CRIMPers = prospective time multipliers?

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 10, 2017 at 09:12 AM

Interesting points. A corollary would be the built-in inflexibility (despite developers’ best efforts) of most task management software. I’ve been using Things 3 for a while, which is a lovely piece of software in many ways, and more flexible than many alternatives. But even so - once something is pinned down as a “task”, it’s remarkably difficult to reformat it as anything else (note, maybe-to-do, possibly-important-once-I’ve-had-time-to-think-about-it, etc.), and even more difficult to assign it to that grey zone holding tasks that need to be done soon, but not that soon. You’ve pinpointed one of the most problematic areas of task management - how/when do you decide what’s important, and in particular, how/when do you decide whether one thing is more important than n other things, where n tends to infinity…

I was using TaskPaper before that, having customised its filters fairly heavily to allow for the above-mentioned flexibility. But TaskPaper has its own irritating limitations (from my point of view), even though it’s very good in many ways. Notably a lack of iOS client (that does the same things, pace TaskMator, which is very capable).

I think tagging is probably a key element in such a system, in which case tags like “evaluate” or “important?” or other interim options could offer a useful approach. I also like the Kanban approach taken by some task managers, at least as one (of several) perspectives on time/priority-sensitive data. Tagging is, of course, handled in all kinds of fascinating ways by many different task managers. And again, flexibility is an issue, as well as the fundamental issue of tagging, which is remembering what all your tags are/how they interact/interrelate!

And that’s why we CRIMP, of course.