Monday, Oct 13
As usual, I begin my day with a look at the calendar to orient myself to what the day holds. It’s a light day on appointments but I have a big commitment looming at the end of the day that requires a lot of prep. I launch my Nozbe account and the tasks I identified on Sunday are right there in the calendar under the section “Planned for specific days.” One of the things I like about Nozbe is that I can list things that are “Planned for this week” separately, parked for when I have time to work on them without pinning me down for a particular day.
I power through my biggest big rock first and hit the “check” button. Nozbe has this neat little feature of dimming the completed task and leaving it in the list until the next day. This allows me to see what I’ve done as well as what’s left. I work until my focus slips and take a break to hike with the dogs.
The rest of the day goes equally well: the important stuff got done on time, I coached an awesome group, and cheering Miami’s wildcat offense and yelling “War Eagle!” every time a former Auburn player got the ball. I end the day feeling optimistic and looking forward to Tuesday.
Tues, Oct 13
I wake up to many more appointments and fewer “have-to” tasks today. Lots more email to process, too. This gives me a chance to try out how Nozbe handles receiving tasks that I forward to it from my email account.
I had already added my Nozbe email address to my contacts and had seen Michael demo the syntax. However, I quickly learn that I don’t know what I’m doing when my message ends up as a task and the task I’d entered in the body of the email, using an asterisk followed by a space and text, is nowhere to be seen. Still, the info I wanted to keep is there so I let that ride. I consult Nozbe’s somewhat convoluted help and try again, using the tags that are meant to supply due date and context automatically. This doesn’t work. I can’t figure out why.
I find that entering multiple tasks is easy by using the “add more actions at once.” Once tasks are in the system, dragging and dropping for due date, context, and assigning the action to a project all rock. I’m used to RTM’s handy key strokes to add other info like repeat and time estimates. No key strokes here: I have to open a clunky input and mouse around. About now is when I also discover that I can’t enter custom repeating dates, like “every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” I start experimenting with the repeat function and suddenly the task I was working on disappears. I don’t know where it went. I am. Not happy. Finally, I realize that when I set the repeat to “every Weekday” the task was immediately assigned to today’s date (it had been in the “sometime this week category”). I feel relieved and annoyed at the same time.
I’m also jumping back and forth between tasks that are still in RTM and Nozbe. My friend Augusto calls to find out how I’m doing and tells me, “The man who has two watches never knows what time it is. The women who has two systems, doesn’t know what to do.” We both laugh and I get his point. I’ve gotta pick one… and soon.
[As an aside, I paid for my own Nozbe account and am not receiving any sort of consideration from them. I'm not an affiliate, either. Just so you know.]
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