Task Management: I’m (not) Switching to Nozbe, Part 3

Wed, Oct 14

Another heavy appointment day and my system is collapsing. As I struggle to get a handle on what must be done and what I’d like to do, I start considering a return to Remember the Milk. My learning curve for Nozbe is just steep enough that I’m running out of bandwidth. If I had time for a weekly review–a really thorough, no NFL distractions, weekly review–maybe I could make it work. But there is no room in my schedule. While I’m exercising (yes, that’s a non-negotiable), it hits me: my ability to be reliable and dependable is threatened. That does it.

Between appointments, I open a draft email and scrape all the items out of Nozbe that I’d put in and import the entire lot into RTM. This is when I really appreciate all the features of Remember the Milk that I’m accustomed to: when I write “tomorrow,” with no fancy characters or anything, it immediately parses the proper due date. I burn through my RTM inbox using keystrokes: adding tags for contexts and due dates, putting in URLs, and all the other little details that make my work run smoothly. In less than an hour, I’m ready for Thursday and a lot less anxious to boot.

Thurs, Oct 15

Today is blocked off to tackle revisions on my book which are due next week. I get down to work right away and enjoy some phenomenal productivity. In six hours, I rip through two chapters of revisions and complete a draft on a completely new chapter which I’d been working on the week before. I get a respectable number of small tasks done during breaks. The only bad moment of my day occurs during my hike with the dogs when a yellow-jacket nails me on the back of the neck.

Fri, Oct 16

We’re between weather systems and enjoying a glorious orange-yellow-gold sunrise. As I settle down to work, I take a few moments to think about what I learned from my failed attempted to switch tools.

Here’s what I’m sure of:

• It’s really hard to move a big, mature system. I have 334 tasks in RTM right now. Those tasks include due dates, contexts, time estimates, notes, URLs. Without easy export and import from one tool to another, I shudder to think how many hours it would require to schlep it all over. It was naive to think that I could do it piecemeal and realize I hadn’t given this aspect of the project due consideration in the first place.
• I enjoyed my Sunday fun way too much and gave my weekly review way less attention than it needed to move from one tool to another. I can get away with those shenanegans when I’m driving my trusty, well-oiled machine. That was a huge mistake when attempting to move to a new system that required changes in the processes I use during my day to day plus learning new syntax, language, and so on.
• Nozbe has some nice features. Drag and drop for due dates, contexts, projects is lovely. The “sometime next week” list is cool. Having the remainder of the week’s days listed below was handy, too. I liked having my projects lists right there in a nice interface. The task gray-out after completion gave me a nice sense of accomplishment and made it easy to know what I’d done.

On the downside,

• Adding and accessing details of tasks can be clunky. The interface requires much mousing around to add comments to tasks, for example.
• No matter where you put the URL or email address you’d like to have, it’s just text, not a hyperlink.
• By not having custom repeat dates (like every 2nd Tues or every other day), I’d be left with entering tasks over and over. That bordered on a deal breaker all by itself.
• After using RTM’s gloriously crisp, super up-to-date help, Nozbe’s help files just about drove me nuts. By using a blog as the online documentation, the user is forced to follow the path of development over time to get to find the most current info.
• The Nozbe iPhone app doesn’t include all the features that the browser based has and had a tendency to quit unexpectedly after a task was entered. As an alternate to the app, I found the mobi page unusable.

In the end, I’m really glad I gave Nozbe a try. I learned a lot about how to evaluate a tool, got a good look at the state of my system, and what works best for me. It does feel a little funny to have undertaken this adventure in a public way. In all honesty, I expected to happily report how great Nozbe was and make the switch successfully. In that sense, this experiment was a failure. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I’m giving Nozbe a bad review, either. Nozbe has good features and some advantages over RTM; it’s just that those couldn’t make up for the problems I experienced, some of which were my own doing. For other users, Nozbe may be just what they’re looking for and will work just fine.

In any event, thanks for coming along for the ride. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.