the 90%.
Anyway, the Backpack/Ta-da List stuff was nice and simple but too simple and I kept looking. I found a TechCrunch article comparing the state of the industry for online to-do lists from a year ago and tried Remember the Milk, which so far is impressing me greatly. They do some very nice subtle UI things that I want to study more and possibly steal (their login screen is particularly nice). Not everything is perfect, they re-sort the task lists based on priority as you change them, which is a bad no-no. After only a few minutes of adding new tasks I was already getting frustrated by clicking on the wrong item because things had shifted underneath me.
They have a little more functionality than I currently want, which I believe is ideal. If they did just exactly what I currently want there's a good chance I'd want more quickly.
I'm going to stick with them a while and see how it goes. So far, pretty damn slick.
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