A few weeks ago I read a series of articles titled “Inbox Zero – Action Based Email” on the 43Folders web site. I had been looking for a better way to keep up with all the things that I needed to do and had happened upon the Todo application for iPhone as discussed in a previous post. That led me to the online task server named ToodleDo which I started using heavily after doing a “brain dump” of all the things running around in my head that I needed to do.
For the lasst two weeks I’ve been able to successfully maintain 0 messages in the Inbox folders of my 3 main email accounts. I’m definitely not “there” yet with the whole Getting Things Done method of managing what you need to do, but I do feel like this is an important baby step.
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I suppose I’m terribly late in having this revelation but it dawned on me last week that the future of a lot of a significant part of what we do in our our day to lives is going to depend on “the cloud”. What do I mean by that you ask? Let me ‘splain something to you Lucy…
Last week while browsing through the iTunes App Store, I decided to purchase a copy of ToDo. ToDo is a nifty GTD-based application for keeping the items in your to do list moving and making sure that you don’t lose track of anything. What impressed me most (other than the fact it is a very nicely built application) was its ability to synch with 2 totally unrelated online task management services (ToodleDo and Remember the Milk) which means that you no longer have to keep a duplicate to do list on multiple devices AND you can now take that one, central, authoritative to do list with you wherever you go.
That’s when it hit me. When I’m looking for providers of services that I am in need of, I no longer look at any services that are just online, or just installed on my laptop. If the service I’m looking at doesn’t have touch points for my computer, my iPhone and web-based access, I’m just not interested. It appears to me as though this is the direction that things are moving. People don’t single access points to their data any more and the trend is growing.
As a developer that lives in this space, this revelation was pretty significant for me. It made me realize that any application that I build from now on is going to require those multiple touch points if it is to be a complete success.
Bring on the clouds I say…I like this trend even if it took me longer than the average bear to figure it out.
At the moment I’m trying out some new WordPress themes for my blog.
…you forget how to get to the admin interface of your blog software to create a new post.
I’ve been really horrible the last (nearly) 2 months in not blogging at all. So much has happened in that time frame that I can’t explain it all. cf.Objective() 2008 combined with the pre-conference Mach-II training is a not so distant memory. I’m back to traveling each week for the foreseeable future and my wife and I have been busy like crazy the last few weeks trying to get our house ready to put on the market.
I do have two or three interesting posts lined up for the next few days however. One of the things I’ve been focusing on after talking to folks at cf.Objective() back at the first of May is reworking my local development environment to make it more flexible and “standard” (I know, everyone has their own “standard”). I’m going to start a series of posts that detail what I’ve done with my environment and why I’ve set it up that way. I’ll give a little bit of technical detail in how to go about setting your system up this way (assuming you’re on a Mac–PC users will have to adapt a little bit to fit their environment).
I’m not quite finished with my setup just yet. We geeks are always trying to change and improve things right? So stay tuned, I’ll post the first in the series in a couple of days and we’ll roll on from there.
Those of you in the web development industry will immediately know what I’m talking about (and maybe some of the more observant web users too).
