Mind Traffic Control

If you haven't looked at Mind Traffic Control recently (and I know YOU haven't, because I see the logs), then you may be surprised.

Just saying ... :-)

Wow! Dan Bricklin has still got it.

This is a really nice twist on the mobile notepad / todo list app. The UI looks brilliantly well thought through.

Nowdothis is awesome!

(hat-tip @adrianh)

Of course, if it becomes massively successful and famous I'll be ... kind of ... you know ...

But I really do wish it well.

What do readers of this blog think of Chandler?

Hmmm are Gmail Tasks going to kill Mind Traffic Control? (Via Stowe Boyd)

Bill Seitz :

One Product Management rule Of The Day, that I try to impose, against resistance from most people, is Tasks that aren't crucial don't become more important with age. (Of course, if you have a paying client, "crucial" may be filtered via the Golden Rule.) Every task that takes more than 30min (even less?) should be evaluated against "is this the most important thing to do now?" (FoCus). Go ahead and stick that item on a To Do List. But it's ok if it sits there forever.

Dare Obasanjo on Windows Live Calendar

Prioritizing by Anxiety.

I see what he's getting at although I'm not entirely convinced.

Obviously No Free Lunch tells us that no "prioritize-by-X" strategy could be appropriate to all circumstances. (Including the FIFO algorithm of Mind Traffic Control).

Because of this, the less time wasted imagining you can specify priorities in advance, the better. Because the only time you can assign priorities is when pulling things out of your queue. To the extent that "anxiety" helps you identify the most urgent to do now it's useful. But Andre does recognise that anxiety (like most *emotional* indicators) is pretty ambiguous; it might be that an item makes you anxious exactly because you *don't* know how to do it or even what you *want* to do about it. So, even choosing to address it now, doesn't mean "doing" it now, it may be a signal to cancel entirely.

Still ... it's to good if it helps you reduce anxiety overall. Perhaps not if you start to *cultivate* it as a priority-identification mechanism.

BTW : MTC works on the opposite theory, assuming that it's easier to know which items you can definitely postpone, than it is to know which are most urgent ... so at least it helps you clear the former out of the way. Nevertheless, what this post mainly reminds me is that, now I'm up to around 200 items under Mind Traffic Control, even MTC is breaking down for me.

Or rather, it's missing something. And I'm starting to wonder if that's the "someday/maybe" bucket. Originally I assumed that "3 months in the future" was more or less equivalent to a someday/maybe ... but I'm finding that that's not the case.

I'm scared to push things so far ahead, even for things I have no idea when I'd get round to. Because there's always the possibility that I might get inspired to try them tomorrow. I need another queue to get things out of the way, but from where I can bring them back, if inspiration strikes.

Opinions anyone?

Phillip J. Eby calls Todo Lists "FAIL".

Background explanation.

Another list view for Mind Traffic Control