Terse Systems

This is a continuation from my Organization post.

I wanted to be able to organize tasks when running around, and on the computer. So it’s a PDA and desktop combo. The best outliner on the Palm is Shadow. That was easy. I’d only been looking it since the Palm Pilot came out. (I tried Brainforest, but it sucked.) There’s a comparison of Palm organizers here which goes through a bunch of different ones.

But the desktop is harder. I want to be able to nest tasks. Just about every editor (jEdit, Emacs/Infodock, MS Word) has figured out that text can have an organization, and that hiding text can be a good thing. But you can’t check them off, there’s no filtering, and date/time management is non-existent. So it’s down to PIMs. But it’s really hard to find a task organizer that a) has nested tasks and b) doesn’t suck. Even Shadow Palm’s Windows client doesn’t cut it in a number of different ways – no tab indentation, no drag and drop, no copy / paste…

So I did a search. Jon Redmood has the best overview of organizers (although there are others), and subdivides them into one, two and three pane organizers. Of these, Ecco is clearly the best. It has a very minimal interface by default, but provides a huge amount of context. Every single item in Ecco can be assigned to multiple folders, and so different folders can display the same item in different context. It’s the most intertwingled program I’ve seen. And it’s free.

The big problem with Ecco is that it doesn’t integrate with Shadow Palm. There’s a Visual Basic plugin for Ecco, and it’s even possible to access Ecco through a DDE API, but ultimately I decided it was easier to take Shadow’s XML format and convert it to indented tab delimited format. I’ve stuck the exporter on the Yahoo group.

So now I have two outliners. Shadow is more of a note taker, for errands and day to day things. Ecco takes care of all the big, complicated tasks. If I have some slop between the two of them, I either enter it by hand, or batch import it.

Because of Ecco’s context management, it’s possible to build a workflow system to tasks. A number of people have been influenced by David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I’ve not read the book myself, but there’s an Ecco template and tutorial which really makes use of Ecco’s depth and power.

I wanted to use Ecco as a time tracker as well, but the tracking system is weak compared to everything else. Fortunately, Ecco’s item handling is so powerful that there’s really no need for it – I put in a daily journal out of items and then assign date properties. It then automatically shows up in the calendar.

The only thing that disturbs me about my system is that so much of the software I looked at is niche and unknown. When you consider how popular PDAs are, you would think that desktop organizers should be a huge market. But I have a piece of abandonware that’s over six years old, and it’s still cutting edge. That’s just wrong.