This Is Not How It’s Supposed To Work

I use Remember The Milk to manage my personal task list, and I really like how the product works, mostly. But RTM notes associated with task are pretty inaccessible: you have to click through three or four levels of the UI to get there. I also wondered about various third party apps mentioned on the site, many of which no longer seemed to be supported.

Since I am a pretty committed user, I decided to pay the $25 for a pro account, so I could have email support and ask about these issues.I went to the RTM support forum and found that many other users had similar questions about the product. Below you can see the response to an email I send yesterday.

Kudos for the quick response, Brendan, but it’s pretty content-free:

Hi Stowe,

Thanks for getting in touch.

We don’t currently have any announcements about changes to tasks, but if you’re interested in trying out new features before they’re released, be sure that your Pro Tester Profile is up to date. You can update it here: https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/tester/

When we have a new feature to test, we use to information to select the users who will get to test it out.

Unfortunately I’m not familiar enough with these third party apps to help answer your questions, but the developer may be able to help you.

I’m sorry we’re not able to provide support for third party apps. :(

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help with.   Regards,
Brendan

A message to Brendan, Remember the Milk, and all the other product companies out there:

1. If you mention third party apps that hypothetically, once-upon-a-time integrated with your product, or which were reviewed once-upon-a-time as integrating with your product, you have an implicit obligation to maintain information at your website with current status of those integrations. This is especially true if they no longer work. Note: just because you don’t explicitly mention them at your website, or you don’t recommend them, you are not off the hook. Deleting their name and link is not sufficient ‘support’ for users. [Note: I am not saying that RTM has deleted information about formerly working third party apps. This is a general observation.]
2. If a large number of your users are requesting a specific feature or a fix to an existing set of features, you have an implicit obligation to respond to the request. You don’t necessarily have to implement it, but you are obliged to a/ state your logic for doing whatever it is you do, and b/ spelling out your plans — if any — for addressing the questions people have posed. Specifically, in this case, Remember The Milk should explain its logic for making task notes hard to create, read, and edit, and the company should make that thinking easy to access on its website. Having a user forum where users can post questions and concerns does not absolve a company from actually explaining its plans or product philosophy.
3. Whenever possible, be grammatical, even if you have no information to share. In the email, when Brendan wrote ‘we use to information to select’, I bet he meant ‘we use that information to select’. I hate to nitpick about grammar and language usage, but we have to hold customer support people — especially when the support is being paid for — to a higher standard.

I like this product, and I use it every day, but I wonder if these people are in step with the way user-centered product development is supposed to work.

Gist Doesn’t Work With New Three Pane Gmail

It’s a shame that Gist is now out of sync with the three pane Gmail. I bet it will only be a few days before they get that straight, though.

I bet that Remember The Milk, Raportive, and other plugins have stopped working, too.

First Look: Taskforce

I have been using Todoist as a personal task manager, but I am always willing to fool with another, so I took a look at Taskforce, because it was advertised as integrating with Gmail.

After installing a Firefox plugin, you are able to create tasks in two ways: One via a floating window above Gmail (using the ‘+’) sign. These tasks can be assigned dates, projects (or tags), and be commented on.

Collaborators can also be invited (via email) to share these tasks, and emails can be attached to existing tasks as well.

A collaborator invited to share a task gets an email like this, which is 90% taken up letting you know it’s a Taskforce task, and the URL for seeing the task.

In the screenshot above, you can see two new buttons that appear on all Gmail emails once Taskforce has been installed as a plugin to the browser. One allows an email to be ‘converted’ to a new task, one that allows the user to attach the email to an existing task.

The first option — ‘converting’ — actually does just that: it converts the email, so that subsequent interactions in the email thread do not behave like email anymore. Instead the interaction is embedded in a Taskforce user experience, which includes a not-so-wonderful pattern of emails with embedded Taskforce URLs, at least when only one of the participants is using Taskforce. When two or more are using Taskforce, I suppose the experience is more like commenting on blogs, but there is still that old school residue of emails with URLs.

After clicking on a URL to a Taskforce task, you are brought to the Taskforce website, which shows a completely different experience:

Here’s a task called ‘testing’ and various comments I put on using two different email addresses.

Bottom Line

I don’t like the context switching that seems to be a necessity in Taskforce: moving back and forth from email to the Taskforce website is too disruptive. Makes it seem more like Taskforth.

Perhaps if Taskforce could represent the Taskforce threaded discussion view right in gmail — either embedded in the email or hovering above it, like the Taskforce hovering task window — maybe then I would be interested.

Also, I need to have a way to see a single list of all my tasks, somewhere. The hovering window view (as in the first screenshot above) only shows thos tasks associated with a single project (or tag) at a time. And there is no account at the website where I can create or modify tasks, at all, despite the fact that the tool keeps taking me back there to look at threading discussions.

All in all, I think there may be something worthwhile at the idea of channeling plain vanilla email into more structure. I like the idea that an email implies a task, and that task should have a date and possibly other metadata. Gmail’s own tasks implement a bunch of that, although not in the most elegant way, but certainly in a way that is more intuitive than Taskforce.And of course there is Remember The Milk and Todoist, both of which work better than Taskforce, and RTM supports task sharing as well. I would certainly advice folks to look there, instead of trying Taskforce, at least in this version.

Alarms: A Deceptively Simple Calendar Tool

I saw a mention about Alarms, a new Mac OS X take on calendars.

The UX is based on a bell-shaped toolbar icon, which opens a top-of-screen calendar when clicked, pushing down and graying out other running apps:

click to enlarge

The app presents a left to right scrolling arrangement of hours. You can click anywhere and create an event, and at the time that the time for that event reaches ‘Now’ (as time passes the hours move to the left), an alarm goes off. This includes a blinking display of the alarm icon, and various tones can be selected too.Note that selecting a date on the calendar to the right allows other days to be displayed, and then the same calendar UI is presented but for that date.

An alarm can be created by dragging a URL to the icon, which opens the calendar display. You can then drop the URL on the time that you’d like to do something, like responding to an email (after grabbing the email URL), or writing a post (after drag-and-dropping the piece’s URL). I’ve even grabbed images and dragged them to the tool.

When the alarm goes off, the display pops a small display, and the URL can be accessed, or the alarm checked.

There is a keystroke setting to snooze tasks, and one for opening/closing the alarms calendar.

There is a deceptively important integration with iCal:

1. Since iCal tasks may be shared, it is possible to use that mechanism to share alarms, so long as both (all) users have Alarms installed. But there is no way to only sync some alarms, so all must be shared.
2. iCal serves as an archive for alarms when synced, while in Alarms, checked off tasks disappear. This alone justifies taking the five minutes to set up syncing. Unchecking tasks in the synced iCal calendar makes them current again in Alarms, too.
3. URL tasks can have their text fields edited in iCal, which can’t be done in Alarms.

Thoughts

My calendaring is all over the place right now. I use Google Calendar for scheduled events, like calls and meetings, and until recently I used Remember The Milk to track larger scale activities, but that app’s biggest benefit is integration with Gmail and it breaks every time Google updates the tool. That makes it pathologically annoying.

I have been experimenting with CRM capabilities of some of the products reviewed in the Streams In Business research project (which I am finishing up this week, I swear!). But the jury is out on that larger scale coordination.

On the finer grained, moment-to-moment task management, Alarms is appealing. It’s faster than writing a note to yourself, and much faster than creating an event in iCal. It’s conceivable that it might even take over the more traditional schedule-a-telcon sort of task, but I think to edge into that region it would have to integrate email invitations, and a number of other features. If the developers behind Alarms could do that, and still keep it small and simple, it would be a real winner.

related articles

• Mac Gems: Alarms 1.0.1 (macworld.com)
• Introducing Alarms, a freakishly awesome reminder app (smokingapples.com)

Remember The Milk, Redux

Ran Barton commented on a recent post about Todoist and Huddle:

As an avid user of Remember The Milk, I wanted to offer two quick suggestions:

RTM has a GMail extension, too - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5339

Also, RTM can be run in the sidebar via their very powerful Google gadget. I do this everyday - it’s great.

http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/help/2222/

Hmmm.

So I took a look, and in a few minutes, I switched to Remember The Milk, and quickly decided to drop Todoist.

Todoist is based on the project metaphor: every task must be in a project, which annoys me, and complicates the interface and experience. RTM, on the other hand, better supports my bottom-up mindset: I create tasks and tag them with as many terms as I like, so I can display everything tagged ‘London’ or ‘cash’.

I favor the chronological orientation of the RTM sidebar, and the ease with which I can pull down the controller on each task to set the status to complete, or to postpone or edit the task.

Here’s the web site, which opens when you click on a task in the sidebar, or select edit:

The list is fine, but I seldom spend much time adding tasks in this view, except to add notes to tasks.

The integration with Google Calendar is totally great, and it the primary integration point that sells me on RTM:

The hack creates a new calendar which contain RTM tasks in some sneaky way (I say sneaky, because you can’t see the tasks when you try to subscribe to that RTM calendar). By clicking on the check icon associated with each day, you see any that day’s tasks, plus any others that are still pending from earlier days. These can be edited or completed just as in the sidebar, and new tasks can be added, and tied to the day selected. Very cool.

The integration with Gmail is not as clean and direct as with Todoist: when you use the “Add to RTM” button that gets placed at the bottom of Gmail’s emails, it pops a window:

It you want to add tags or set the date for the gmail-linked task, you have to edit the magic words in the email that is generated, and which is later sent to your Remember The Milk account. Later, if you want to bring up the email that was linked, you have to go through two steps:

1. You click the task in the sidebar to open the task info in the web page
2. In the information associated with the task, the URL area holds the URL, which you click to open the email.

So it’s workable, but I favor the more direct one-click approach that Todoist provides. RTM’s team should do something along those lines.

However, I have found the switch worthwhile, and I am very happy with RTM’s look and feel, especially the tag-based organization into taggings, not projects.

Alexandra Samuel also commented on the earlier post:

Stowe, you make a compelling case for ToDoist over RTM, though I have been pretty happy with RTM — except for the basic nightmare of having tasks split between RTM and Basecamp. I just blogged how we’re using Basecamp (http://www.socialsignal.com/basecamp-workflow), despite the fundamental problem that we have with Basecamp’s lack of task due dates or task annotation.

What I’m curious to hear — and a little reluctant to take on the hard way, i.e. by personally testing yet another project management tool — is whether your Todoist plus Huddle approach would offer any major improvement in task management integration, compared to our Basecamp plus RTM solution. It sounds like you are still in the same pickle of needing to keep tasks in two places. Does the non-secure RSS setup at Huddle let you export your tasks in some more usable form (e.g. the kludgy approach of placing them on an iGoogle homepage, next to an RTM widget, so you can at least lay eyes on all your tasks in one place)? Or would you, given the overhead of switching a team to a new tool, wait for some more revolutionary, hint hint, solution?

Yes, I am still divided between a task management tool — RTM — and a social work management tool — Huddle — which both have task management capabilities, and which are unintegrated. I use RTM to manage my personal debris: telephone calls, posts to write, email to follow up on, planes, trains, and automobiles. This follows my personal patterns pretty well.

Of course, I could use RTM’s shared tasks with others, in principle, but I am a soloist playing in many orchestras, so trying to get my colleagues in the various companies where I am consulting to use RTM seems a bit too complex, since all it offers is task management. So, I invite my colleagues to use Huddle to manage the conversations around our work, and any project-related shared tasks. Or they invite me to use Basecamp, which happens frequently, or Clearspace, or some other tool. And I just flex, because there is so little leverage from having all your work in one of these contexts, anyway. They are just big collections of projects chatter, useful for collaborating on concepts and coordinating work lists, but not particularly geared to supporting the flow of work.

Yes, I have dreams of a more revolutionary solution, but that’s all you’ll get out of me today, Alexandra. In the near term, I have provided a list of recommendations to the folks at Huddle, and they are at work on some of them. Most importantly, I want things like having comments on Huddle posts (which they now call ‘whiteboards’ for no good reason) finding their way into the RSS feed. And, yes I would like tasks to show up in the RSS feed as well.

Greg Willows tried to drag my attention back to Wrike, which I reviewed months ago:

Stowe, not everybody uses Gmail. Does Todoist integrate with other email applications? Wrike does. I use it everywhere and can check a project updates even from my BlackBerry. I’ve read your review, looks pretty tough. But it was almost a year ago, Wrike guys have done a lot and the tool is now very efficient. I signed up only in May and I don’t know how it was in the beginning, but Wrike is full-fledged now. And besides, you can share all your tasks in Wrike. I have a small business and my whole team is working in Wrike. If I want to get an overview of my whole project work I use timeline, which is very handy. This tool doesn’t need “integration” with Huddle or any other tools. So probably you should take a look at it once again?

Well, I do use Gmail, so that matters to me, a lot. I really don’t like the Wrike model, which is — once again — tied to a “project as container” metaphor. Wrike’s timeline view is a nice feature, but it’s not important enough to me in general to justify the tool.

When Greg wrote ‘I use timeline’ I thought he meant another external tool. I hadn’t heard of Timeline, which is a widget for visualizing time-based information. That looks cool, although you have to manually generate the Timeline dataset, right? Too much work, in general. Maybe someone will build an exporter from RTM and/or Huddle, and I could get timelines whenever I needed one.