Nice review of MLO (v.4)

Posted by nathanb
Sep 26, 2018 at 10:44 PM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
Pixelpunker wrote:
>>I do, on average, about 3 tasks a day.
> >Lucky you!
> >My guess is that most people who turn to a tool like MLO have a much
>large number of tasks to manage, else a paper solution would probably
>suffice.

We all do, it’s just a matter of how granular we want to be with what we define as a task. Unfortunately, there’s a fuzzy boundary about what meets that threshold. I doubt anyone has ‘put on pants’ as a daily task, but ‘file taxes’ could be one task or a few dozen, depending on your personal definition of ‘task’.

I don’t use MLO right now but it’s one of my favorites to go back to. It’s one of the best infinite nesters out there. Though it has one feature that makes it truly unique outside of big project management software, it handles dependent tasks. This makes it fantastic for largish personal projects and helps with prioritization when you just feel overwhelmed and need to explicitly lay out all your sub-tasks and RELATED tasks as a brainstorming/planning exercise.

For example, I used it last year for building a little backyard workshop. I had several main project categories with subtasks with a mix of dependencies (concrete, framing, roof, mechanical, electrical, machine refurbishing (these were old rusty auction finds), etc. Like ‘get permit’ would be a sub-project (which MLO lets you explicitly define for any task in any place in the hierarchy). It’d have it’s expected 5 sub-tasks or so (some as @errand/@business-hours context). There would be several tasks within other parts of adjacent sub-project trees that would depend on that permit project. That’s really dang helpful when you find yourself thinking in circles about what the highest priorities need to be next. I even put in very rough time estimates for every subtask and it actually came out pretty close in terms of how many hours the entire project took to do over the span of a few months. I’m not sure there’s another task manager out there that allows you to go WAY into the project management weeds for some chosen battles while still allowing you to be messy and loose with your ‘regular’ tasks. Like I could have used MS Project or whatever for something this complex but not while also using it as my daily random task manager.

The one thing I don’t like about MLO is it’s inability to do attachments, which honestly is one thing that enables it to remain so lightweight-yet-complex. Referencing documents and folders is no big deal but for daily task stuff it’s really nice to be able to snap pics on the go and keep minor reference stuff right there with the task.

For such a nerdy platform, the mobile app is surprisingly well-designed and I still miss how it does recurring tasks compared to Todoist.