January 29, 2010Two Weeks with AccomplishBoard
So it's been exactly two weeks since I first put AccomplishBoard on a server and started using it in earnest, and I thought I'd give you some candid thoughts on the experience so far. Unfortunately, my thoughts will probably sound more canned than candid, since I'm having such good results with it, but really, it makes a lot of sense when you think about it: I made AccomplishBoard to solve my own problem. Consider this "problem solved."
First, let's talk about the activity on the site since the launch. At the time of writing, there are only two limited beta spots left, so I would consider the launch as having met expectations. Of the current pool of users in the limited beta, only five or so are active/regular users; although I'd be surprised if I weren't the most active out of these. I designed AccomplishBoard with the Gmail "poweruser" in mind; that is, the person who has Gmail open on a tab the entire time they're at a familiar computer (e.g. home, work). AccomplishBoard is meant to be used in the same way. On my setup at home, where I run Ubuntu with six virtual desktops, I just keep a browser window with my board maximized, and so one of the virtual desktops is dedicated to a full-screen board. Basically whenever I find myself thinking about what I should do next, I just move over to that screen and check on my tasks. Similarly, if I think of something that I should do at some point, I'll just move on over and add that to the backlog, which gets re-sorted accordingly.
Next, I want to highlight a couple of features that I've added. Mostly, I've spent a lot of time making the user interface friendlier. Hovering over tasks will now reveal when they're due, but also any notes you may have added. Notes will automatically link to any websites or email addresses you enter. For example, since I use AccomplishBoard to track development tasks for AccomplishBoard itself, I keep a backlog of features that I would like to implement. As a part of this process, I also have to research how I can solve the problem (in case someone out there has already solved it). I'll usually put all the relevant websites in the notes, so that I have quick access to them later on.
Another bit of retooling I've done is for the archived tasks explorer. This page now shows your tasks grouped by the month in which you accomplished them. Incidentally, this is also how I'm writing this post: I'm just looking back in the archives to see what tasks I've accomplished for the site in January! Obviously, since data currently only goes back a month, it's not horribly exciting. But once you have enough history to go back further than the four months which are shown by default, you'll of course be able to go back as far as you need to, easily navigating across all the months in which you've accomplished something.
I've also done some work to make AccomplishBoard compatible with the major modern browsers. It works great in Firefox (with the exception of the appearance of subtask entry, which you have noticed is kind of "misplaced"), Chrome, Opera, and Safari, with minimal display bugs. Surprisingly, I was also able to get IE8 to work once I had changed some variable names in the javascript. Can you believe that? What a bad way to have to fix something. It turns out that "event" is a reserved keyword in the IE flavor of javascript, and so changing that fixed... everything, really. IE7 is still broken, but you won't be able to get on the site with it (try it for a nice surprise).
Lastly, I've laid the groundwork for task statistics and timeline generation. This is a feature that I personally regret having missed in the original release. It occurred to me that I not only care when a task was accomplished, but also how much time it spent on the backburner (not started), how much time I spent wrestling with it (in progress), when I checked off the subtasks (thus justifying long stretches of time spent in progress), and how much time I spent waiting on someone else (waiting for resolution). This information is also useful if you need to reconstruct a series of events (say for tax documentation purposes); you won't have to write some fuzzy answer about when you did something--you can just look back on the task timeline and know immediately.
Despite all these obviously desirable features (desirable to me at least), I hadn't been maintaining enough data to present such a timeline, but I've recently deployed some plumbing (invisible to users) that tracks these changes intelligently. In the near future, you can expect to review your tasks along a timeline; in the less near future, I'll provide some analysis tools to show you some statistics about how you're approaching your tasks. I'm personally pretty interested in how early I finish tasks before their given due date, or how many important tasks I'm doing compared to unimportant ones.
I also imagine that once you start accumulating a large history of tasks, that you'll need to search through them somehow. To this end, I plan on implementing task and subtask searching to help you find old tasks. I'm still thinking about how to approach this problem (there are several solutions available to me, each with their pros and cons), so it probably won't happen for another month or so. But then again, if you're generating that many tasks to begin with in the period of a month, and absolutely need task searching, let me know. I love nothing more than to help another productive person.
Ok, so that's what's new in AccomplishBoard--now let me tell you what it's done for me. Some have asked me what it is about AccomplishBoard that is so successful for my newfound increase in productivity; I only wish I could get you to see how I use it. You see, in the month or so that I invested in making this tool, I hadn't done much of anything else. In fact, I was secretly waiting for the day when I could finally put all those tasks up on a blank AccomplishBoard and really get going. When that day finally came two weeks ago, I found myself with seven categories loaded to the brim with important tasks. There weren't many unimportant ones because I had already shunned them to the point where I forgot about them. Many of these tasks were also red (trivia: I set my board to give me 5 days notice) because they were badly overdue.
Then something very interesting happened.
Previous to having this kind of immediate visual feedback, I was never really too motivated to do anything on my to-do list: everything was just a dusty item on a list with a dinky checkbox. But now, things had colors and I could move them to completion. As ridiculous as that sounds, if you're the kind of person who once enjoyed keeping your Tomagotchi (or however that's spelled) alive and well-fed, you'll probably understand the feeling. Suddenly, I felt very inclined to make things go green. Things that I had been delaying on for months (literally!) got done over the course of a week. My personal rule is to keep at least one thing in the "In Progress" box for every category at all times. This way, I'm always developing and progressing in the seven categories that I laid out for myself.
My workflow is pretty much just this:
- Look at the Waiting for Resolution column. If there's anything that's come out of that state, move it to completion.
- Look at the In Progress column. From top to bottom (I sorted my categories by priority), ask if you can do anything more to move those tasks forward.
- If there is and it's a subtask, go do it.
- Otherwise, figure out what a sensible subtask is; add the subtask, and go do it.
- If I've finished a task from the In Progress state, I ask myself whether it's done or if I need to wait on some kind of confirmation. I move it appropriately.
- If the box is now empty because there are no more tasks In Progress, select the first one in the Not Started box and move it over.
- Look down the Not Started column and identify tasks that should be started.
- Repeat.
Just doing the above, before too long (namely two weeks), I find myself with about equal parts of blue as red and yellow in my "Not Started" boxes. Granted, there will always be new things to do, so I'll never technically run out of stuff to do, but for once I don't dread adding tasks to my backlog, because I know that if I trust the system, it'll work out great. It's been incredibly rewarding for me in so many ways and I really like that I was able to spell out which categories are important to me in life. That way, the categories that were previously neglected (take "Friends" as an unfortunate example), are now getting the attention they deserve.
With that said, I'm going to change the AccomplishBoard slogan. Sure it's "a new kind of to-do"--and, yes, in my opinion it's "to-do done right"--but what it really should be is this: AccomplishBoard? Accomplish More.
"That one'll catch you on the way home."
