Fri, Sep 14, 2007
Products as duck-billed platypi
Wherein the author bitches, whines, and whinges about personal information management an GTD for several hundred words.
Wherein the author bitches, whines, and whinges for several hundred words.
Products evolve, and I get that, but it’s driving me crazy.
37Signals’s Backpack lets me email to-dos, but there’s no way to date them. I can added dated to-dos (reminders) manually. As a bonus the reminders are available as an ical feed, which means I can import my reminders into the Backpack calendar. That’s cool. I can see appointments and dated tasks side-by-side. Brlliant.
Highrise also has to-dos, but they’re called tasks. The only difference between Highrise and Backpack tasks is that Highrise gives you the option of dating a task. Essentially, any task can be dated or undated. And of course, a dated task is essentially the same as a Backpack’s reminder.
As a bonus, Highrise supports this really robust email feature that lets you email tasks to the application. And you can email them as dated or undated, and you can even associate them with one of your contacts. So, if I need to email Mike mockups in March, I can email this to Highrise and forget it. Highrise will tell me later.
This is great, but Highrise doesn’t have an ical feed for dated tasks (reminders) like Backpack does, so there’s no way to see if I’ve scheduled 15 tasks on the same day I already have an all-day meeting.
Did I mention that Backpack has a calendar? And it accepts ical feeds from other places. So, if my wife and I have our family events in a Google calendar, I can pipe the Google calendar into Backpack and see that I’m in Dallas for a wedding adjacent to the all-day meeting I scheduled in Backpack.
Too bad I can’t see the 15 tasks I scheduled on that day in Highrise.
And forget the to-dos I’ve already emailed to Backpack.
I assume that at some point, the fine people at 37Signals will unify their email and calendar APIs for each of their products, but it would sure would make my life easier if they did it sooner, rather than later.
Or if by some magic moment, I acquired a personal assistant to follow me around, take my appointments, open my pickle jars, and tell me which shirt to wear.
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Did I mention these shenanigans are taking place because Mac’s iCal has started eating my machine whenever it’s open? In my original system, my family calendar in Google was piped into iCal alongside the synced work calendar from Entourage (Outlook for the Mac). That was great, and all my to-dos were in Backpack.
Days started with me printing out my Backpack to-do list and that day’s view from iCal. Man was that awesome. Two printouts and an entire days worth of focus and productivity.
Man does it suck that iCal doesn’t work anymore.
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