Advance apologies for the partial rant, but I thought I would share the following CRIMP related story for your amusement and as a possible warning. As you may recall, I have not been happy with my task management software of late, Asana, and have again been looking for a possible program to use at work. I am again heading into a very busy period of work and the trial of Todoist was just not fully cutting it as a replacement for Asana. I decided to look at some other possible alternatives, including some software that I had previously considered, and was doing a bit of research on the web about some previous possible contenders that we had discussed here in prior posts. My research included a look at MyInfo again, including a quick look at what kind of files were available for download. While I clicked the download link to see the file type, which happened to be an EXE file, I cancelled the download when prompted because we are not permitted to download files at work. I also revisited AllMyNotes, of which a no-install portable copy was on my machine from a previous trial. Upon opening the application, I was greeted with a screen telling me that my trial had ended, and offering me several options for continuing. I decided not to take any action other than to close the application.

I then resumed working and had a large number of email messages open while I was trying to track the latest version of a number of documents that had been circulating among a number of parties. I was also engaged in a somewhat intense phone conversation when one of our department's IT staff approached my cubicle and was standing there staring at me. I waved him off as I was at a very critical point in my phone call when he started shaking his head at me. I abruptly, and apologetically, ended the conversation only to be told that the main IT department had been detecting traffic from my machine to servers in Germany and elsewhere in eastern Europe, and that they had detected what appeared to be the Angler exploit. I was told that my machine had to be immediately unplugged from the network, and that my hard drive was to be "flattened" and a new image would be installed.

With only a minute to see what was on my C: drive, my machine was then immediately removed right in the middle of work. Now, I cannot say what I exactly infected my machine because they were not going to analyze it due to work load issues, but I was not a happy camper to say the least, and I am left to wonder if some server that I may have connected with was infected. I am also not going to say that either of these software sites was the culprit because the infection could have happened from almost anywhere, but I will say that I am probably going to stick with web-based applications at work from now on to avoid this kind of fiasco. Needless to say, it was a very frustrating day, and I am no closer to finding some software that I find up to the job. I would say the search continues, but I will be spending a large amount of time trying to rebuild my new computer next week, just as I had to do when they gave me a loaner today. No good deed goes unpunished in trying to be a more productive worker. End of rant.

--Ken

Wow, Ken. That is a cautionary tale. Makes me wonder how many of us without a heads-up IT department end up with that kind of infection without even knowing it.

As to your task management search, I am becoming more impressed with IQTell, at least with the web app. Haven't really used the iPad client much, so not sure how that works.

Steve Z.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Wow, Ken. That is a cautionary tale. Makes me wonder how many of us
without a heads-up IT department end up with that kind of infection
without even knowing it.

As to your task management search, I am becoming more impressed with
IQTell, at least with the web app. Haven't really used the iPad client
much, so not sure how that works.

Steve Z.

Yes, it was a bit cautionary, but it was also frustrating because they did not share any details with me. It might very well have been Angler, or it could have been something like AllMyNotes just "phoning home" to offer me post-trial options. And, while I have not had the time to look up additional information about Angler to see if typical AV/malware/firewall software will detect and prevent it on a PC at home, I could just as easily have conducted that search at home. More frustrating is that I am now very gun shy about using any portable/no-install apps at work, especially if they "phone home" abroad, legitimate or otherwise.

--Ken

Hi Ken,

That sounds like a pretty good IT department you have there... Regarding the infection, maybe that's one more argument for using a web-based task management tool.

If you don't mind me saying so, it seems to me that your search for a solution is a bit too focused on the tools, rather than on the problem to be solved. I'd suggest to approach it the other way round.

Work out your preferred workflow first, and then look for the tools that best fit the steps in the workflow. Chances are that you might need to assemble two or three different tools to accomplish your workflow.

There is a danger that if you choose the tool first and try to fit it around your workflow, then it's someone else's idea of a workflow that is being forced on yours, and inevitably there won't be a perfect overlap.

I realise that finding one perfect tool might sound preferable to having to work across three tools, but it might not be as onerous as it sounds. Sometimes it's just a question of switching between two or three tabs in a browser, and sometimes they may even allow direct links to each other.

If you absolutely need to use a local PIM database of some kind, you could also look for a portable one on a USB drive (if your IT system allows it).

Ken wrote:

More
frustrating is that I am now very gun shy about using any
portable/no-install apps at work, especially if they "phone home"
abroad, legitimate or otherwise.

Oops, I didn't see your message before I posted mine. I didn't realise a portable app would do such a thing (?)

Dr Andus wrote:

Hi Ken,

That sounds like a pretty good IT department you have there... Regarding
the infection, maybe that's one more argument for using a web-based task
management tool.

If you don't mind me saying so, it seems to me that your search for a
solution is a bit too focused on the tools, rather than on the problem
to be solved. I'd suggest to approach it the other way round.

Work out your preferred workflow first, and then look for the tools that
best fit the steps in the workflow. Chances are that you might need to
assemble two or three different tools to accomplish your workflow.

There is a danger that if you choose the tool first and try to fit it
around your workflow, then it's someone else's idea of a workflow that
is being forced on yours, and inevitably there won't be a perfect
overlap.

I realise that finding one perfect tool might sound preferable to having
to work across three tools, but it might not be as onerous as it sounds.
Sometimes it's just a question of switching between two or three tabs in
a browser, and sometimes they may even allow direct links to each other.

If you absolutely need to use a local PIM database of some kind, you
could also look for a portable one on a USB drive (if your IT system
allows it).

I work for a large municipal government and IT is taken pretty seriously, but that also limits any type of flexibility regarding the use of software, and we are mostly a MS shop that is slowly migrating our data over to Office 365. I would concur with your recommendation of outlining a solution first before choosing a tool and have mostly done so, albeit I have not shared much of that process with the forum. In the past few years since leaving Ecco and finding myself with a number of mobile devices in addition to PC at home and work, I have found that I have different needs that now seem to require different solutions, and I am OK with that. The one pressing need I have been trying to solve revolves around managing a number of large projects with a variety of tasks and subtasks that are often tied into documents attached to mail messages. So, I seem to need both a task manager and a note system that allow quick entry and easy access. Asana and Todoist are somewhat close given my software restrictions, but both seem to be missing some key items in one area or another, usually a feature or UI issue. I need to find some quiet time to review my needs and look at my possible choices and see if I can find a workable solution that does not get in my way. I am sure I will be posting more in another thread if I find anything useful. Thank you again for the advice and support. It is much appreciated and always helpful.

--Ken

Ken wrote:

The one pressing need I have been trying to solve
revolves around managing a number of large projects with a variety of
tasks and subtasks that are often tied into documents attached to mail
messages.

Being in a similar situation I've followed this advice
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/4925
posted some time ago by the good Jack Crawford. While I still haven't completed my ideal software setup, I am much closer to achieving a task management approach which is well integrated with my actual work situation.

I would assume that being MS-based, you may be able to follow a similar route as proposed by Jack. For my part, I work on a Google Apps-based environment so I am trying to setup the system on cloud services and related apps--not always ideal as I often need to work offline.

Ken wrote:

The one pressing need I have been trying to solve
revolves around managing a number of large projects with a variety of
tasks and subtasks that are often tied into documents attached to mail
messages. So, I seem to need both a task manager and a note system that
allow quick entry and easy access.

As Alexander says, if you're in the MS Office environment, figuring out an Outlook workflow for it might be one sensible and handy solution (though I don't know what the Linenberger method entails).

But since I'm a CT enthusiast, let me describe how CT could be used to deal with the above type of problem (partly also for my own amusement at the end of a long week, but also if anyone else might be interested in this).

This might not satisfy your "quick entry" requirement, as there is a bit of setting up involved, but after a while a lot of it can be automated by using keyboard shortcuts and templates (and even more so with AutoHotkey scripts).

There would be many different ways to do it, but here is the simplest scenario (using either the desktop or USB portable version), and the benefits:

1. create a new CT database ("project") for managing your work projects.

2. when you get an email with attachments that you need to do something about,

2a) create a new "date and time topic" (a new document with temporal features) in CT and give it a descriptive title (can have up to 256 characters),

2b) select all relevant text in the email,

2c) drag and drop it into the CT topic,

2d) if the attachments are important, save them on the hard drive in a folder, and then drag and drop the files into CT from your file explorer, which would create links to the files (clicking on which would launch them in their respective applications, such as Word, PDF reader etc.).

Benefits so far:

Moving the email and the attachments over into CT will identify them as important (a todo), and they won't disappear as more emails arrive in the Outlook inbox.

Keeping such tasks in "time and date topics" will automatically order them chronologically, and can be also sorted in reverse chronological order, and viewed as a list in the Topic List pane. They can also be navigated through a Calendar interface.

Links to topics created on the same day will be displayed at the bottom of each "date topic", as "tasks".

Having the contents of the email and the links to attachments in the same topic will serve as a mini dashboard for that task. More content and files can be added to it, and it can be linked (using wiki links) to other tasks in the CT database.

It can also be split into smaller, linked topics, as a task grows (which can be visualised as a mind map or outline in the graphical Navigator pane).

It is also possible to open and view multiple topics as floating (repositionable) windows, which helps when you need to refer to other tasks in other topics.

3) In order to identify this task as part of one of your larger projects, add a "Category" label to the topic, denoting the project. This will help filter tasks belonging to the same project, e.g. by ticking that category in the Category pane. Alternatively, a separate CT "project" (database) could be created for each real world project, if we are talking about huge projects. But normally it's better to work from one database initially.

4) Add a red warning type icon to the topic in the Topic List pane to signify it requires attention. Topics can be filtered according to their icons in the Topic List.

Now, let's say that you'd want to reorder these tasks according to their priority/urgency, which currently are listed in chronological (or reverse) order. For this, you can create an "outline" file in the Outline Pane (or multiple outline files, one per each project, i.e. category). Then,

5) Drag and drop selected tasks (i.e. "time and date topics") from the Topic List pane into the Outline pane. This will create new outline items with links to the topics.

The benefits are that you can now quickly reorder the various tasks in a hierarchical tree, and it only takes a click to launch any of the linked topics. The Outline Pane has other useful features such as checkboxes (that cross out the done tasks), icons, hoisting etc.

When a task is done, then you can also change the topic icon from a red warning sign to a green tick. The benefit of using CT and date and time topics is that a permanent record of the task and all its contents and linked files will remain in the database and will be easy to find in the future (through search, or the dates, or other parameters).

This would already work as a basic task management system. The above assumes that you have the Topic List, Category, and Outline panes docked in the CT desktop, so it's easy to see everything and drag and drop stuff from one to the other.

But CT also has a host of other features that make it possible to make the task management system more sophisticated.

This is a long enough post, so I don't want to go into the details, but there are commands that one can add to templates that can be automatically inserted when a new topic is being created, and they enable you to add "attributes" or "properties" to each topic easily, e.g. to display a pulldown list to choose whether the task's importance is "very important, important, medium, low, or none," or a checkbox that, when ticked, adds the "Done" property.

Other options could include adding start and due dates to a topic (task).

The key benefit of using such attributes/properties is that now you can create a summary page (e.g. the Home page of the wiki database or "project", that is easy to click on or call up with a hotkey), which will automatically populate and update a table of todos with the dates ordered according to a selected parameter (such as start or due dates or importance), another table for actions that are done but you're waiting for others (this requires adding a "waiting" property, and the name of the person responsible), and another table with the Completed tasks, just for the record.

Here is a link to a CT forum discussion with some templates and more details on this approach:

http://connectedtext.com/forum/index.php/topic,3139.msg15299.html#msg15299

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Being in a similar situation I've followed this advice
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/4925
posted some time ago by the good Jack Crawford. While I still haven't
completed my ideal software setup, I am much closer to achieving a task
management approach which is well integrated with my actual work
situation.

I would assume that being MS-based, you may be able to follow a similar
route as proposed by Jack. For my part, I work on a Google Apps-based
environment so I am trying to setup the system on cloud services and
related apps--not always ideal as I often need to work offline.

I have heard Linenberger mentioned before, but I will now have to see what he says about Outlook. Thanks for the link to that old thread, and the recommendation.

--Ken

Dr Andus wrote:

As Alexander says, if you're in the MS Office environment, figuring out
an Outlook workflow for it might be one sensible and handy solution
(though I don't know what the Linenberger method entails).

But since I'm a CT enthusiast, let me describe how CT could be used to
deal with the above type of problem (partly also for my own amusement at
the end of a long week, but also if anyone else might be interested in
this).

Thank you very much for such a detailed post. Even though I have not used CT, and probably cannot use it at work, reading your work flow was extremely helpful, as it sounds very similar to what I tried to do with OneNote recently. To date, this has not quite worked as I had planned, mostly I suspect because I am still on a learning curve with OneNote. It looks like such a simple program, but it has a great amount of resources under the hood, but you need to tap into them to really get the program to perform. Right now, I have a lot of Outlook messages on a large number of tabs, and I am not able to pull the data that I need in any reasonable and repeatable form. I am not sure if there are any books or web sites that really unlock the power of OneNote for task management, but that might be an option.

What I think I would find helpful is a system that allows me to quickly and easily review tasks, subtasks and/or notes for projects in a number of views. Sometimes I just want a list of critical tasks in front or me, and other times I want to look at all of a project's tasks, subtasks and and notes. Many programs offer most of these features in one form or another, but most have terrible UI which means I am not always able to see what I want without having to wrestle with the program. Take Asana, for example, it offers many useful views, but the layout is horrible. Tags (and project labels which are esentially tags) are displayed as an afterthought and squished at the end of a line. And if there is no room, they are just truncated ans squished together. And there is no way to quickly see what the tags/projects say. And the marker they use to identify the presence of subtasks and/or comments is also an afterthought. I realize the three-pane set-up is quite popular these days, but they just have too much stuff crammed into too little space. I have asked them to reconsider their layout and to incorporate some negative space to make it easier to see information, but I just keep getting the standard response that they will pass along my comments.

Todoist, on the other hand, gets negative space, but they do not understand how to sum up or display information. Every project gets flattened in the main pane, and this is not helpful when trying to review a large number of projects and subprojects (yes, they offer subprojects as well as sub tasks which is a nice feature). Their comments box is a popup window, so you cannot see anything else while looking at comments. Not useful if you need to move back and forth between tasks and notes.

One of the things that I liked about Ecco was that you could have the same data, or a mix of different data, displayed in a variety of tabs so you could quickly see things as you wanted to see them. It sounds like CT may offer this, and I suspect that OneNote may as well, but I have not been able to master it to the point that I can both trust it and use it regularly with any speed and efficiency. To date I have stuck with Asana despite it shortcomings and it is certainly better than nothing, but short of this forum, I feel as though I am on my own in my quest to get myself up and running as I would like. Our attorneys handle the same type of work flow as I do (since we work on the smae projects), but they are so busy that we can never really discuss workflow. And most of my colleagues do not do project management, so I sometimes feel as though I am chief cook and bottle washer with respect to my work assignments. Nonetheless, I keep plugging away while I try to improve my workflow. Hopefully some day I will hit stride and post about it. Until then, I suspect a bit more CRIMPing will occur.

Thanks,

--Ken

I would avoid jumping to the conclusion that there is equal risk in any non web based software. Software products such as Zoot and ConnectedText have been as safe and trustworthy as any I have used. A few minutes searching the web and forums will tell you if the developer is worth taking a chance on, I have also found that few web based products have the same sophistication as a well developed standalone product.

The lesson here is that indiscriminate CRIMPing may be hazardous to your health, not that one should avoid supporting well designed software.

Ken wrote:

I am not sure if there are any
books or web sites that really unlock the power of OneNote for task
management, but that might be an option.

This might be what MS has acquired Wunderlist for: to give OneNote such a task management capability. We'll have to see how well they manage to integrate them. I don't use either, so not sure how well these two tools work with each other currently.

Ken - maybe you are aware of the excellent OneNote software add-in site, Onetastic.
There are many 'add-ins' that, although not tutorials in themselves, give one ideas about how to use OneNote efficiently

cheers


http://omeratay.com/onetastic/

I would suggest you look at Teamwork.com as a possible solution. Web based with mobile apps as well.

I would be happy to give you an online demo as to how I use it. I am not affiliated with them - they are the tool I settled on after weeks of testing various task management systems.

Thank you for the additional suggestions. I was informed last week that we are moving to Office 365/Office 2013 tomorrow, so I am going to hold off of r a few on anything related to Onenote and Outlook until I can see how the new (to me) versions differ from what I was previously using.

--Ken

Ken wrote

we are moving to Office 365/Office 2013 tomorrow

Just in time for Office 365 2015 ;-)

Paul Korm wrote:

Ken wrote
> we are moving to Office 365/Office 2013 tomorrow

Just in time for Office 365 2015 ;-)

Like many large organizations, we are always a bit late to the upgrade party.

--Ken

Well, they "upgraded" our Office 2010 to 2013 and are starting to integrate our system into Office 365, and all I can say is "Yuck!". I find Office 2013 to be quite harsh on the eyes with it's "look I can be as minimalistic as any Apple OS" approach. I understand that some things needed to be changed for tablet and cloud use, but so many of the changes seem to be cosmetic, and they are certainly not a UI improvement IMHO. I complained that Asana had too little negative space, and I now have to say that Office 2013 has too much negative space. Many of my visual cues (colors and/or icons) have been replaced by stark white backgrounds and a monolithic font. Except of course in Outlook where the message header now has the senders name in a huge font that takes up more space than you can imagine. My advice is to check out Office 2013 on the PC before upgrading (if you have the choice). Just not my cup of tea, and I can only wait until we get firmly entrenched in SharePoint online. Can somebody find me my circa 1984 128k Mac please? I'm feeling a bit of whiplash from the fast pace of "progress".

--Ken

Ken wrote:

I find Office 2013 to be quite harsh on the eyes
Many of my
visual cues (colors and/or icons) have been replaced by stark white
backgrounds and a monolithic font.

I completely agree with your sentiments, it's like trekking on the North Pole. I have both Office 2010 and 2013 on my system (Win7, x64), but I never use 2013 for the reasons you mention, plus the infamous blurry font problem. It's a software product that millions of people around the world have to spend their entire days staring at, yet MS can't be bothered to make that visually bearable.

For these reasons I refuse to use any software for writing that's harsh on the eye or doesn't allow me to easily set up my own permanent colour schemes.

Dr Andus wrote:

I completely agree with your sentiments, it's like trekking on the North
Pole. I have both Office 2010 and 2013 on my system (Win7, x64), but I
never use 2013 for the reasons you mention, plus the infamous blurry
font problem. It's a software product that millions of people around the
world have to spend their entire days staring at, yet MS can't be
bothered to make that visually bearable.

For these reasons I refuse to use any software for writing that's harsh
on the eye or doesn't allow me to easily set up my own permanent colour
schemes.

That is a great description! I can somewhat tolerate this type of UI on a small tablet or phone where the environment is a bit more confined and my use time is limited, but it concerns me that MS took to this route as well for their desktop environment. I would love to know if there is any research backing up this type of UI, or is it just a design refresh for marketing purposes? It is a bit concerning that the first generation of GUI focused so heavily on standardization, and now the trend among so many companies is to keep recreating and changing their UI, as if change is good just for the sake of change. I hit icon overload quite some time ago, and am more inclined to not upgrade to "new" products unless it really makes sense. There are only so many commands and icons that I can remember, especially with programs that are not used on a daily basis, especially when I am working with devices that run three different OS's, two of which rely on my fingers for navigation and selection.

--Ken

Ken wrote:

I'm
feeling a bit of whiplash from the fast pace of "progress".

If we're on the topic of moaning about MS (though I'm not an MS hater, I like my Win7 a lot), another bugbear of mine is the recent update to the Outlook Web App interface (both Office 356 and other varieties).

I find it very cumbersome designwise and painfully slow to use. What used to take 10 min now takes 30 min, and I'm just talking about reading and answering emails.

I have finally managed to switch back in recent days to the "light version" (which they seem to have deliberately degraded in order to discourage people from downgrading, e.g. the search function) in all my browsers and devices, but it wasn't easy, took weeks, as Outlook would just ignore that choice (I tried deleting cookies, signing in and out etc. nothing worked).

Dr Andus wrote:

Ken wrote:
If we're on the topic of moaning about MS (though I'm not an MS hater, I
like my Win7 a lot), another bugbear of mine is the recent update to the
Outlook Web App interface (both Office 356 and other varieties).

I find it very cumbersome designwise and painfully slow to use. What
used to take 10 min now takes 30 min, and I'm just talking about reading
and answering emails.

I have finally managed to switch back in recent days to the "light
version" (which they seem to have deliberately degraded in order to
discourage people from downgrading, e.g. the search function) in all my
browsers and devices, but it wasn't easy, took weeks, as Outlook would
just ignore that choice (I tried deleting cookies, signing in and out
etc. nothing worked).

I do not hate MS as a habit, but sometimes I just do not understand what they consider progress, although the same could also be said for Adobe, Apple and Google given some of the "updates" they have recently released. I currently use Win7 and while I miss a few things from XP, I am comfortable with it, especially as ti can be customized to my liking.

OWA and Outlook.com, however, are a whole different kettle of fish. I never took to OWA, and found Outlook.com to be a slight improvement for my workflow, but neither are really a good substitute for the desktop client version of Outlook (2013 version excepting). I find it just fascinating that as much as many software companies are moving their product lines to cloud-based applications, the lack of a good web-based email client is depressing. I have grown accustomed to Gmail and find it mostly useful, but I just cannot find many good alternatives if you host your own domain and do not want to subscribe to Google Apps. I do wonder if these companies really think that email is a dying form of communication. It is still the lowest common denominator of electronic communication when doing business with others, and I just do not see it going away anytime soon. I am hoping that somebody will fill this void, as I am getting tired of using RoundCube for one of my accounts.

--Ken

Ken wrote:

OWA and Outlook.com, however, are a whole different kettle of fish. I
never took to OWA, and found Outlook.com to be a slight improvement for
my workflow, but neither are really a good substitute for the desktop
client version of Outlook (2013 version excepting).

I didn't mean to suggest that I particularly love OWA. I'm also reasonably happy with Outlook.com (and even like the Live Mail desktop client). It's the 365 version that I find annoying for being so slow.

Compared to that the light version OWA is like going back to a no-nonsense plain text world... Unfortunately 365 has just "upgraded" me again (against my will) back into the full version, even though the "light version" is clearly ticked in the options... Argh...

Dr Andus wrote:

Unfortunately 365 has just "upgraded" me
again (against my will) back into the full version, even though the
"light version" is clearly ticked in the options... Argh...

The flogging will continue until the morale improves! ;)

--Ken

Dr Andus wrote:

Regarding the infection, maybe that's one more argument for using a
web-based task management tool.

I have to disagree with this if the concern is security. A local binary in isolation only has to be vetted once. A very security conscious person could even use a tool like GPG to sign the binary at home, or have the IT/security department do it for them, with the public key on their USB stick. If the work computer is compromised they wouldn't get the key to forge a signature, and trojans that modify any exe file they can find would invalidate that signature.

A web service can't be audited; they could get hacked at any time, and often do[1][2]. Most connections to even secure websites are only vetted by association to organizations that have been caught forging signatures[3]. Even if you trust the (probably small) web service, any number of intermediary attacks[4] can compromise you anyway.

(If you meant possibly losing data if your machine gets hauled off by IT, in which case I would agree.)

Dr Andus wrote:

Oops, I didn't see your message before I posted mine. I didn't
realise a portable app would do such a thing (?)

As far as I'm aware, the only real rules for being a "portable" application is that you don't leave a footprint on the host. MIRC for example stores all preferences in an ini file when used from a portable install, yet still performs phone-home activation of your license key for each host you run the program from.

Ken wrote:

More frustrating is that I am now very gun shy about using any
portable/no-install apps at work, especially if they "phone home"
abroad, legitimate or otherwise.

Hmm. This makes a good case for moving the update toggle on to the first-run wizard for a portable application. Maybe even some kind of "roaming" mode where app usage data or update checking only gets sent when using the computer you initially installed the program on (e.x. set your home machine as home, and if detects a different machine ID then it won't phone anywhere.)

Footnotes

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/04/tech/web/evernote-hacked/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outage

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/01/google-cnnic/ Additionally, VeriSign will forge SSL certs for law enforcement.

[4] http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/lists/posts/post.aspx?ID=249