Task Management Interfaces: Outlines, "Contexts", Tags, and Areas

Posted by Randall Shinn
Jan 23, 2009 at 03:54 PM

Playing around with OmniFocus, Things, and The Hit List has made me consider in general several aspects of designing the interface for a task manager.

Single tasks don?t seem to be as difficult to sort out as projects. For projects, outlines seem natural. On page 220 of GTD David Allen suggests that most project planning can be handled by a simple hierarchical outline. His example is shown in Microsoft Word, and almost any outliner software could do this. OmniFocus and THL have the ability to outline project tasks built in. This is helpful for planning, and it is one of the most requested features for Things on their forum.

Contexts, tags and/or areas? Allen?s concept of ?contexts? is interesting, but in essence a context such as @home is just a type of tag. OmniFocus has stuck with ?contexts,? but Things has moved to tags and smart folders for ?areas? (of responsibility, or location, or type of work—whatever you want). The smart folders collect whatever items include the searched for tags (or you can drag items there). THL allows you to type in either tags or concepts, and the smart folders search for them in the same way.

There is a crucial difference in the way that these interfaces are set up. Both Things and THL assume that you may want to assign multiple tags to an item, and make it easy both to do this and to see all the tags that have been assigned right in the area you are working. Thus you might assign a task to ?work? ?finance?, and another to ?home? ?finance?, and another to ?vacation? ?finance? ?errand? ?30m? to remind yourself to pick up Euros before your trip to Italy (might as well imagine something fun).

Things perhaps has the multiple tag display implemented the best, but if I were planning an Italian vacation, I would love to do that in an hierarchical outline (which I can’t yet do in Things). OmniFocus would let me do the outline, but unless I?m missing something, it wouldn?t be really easy to assign multiple tags. The Hit List would allow me to outline the vacation tasks, assign multiple tags, and estimate times on a single line. But THL is still in beta, lacks recurring tasks, lacks synching, and has no iPod/iPhone application.

So for the moment I?m playing around with all three, and waiting to see what happens over the next year with each program. I have read Allen?s books, but after working with these programs I feel that the ?context? label is a confusing term when used for interface design. It is not as ?neutral? as ?tag.? If I need to make a call, I don?t hesitate to put in the tag ?call?, but is the ?context? the phone that I will use to make the call or the call itself? Is my collaborator?s name the context, or is the project we?re working on the context, or perhaps the place we?re meeting? Putting in multiple tags solves all these questions, so for me that needs to be easy and visible on the same page I am working in.

Randall