Jan Schulz

This is another blogpost about my experience with eProductivity, this time about working with my lists of ToDos.

Your ToDos (or actions in eProductivity speak) can become quite a lot. To get an overview of this pile, there are different ways to divide them or better "look at" them: by context and by projects.

Context is one of the key concepts of GTD: sort your actions by context so every time you have a telephone nearby or a computer or are @Work or @Home, you know where to look for work and it lets you keep an overview over your todos. eProductivity implements that by some categories and views (default and user specified!) , where you can sort in your actions and view them:


Unfortunately I have some problems with that as I am/was a student: my room is my workplace, together with telephone, laptop and online connection. So basically everything is @Home. And most of the rest isn't getting filled up and I felt like I overlook some actions in all my @Home ones. And that was exactly the feeling I wanted to leave behind with my "old style" todo handling. So something needed to be done. First try was sorting "leisure" items into a different box, which helped a lot. Anyway, I still think I have to split up the rest, but currently I've no idea how: there isn't really a hard border between the rest, where I can divide them up. Any Ideas?

Another way to sort your actions is by linking them to a project. A project is defined as something, which takes several actions to get done. This divides most of my actions quite cleanly and is currently my default way to get a grip on the "important" actions. There is also a view "projects and actions", which sorts all actions by projects and so is almost as informative as the context views and I can even drop stray actions into projects. Using the projects itself is also possible (all actions are shown there too), but most of my projects start out with a brainstorming session and a lot of small actions and so the small embedded view does not give the same overview as the view. It's even possile to sort the action, but only in the embedded view of the project, not the view (feature request sent :-) )

[there is another way to look at your actions: usually you fill in the action as "Category - Action title", where category is usually a person you need to contact. If you use advanced settings and subcategories, there is a view, which shows all actions by this categories ("Actions by entity", burried a bit in the preferences in "Navigation -> advanced"). As I only use categories, not subcategories, it only shows "uncategorized entities" and is so unuseable for me :-/ Lets see if the next version makes this view available for category only users :-) ]

What I miss
I use eProductivity as a dumping ground of all my actions (as a "trusted system" and to get them out if my mind) and then sort through them to get to the ones I need/want to do and plan the next day. There is still some lingering feeling, that there is some urgent or important action burried in my pile and I would overlook that. Actions which are due today show up in the today view (if set to advanced and I got a reply to my bugreport, that there will be some more improvements in the next version) and you can sort most views by due date, so that helps already (here is an ideajam for a specific view). Also you can assign priorities to actions, but I haven't found a way to look at them in that way, sorted by priority.

Anyway: even if there is still some of this "do I overlook something important" feeling, it isn't as high as with any other system I've used so far. In this regard, in times of stress, eProductivity really took a lot of anxiety out of my life. :-)