Macopinion

Where has Marc been? Part 4

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

For the past few columns I've been discussing Getting Things Done, a terrific book on increasing personal productivity by David Allen.

David's key principle is to get planned tasks out of your head and into some kind of organized system and therefore free your subconscious from worrying and remembering things to do. Unlike gimmicky productivity solutions, David doesn't care what system you use: it can be paper or electronics. The specifics aren't important: what's important is that it's convenient so you'll use it, and that you are using some kind of system.

I liked David's ideas and as I thought about my own life structure, I pondered what kind of system would work best for me. Working from home I don't travel as much as most people, but I do get out occasionally and thus I wanted my system to be portable. I also knew my system would have to be electronic, since my handwriting's unreadable and I'm comfortable with software. I thought about a PDA but PDAs are limited and I don't want to have to carry one around all the time. Also, for extensive editing, a computer's far superior to a tiny handheld.

Of course this summer I've gotten hooked on my Apple iPhone: it's similar to a PDA, though lacking many PDA features, but because it's a phone I tend to always have it with me. The problem was, how could I edit lists on the iPhone?

If you're familiar with the iPhone, you probably know that one of its most severe limitations is that it doesn't support any kind of document editing or creation beyond its built-in Notes application and email. There are some websites that offer document editing features, but those require Internet access and tend to be slow.

The iPhone's Notes application has no Mac counterpart (yet) and thus Notes are not synced to your computer, meaning that I'd only be able to view and edits lists on the iPhone. More serious, people report that Notes are not backed up on your computer when you sync, so if you ever had a problem with your iPhone and had to restore the software, you'd lose those Notes. For my critical need, that's not acceptable.

What I wanted was some kind of system that would let me edit my lists on either device and have them automatically sync.

Now other than websites, the only tool that auto-syncs on the iPhone is IMAP mail. IMAP mail is cool: you can check the same account on your computer and on the iPhone and changes on one device (read, moved, or deleted messages, for instance) are immediately reflected in the other.

The problem is that Apple's mail program won't let you edit existing messages. You can create a new To-Do list but once it's saved and closed, it's no longer editable. What good's a list you can't modify?

Then I remembered something interesting. There is one circumstance in which the iPhone's Mail app will let you edit emails: messages in the Drafts folder are still editable.

So I gave this a try. I created a new IMAP email account via my web host. I then enabled access to this email account on my iPhone and in Apple Mail on my desktop Mac.

Then I created some "To Do" lists as Draft messages. When I checked on my iPhone, these messages showed up!

I can edit these lists on my iPhone, though the interface for doing so isn't the most intuitive. For instance, there is no "Save" button on the iPhone. An email message has Cancel and Send buttons instead. So after making changes to a Draft message, I have to click the message's Cancel button. That generates a Save/Don't Save dialog box. I then click Save to preserve the changes.

Since the email account is an IMAP account, changes to any of the messages are stored on the mail server so I'm free to edit the "To Do" lists on either the iPhone or my desktop Mac (or any web browser via my mail account's web access). This is exactly what I wanted. Now I can check and modify my task lists either on the iPhone or at my desktop Mac. The lists themselves are merely plain text, which is ideal.

I've been using this system for several weeks now and so far it works well. However, there are some disadvantages and cautions.

The biggest drawback is that email support requires Internet access, meaning that working with your lists can be problematic if you're out of cell range or on an airplane. You can read the lists without Internet access (apparently the iPhone does cache the messages), but the lists may not be the most current if you haven't consolidated the lists recently. Unfortunately, you cannot make changes to your lists: while the iPhone will offer you the "Save" button nothing is saved. Your changes vanish.

Generally this isn't a problem if you're careful and plan ahead, but you could run into an issue where consolidation between the IMAP server and the iPhone have gotten out of sync. For instance, I once ended up with two copies of the same message in my Drafts folder. I have never been able to duplicate this again, but I think I had the message open for editing on my iMac and then modified it on the iPhone: in effect editing it simultaneously on two different devices.

Another issue is that consolidation can take a few minutes, depending on the extent of the changes and your Internet connection speed. Via a poor Edge connection it can take a while or even fail. But if you plan ahead this isn't a problem.

For instance, say I've just made a bunch of changes and additions to my lists on my iMac. Before I leave the house, I'll browse my "GTD" account on my iPhone, forcing it to download the latest versions of my lists. This is at home via WiFi and takes just a few seconds. Later, when I'm out and about and using Edge, the consolidation is quick because I've already got the latest version. This will also ensure that if I'm out of Internet range I at least have the latest versions cached and can read my lists without Internet access.

It is nice to note that the iPhone shows you the date and time you last refreshed the Drafts folder (the last time it consolidated with the server) and the date/time of the most recent change to each message. It's good to keep an eye on both these, because it could be a disaster to have a list missing changes you think you made.

Now this is potentially just an interim solution. Mac OS X Leopard apparently includes some "To Do" list functionality and many are speculating that once Leopard is out Apple will update the iPhone to support To Do lists (I hear Notes are also supported in Leopard). This would make sense, since Outlook on the PC supports both lists and notes, but Apple's waiting to add that iPhone functionality for when the Mac also supports it.

But in the meantime, this is a pretty cool way to handle your GTD lists. It's fast, syncs automatically between computers and handheld, is available via iPhone or any web browser (assuming your IMAP email account has web access), and is simple plain text.

While I've been vacationing the past week and haven't had a chance to really incorporate GTD into my life fully yet, my early tests show this is an excellent system and really love having my tasks available on my iPhone for easy modification whenever I think of something I need to do.

macopinion@designwrite.com