Brain Breach

Productivity, organization, and collaboration software excite me.  Just recently I decided to upgrade my task tracking system, and that is just so fun!  The following is a review of some desktop task management suites.  After many hours in review of online project/task management, I wasn’t prepared to go that route.  We already use Trac internally for dev teams, and each of them has their own way of tracking tasks.  There is just no killer project management suite as of today, sorry.

Certainly there is a fine selection of personally task management software, or so I thought.  After all, mastering ourselves is the key to mastering our dreams.   Let me explain what tools I tried, and my opinion of them.

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TaskJuggler

This project is attractive because of its robustness.  You can do nearly everything.  It might very well be a pain to do it, but you can.  See, this program manages tasks via its own markup.  I would be able to pull out reports with any level of abstraction and specificity I wish. That’s HUGE. But a new markup to learn? Well, darn.  But I figured it was worth learning because the task management landscape is terribly malnourished.

I make my way to the download page and………surprise…Linux only!  You can get it running under Cygwin, virtualization, or just run it remotely on your Linux server.  Gees.  No thanks.  Looks like a great project, but until its ported, or I move to Linux full time, I shall look elsewhere.

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Nomad Pim

My hopes are once again high.  This PIM is programed on the Eclipse platform.  That means programmers can focus on functionality over platform robustness, and the ensuing app has great potential.  The app has a short learning curve, and the interface for contacts and tasks is the same.  That’s a new take, but it seems to work.  You can search through your contacts quickly, and schedule tasks.  Its usefulness ends there for me.  When I flick on the PC, and open my task lists, I can’t have 100 tasks staring me in the face.  I need abstraction! In other words, give me the top priorities.  That’s the essence of GTD, except they are called next actions.  Note: “GTD” suites suffer all the same problems in my opinion.

A neat start for Nomad, but that’s all.  It really would leave me stressed at the end of the day from not knowing exactly what I need to be doing. I am starting to think my requirements are impossible, but they seem simple to me.

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Abstract Spoon’s ToDoList

Deciding I have to disperse PIM functions into different apps, I look solely for a task management application. So many! I am not going to list everything I have tried or researched.

Do you know that I fell in love with ToDoList? It is open source, a few minutes to learn, only has minor bugs, and you can truly arrange and filter tasks. If you are looking for an app that is great for collaboration, keep looking or hire Bixly to build one that considers such usability topics as abstraction. ToDoList is magically simple and smart. Sure, it can be a bit awkward to use at times, but it just leaves these other programs in the dust when it comes to getting things done without stress. Good work!

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WikidPad

For a neat desktop wiki that tries to employ a task system, try Wikidpad. It’s the best desktop wiki I have seen. Its attempt to tackle “globals” such as tasks, is darn interesting. I think my dream PIM app lay somewhere in WikidPad, just not yet. It’s rather cumbersome right now as a task or contact manager. But the idea that you can create tasks or contacts from anywhere on any wiki page is fantastic. Also, having the navigation tree decided completely by the wiki script is cumbersome. I just haven’t given thought to exactly how it should work, because the alternative is quite robust. I am truly rooting for this project.

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Another program that really disappointing me was TaskCoach . It just…..doesn’t get it. Nothing is intuitive or easy, and it certainly doesn’t help me manage tasks very well. Now I am thankful to all these programmers for giving us free software, so don’t misunderstand my purpose here. I hope to save you time in your search for great software.

Also you might find collaborative mindmaping useful for knowledge management and simple tasking within the enterprise. The earliest program to do it right was Comapping .

Research has shown that we certainly possess risk aversion. Ambiguity aversion should be considered its hidden twin in the proliferate duo that is worth understanding for your business. An awareness of this principle is certainly important enough to add to Paradigms I Follow .

It is simply this: Being psychologically prohibited to expanding decision options because of ambiguity. See, you can have a two or more choices in front of you with greater/lesser/equal worth in the end. You will most likely choose the one which requires the smallest amount of thinking. Please check out the Thirteen.org video that inspired this post. What a neat show! Further:

Frisch and Baron (1988) emphasized that the subjective experience of missing information relevant to a prediction may lead to ambiguity aversion.
Keller

This has so many implications for business and brands. A great example of popular usage and profit from Ambiguity Aversion is the show Deal Or No Deal . Forward to the middle of a show and the decision usually looks like this: Take $300,000 right now, or possibly get $800,000. It’s silly really to choose the $800,000 because the chances are still 1 in 5 or 1 in 10. Since we are averse to ambiguity, it’s easier to calculate “hmmm, I want more money, and this could work”.

This opens up a whole new field of Neuroeconomics to us, which is definitively worth further brain breaching.

Interestingly, ambiguity aversion in pairs of users actually gets worse!

The majority of the dyads exhibited a cautious shift in the face of ambiguity, stating a smaller willingness-to-pay than the two individuals’ average. Our study thus confirms the persistence of ambiguity aversion in a group setting and demonstrates the predominance of cautious shifts for dyads.
Keller

Additional resources:
Four types of Ambiguity Aversion link

What could the benefit be with being able to get over and assessing our failures quickly, and handling our success with emotional intelligence?  Failures wouldn’t be devastating, but just lessons strongly learned.  Success wouldn’t ruin us and our kids, like we see so often, but simply spice our lives a bit.

Consider your success and failure not as a state you are in, but as events that are happening to you. Certainly you have much control over these events, but not complete.

There is an important reason to taking this angle.  Your monetary success can’t bring ultimate fulfillment, and your failures shouldn’t be allowed to bring you ultimately down.  Success and failure should not be considered states that you are in or out of.  Being “in” failure implies a few things that might not be true:  You are a failure; you fail more often than others; you have lost.  Likewise, being in “success” implies some things that shouldn’t be considered true: You job is now finished; sit around; you have arrived.
Success and failure happen to you, they are not you.  React to them as you do with other things that happen to you, and fix them.

Thanks to Lawson for Sparking this idea.

While this is counter-intuitive and seemingly unproductive in some circles, I try desperately to live it. There are even personal benefits to living this selfless mantra. Think of it this way: how does one climb the social latter? By making others feel special, wanted, liked, important. Now I consider that a lucky side-effect, and not the reason to consider others better.

This mind-frame is difficult, and something I must practice whenever I remember. I find it especially difficult with people that are pompous. Imagine looking at the person checking your food out at the store: he/she probably doesn’t have a great education; I am better paid; I am dressed better and maybe better spoken, yet, they are better than me!

Sure they are better than me. How do I get in this mind-set without just lying to myself? Those are all outward appearances, and I really have no idea what they are capable of. John H. Johnson started with nothing, as did many other business greats. I consider the person in question either better than me at what they are currently doing, and therefore fulling their duty, or, consider them an dormant seedpod, who will hopefully find their inspiration and direction and become great.

Now look how I can treat this person. With the same respect I would give an admired or wealthy personality.

I want to build a team of greats, so I will treat them as such.

ps. Sorry to all the great people I have fired. You will be great for someone else ;)

Grady Booch, a brainbreacher in the software architecture world, put such importance on a programmer’s ability to abstract properly. You can listen to the wonderful podcast by following the link at the end of this article. Booch describes how all complex systems are broken down to become simple through abstraction. Think of abstraction as organizing information. As wikipedia puts it:

Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose.

Have you ever soldered a circuit board? You wouldn’t be thinking of capacitors, resistors and ferrets when you are trying to enter a certain time into the microwave, even though they are involved. If you do, it might hinder your ability to judge the right time. McConnell (book) says maintaining different levels of abstraction and allowing modules only to only communicate to other modules in their strata is called Stratification in software engineering. Perfectly termed! Think of the strata of the sky with it’s troposphere, mesosphere .etc.

Now the ability to abstract, and the importance of recognizing when to abstract is critical for programmers. If your engineer can’t create software with clean and well thought out stratification, you will soon find a mess on your hands when your skilled engineers give you a piece of the their mind. This doesn’t mean if a fellow can abstract any way he will can be a good engineer; I have seen folks that can abstract up well, or down well, and not the other way. This creates problems. If your engineer can’t abstract up in the hierarchy of information, conversations can be very awkward, and design lacking. If they can’t abstract down to the complex, they will never get anything done.

One way to test this is good long technical conversations durring the initial interview. If they can make your nontechnical colleague understand how their system works, we might have some abstraction problems.

Links
Gary Booch podcast
Gary’s Blog
Code Complete 2