time management posts

Time Management games challenge you to run some kind of business operation while balancing your resources against the demands of customers. In the following write-up, I tested five popular time management App Store games to see how well they delivered the fun and strategy of challenging yourself against time. As you'll see, not every game delivered the same level of fun and overall gameplay. Here's how they stacked up.

At $2.99, Sally's Spa is our absolute favorite of the time management games we tested for this write-up. In this game, you run a virtual spa, providing steam baths, massages, manicures, pedicures, and more. You aim to keep your customers happy and radiant (literally) by dragging them from one station to the next, applying spa services, and balancing their needs against your limited resources of time and equipment.

As your salon earns money, you re-invest into improvements such as hiring employees to automate some of the stations and upgraded equipment to provide higher levels of satisfaction. The challenges grow more sophisticated over time (although I could have done without the whole eyebrow tweezing service that appears late in the game), as you attempt to perfect your spa-fu.

I've alluded to my search for personal organization a couple of times during 2009. While it's not something that I'm obsessing about, I now capture my major goals in Things, and that at least tells me what I'm supposed to be doing in terms of short and long-term goals. However, I found that sometimes I couldn't figure out how to organize a single day in my calendar, simply because I would jump around to all sorts of projects and never get even one of them accomplished.

Back in August, fellow TUAW blogger Brett Terpstra started writing a post about The Pomodoro Technique™. Being a foodie and part Italian, I knew that pomodoro is the Italian word for tomato, so I asked Brett if he was talking about cooking. What he turned me on to was a wonderful concentration and organization technique.

In 1992, a student by the name of Francesco Cirillo was looking for a way of improving his study habits. He took a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (hence the name Pomodoro) and found that if he broke tasks into 25-minute sessions, now known as Pomodoros, followed by a 5-minute break, and then took a longer 15-minute break after four Pomodoros, he was able to concentrate more fully on the tasks at hand and accomplish more work.

The technique is deceptively simple, easy to implement, and surprisingly effective. You can download Cirillo's book for free and learn more about the technique at the official website, just to see if the method works for you. If it does, then you might want to look at the assortment of Mac and iPhone applications designed to help you time your Pomodoros and get more work done. That's the focus of the rest of this post.

[Update] Ken Case comments below, addressing some of the concerns listed here. It looks like a future version of OmniFocus on the Mac will be able to directly update the OmniFocus reminders on the server, removing at least one of my complaints.

Ken Case from The Omni Group has been twittering for awhile about the impending inclusion of alarm reminders for OmniFocus. The task management app's iPhone users have been pestering The Omni Group to implement reminders as push notifications, but OmniFocus refuses to do so. They say that reminders that rely on connectivity are not good enough, and they have instead chosen to implement reminders by exporting due dates and times into iCal. Once the time comes for a reminder, it pops up like a normal iCal appointment reminder.

Well, OmniFocus 1.5.2 for iPhone was released, and now we get to see how this alternative reminder system works. If I had to choose a word to describe this implementation, that word would be "awful." Here's why:

• The Omni Group has taken great pains to point out that you do not need to be using the desktop version of OmniFocus to get use out of the iPhone version. But for users that only have the iPhone version and are not synchronizing it to either MobileMe (which has a yearly fee) or a WebDAV server (complicated for non-techies), they can't use this implementation of reminders. That's right; the way it works is that OmniFocus on the iPhone exports your reminders to your synchronization server, then points iCal on the iPhone to the server to import your reminders. That means that if you enter new due dates in OmniFocus for iPhone but don't happen to have connectivity, you won't get reminders. Wait, I thought it was implemented this way in the first place to guard against a lack of connectivity?

• Your OmniFocus reminders unnecessarily pollute your iPhone calendar with reminders. This is a visual problem when you need to glance at your calendars and see what actual appointments are coming up. On the iPhone you can either look at one specific calendar, or all calendars, so if like me you need to regularly stay on top of more than one calendar, you're forced to look at your OmniFocus reminders as well. Oh, and even when you complete them in OmniFocus and resync, they don't go away in your calendar. [Update] Stephen points out in the comments that this works as expected, and upon further testing I have to agree. Maybe I was being a bit too impatient.
  

• Since your OmniFocus reminders are actually just fake appointments, there is no way to audibly differentiate them from appointment reminders. They sound and look exactly the same. Remember the Milk, for example, uses push notifications on its iPhone app, and you can set the notification sound to a number of different options. That way you know that you're being reminded of a task rather than an appointment.

• Reminders are set based on Due time, rather than Available time, and in terms of flexibility you can set the reminder to be 5 to 60 minutes before the task is due. By the time a task is actually due, isn't it too late to be reminded about it?

• Finally, if you're a user of OmniFocus for the Mac, your reminders are not created on your iPhone until you think to launch OmniFocus on the iPhone and synchronize it. That means that if you work all day in OmniFocus on your Mac (like I do), then drive home and start doing other stuff and don't happen to open OmniFocus on your iPhone, you won't receive any reminders for tasks that you might have set for that night, or until you actually open and sync OmniFocus on your iPhone.

So, what would I rather see? Push notifications, like the many other OmniFocus for iPhone users out there that have been providing their feedback to The Omni Group.

As mentioned, Remember the Milk has implemented push notifications, and the ability to change the notification sound isn't the only trick it has up its sleeve. The Remember the Milk icon on my iPhone's screen shows how many due tasks I have that day, and the number changes almost instantly when I make changes on the web version. To see how many currently available and due tasks I have in OmniFocus, I again have to launch the app and wait for it to synchronize.

While I love OmniFocus and I think The Omni Group does amazing work, this implementation of reminders for the iPhone version of OmniFocus is just full of an amazing amount of fail. It's a hacky workaround that still doesn't ensure that a lack of connectivity won't adversely affect the user's ability to receive reminder notifications. Omni folks, this is just meant to be tough love -- I wouldn't be saying all of this if I didn't truly care about OmniFocus.

People seem to enjoy tracking the time they spend on various projects, so it's no surprise that a plethora of project-tracking apps are cropping up. We've mentioned dozens in the past, including iRatchet, iBiz, Billable and even On the Job, but now users have a new choice on the 'simple and streamlined' end of the spectrum with Project Calculator from blue banana software. Project Calculator features many of the fundamentals one would need for recording the time spent on projects, such as tracking multiple projects, manually editing projects and the time spent on them, exporting to various formats (CSV, PDF, HTML, etc.) for sharing with clients, wages/cost calculation, searching, filters and much more.

A demo is available, while a licenses costs a mere $14.90.

The iPod does not jump out at me when I'm asked to think of time management tools. Entertainment and amusement? Certainly. Office tasks like note-taking, calendar management and work-flow? Not so much, even if you allow for iPod voice recording attachments.

Bill Bennett (and I'm pretty sure it's not that Bill Bennett) of Australia's "The Age" disagrees. He lists the iPod as one of his 10 ways to improve your time management. He writes, "[I]t may not have been designed as a productivity tool but it's possible to download your text-based to-do lists to an iPod." It is also possible to print out my text-based to-do lists and stick them into my wallet but that doesn't turn my wallet into the next and greatest GTD device. Am I off the mark here? What am I missing about iPods and their time management abilities?