Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [20]
A good exercise to begin each day is to review and prioritize today’s todos: redate non-critical todos into future days, and then sort today’s todos, top to bottom, from most to least important. You then have an ordered list of everything you need to get done today, and you always know what you should be working on at any moment: the todo on the top of the list.
For example, the todo list may look like Figure 1 (previous page).
If the user decides that the expense report—now at the bottom of the list—is most important, he can change the priority of the todo. There are two up-arrows to the right of the todo: an underlined arrow that takes the todo to the very top of the list, and another arrow that takes the todo up by one spot. Clicking the underlined arrow results in this todo list:
The todos are now in the right order. Throughout the day the user can work through them, from top to bottom, always knowing the one thing he should focus on. Assuming the inbox is also empty, once all four todos are checked complete, the user will be done. This is what the empty todo list will look like:
The user will have then achieved emptiness and can finish the day free from any overload—or even start working on the next day’s todos.
4. Each todo can contain a detail field as well as a summary, much the same way an e-mail can contain a message body as well as a Subject line.
Each day’s todo list—for today or a day in the future—shows the summaries, or titles, of all the todos that day. What the summary view does not show is the detail of the todos. The user must click a todos “detail” link to see it. This way users can store arbitrary amounts of information inside their todos, but only see one-line titles on the summary view. It’s an essential safeguard against clutter.
In the earlier example, clicking the “detail” link to the right of “file expense report” would bring up the detail view of the todo:
Todo details can contain any sort of text: call notes, e-mail threads, followup history, journal entries, and so on. For example, you can create a todo called “call John,” and in the details, you can include the entire meeting agenda, John’s different phone numbers, and the thread of recent e-mails that brought on the call. Everything necessary to complete the todo is in the details, but on the todo list it only says “call John.” (The color of the “detail” link tells whether the todo contains something in the detail field. Purple means something is in the detail field; blue means it’s empty.)
Using the detail field, users can also manage and track a large todo that encompasses many different steps. As each step is complete, the user can note it in the detail field, and then check the entire todo done when all the steps are complete.
Omitted features
The examples above show how Gootodo offers the four essential components of a bit-literate todo list with a simple user interface. There are some other optional features, too, accessible by clicking the “Your Account” link on the top of the page. In general, Gootodo was built to be as simple as possible to allow bit-literate work, but no simpler. This means that Gootodo can’t be everything to everyone, and so it omits some possible features.
Such simplicity comes at a cost. To the techie user, a bit-literate todo list may come across as pedestrian, even dull. The response Gootodo gets from techies is often “Is this it?” along with a request for more, flashier, higher-tech features. There are good reasons why Gootodo omits most of these features.
The most common feature techies ask for is categorization: the ability to sort todos into types, like “home” and “work”; or high, medium, and low priority. Such features would require Gootodo to display todos in different colors, multiple hierarchies, or with accompanying “tags,” or keywords. Other requests ask for sub-lists that track multiple steps within one todo—something that Gootodo users can already