What did you do today? Did you really accomplish anything? Or was it “stuff” that did not bring you forward?

I all these activities “time eaters”, and thanks to the Internet it is very easy to spend a lot of time doing basically nothing… filling your brain with “stuff”, with useless Facebook entries and pictures on Pinterest. Would’t it be better to focus on the real world instead? On the one with real people, real friends, real problems? (Are they really problems?) And the real fun? Just an idea…

Anyhow, I’ll stop writing here now, I have to check out what’s new on Facebook…

Image (c) Joy Of Tech

It’s really hard to believe, but The Hit List has been released to the public after 2 years (!!!) of “development”. When I first wrote about it I really thought this is going to be a great application… last years update was depressing already, but there was still hope in the Google Group.

Now that Poition Factory finally announced The Hit List 1.0 (not really announced, the only developer just put it online) I really wonder

• if it will take another 2 years until an iPhone or even iPad application are released?
• what the upgrade policy will be? How fast will bugs be fixed?

Do people still believe in such a company, with such a bad track record? How could anyone pay for the sync service? I personally would rather invest into Appigio Todo, which has released many many updates and a Web interface – and they had some time to fix bugs and improve the application.

…just my 2 cents regarding this 2 year saga….

Update:

Not even to mention all the features that the competition has and that should be the standard in todays productivity apps:

• Importing and exporting tasks. At least from basic text files. My data belongs to me, not to your proprietary database format.
• Adding tasks via E-Mail. Most times this is the application in front of me, so why not mail a task to myself?
• Documented API’s and interfaces, so others can modify the data easily – think about Evernote or Dropbox, how well they integrate with tons of apps.

So yes, the user interface of THL is still charming, simple and because of the keyboard shortcuts very very powerful…. but again, the competition is way ahead….. about 2 years to be exact.

Recently a new startup in Germany released a task manager, called wunderlist. As I already did some reviews about GTD applications for the iPhone and because wunderlist is free I checked it out on day one. Not so impressive in my opinion. Good application, but requires some work to be really useful.

Today the iPad application called wunderlist HD has been released, again with great buzz around it. Downloaded it. Again not so impressive. Decided to write about it.

Don’t get me wrong, wunderlist and wunderlist HD look beautiful. They are developed using the Appcelerator platform which makes development for multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android….) relatively easy. Wunderlist offers cloud syncing. And it is actually a real, released product.

But in the end I think there are other alternatives (ToDo, 2Do, Toodledo to name a few) that are around way longer, offer more features and work faster (wunderlist sometimes reacts slowly). Also faster in terms of task entry and efficiency for me, the user. Furthermore others have proven over years to work and sync reliable and they improved their features over time…

So I really wonder what’s so wunderbar about wunderlist? To me it solves an already solved problem with more buzz, that’s it…

Mainly because of  M&Ms… Managers & Meetings are the real problem to productivity. Check out the whole TED video if you are interested why work does not happen at work:

So where do you work?

(via ted.com)

Papa, wir müssen noch ins Kaffeehaus gehen. Dann ist das mit dem Lutscher endlich abgehakelt.

Früh übt sich…

Long long time ago I wrote about The Hit List – that it is going to be the best GTD software on earth.

A little after that I wrote about how to not write software and especially about how to not communicate with users.

Finally it is time to say that The Hit List is not going to be a hit…. let me quote some statistics from CAS:

Last tweet: December, 2009
Last forum post: December, 2009
Last blog post: September, 2009
Last significant (non-fix) upgrade to THL: May, 2009

To me this looks like THL is finally dead…. too bad, would have had a great future!

RIP, The Hit List!

What have you done with your connection skills that has been worthy of criticism, that moved the dial and that changed the world?

Go, do that.

If just everyone @work would follow these 5 steps….:

1. Go, make something happen.
2. Do work you’re proud of.
3. Treat people with respect.
4. Make big promises and keep them.
5. Ship it out the door.
When in doubt, see #1.

Source

(from JoyOfTech)

A while ago I wrote about The Hit List – a clean, powerful GTD application for the Mac. Over a year passed since that posting so I’d love to give an updated about The Hit List and the development of that particular application.

THL is still beta

The Hit List lets you plan, forget, then act when the time is right. (source)

THL for the iPhone is vaporware

The competition….

My recommendation