Re: iPhone and Shadow

--- In [email protected], Peggy Hanton <peggyjo@...> wrote:

>... 
> My husband¹s iTouch just arrived ...
>
> I¹m not sure I¹d be crazy about my device showing me to-dos
> based on my location. ...

AFAIK, this is but one aspect of the GtD philosophy that makes it
"work". Being able to tag tasks by where they are to be done has for
example helped me sort all of my priority 2 tasks (for a given day)
into sequences of "@work" followed by "@errands" followed by "@home".
In this way, my ToDo list follows me exactly by where I am, first at
work, then on my way home, and then at home.

> If my device had that built in, I¹d hope to turn it off and be
> able to choose which context I wanted to look at.  I like an
> application that gives me options, but still acknowledges that
> I have a brain!

At some point, providing preferences to turn on/off various options
makes an application more unwieldy from a programming standpoint.

In any event, why not substitute the available "location" tagging with
you desired "context" tagging instead (though I am not sure what you
mean by context)? For example

Locations
->@work
->@home
->@errands
->@phone

Locations mapped instead to Context?
->business
->personal
->family
->finances

>...
> I think I¹m more of a stylus person than a fat fingers person.

Personally, I could get used to the "fat-finger" approach for task
management when the GUI is properly designed. I suspect transporting
Shadow -> iPhone will have to face this (an issue of which Jeff seems
to be well aware).

> Even so, my Palm T3 has an extended screen, and my to-dos are
> often 3 screens long

Out of curiosity, does Shadow on the T3 have the serious problem of
jumping back and forth from short screen to extended screen? It is
frustrating as h*** to be editing long lists in Shadow on the T5 and
to have continually to account for a GUI that will a) redraw as a
short screen while loosing its bottom menu bar in the process and b)
not allow items at the bottom of a screen to drag properly to the top
of a screen.

> Who knows what it would be on an iWhatever!

Supposedly, in the true GtD approach, when working on tasks, one
should only be concerned in a "one-at-a-time" approach about the NEXT
ACTION, not the long list of actions that follows it.

IOW, once you set your list of tasks (for the day), the idea is not to
continually revisit them to reorder them, rather to go through them
one at a time as they appear.

Understandably, organizing a long list of tasks into NEXT ACTIONS on
an iPhone must involve a bit more scrolling than on a PalmOS device.

--
JJW