I notice that Wunderlist is closing down.
It appears from this article that Microsoft bought it a few years ago (for $200 million!) and is finally assimilating it into their empire, having completely re-written it, – and in the process making it WORSE!
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/8/20855201/wunderlist-buy-back-offer-microsoft-christian-reber
Wunderlist never was that great – it’s just a collection of lists, with a few features added, for example if you star an item it appears on the ‘Important’ list as well as the other list it’s on.
So it’s in two places. In fact if you give your task today’s date it appears on the ‘Today list’, so now it’s in three places. I’d rather have just one list where you can see everything, and be able to sort it by urgency or importance.
On Wunderlist, or Microsoft To Do as it’s now called, you can’t see everything on one list. You can have lots of lists, e.g. “Jobs for Paul to do”, “Wedding”, “Shopping” and “When I’m in the office” but you can’t see all of your jobs listed in one place.
You can give your lists colours but when the tasks are pulled through into Important or Today the colours are lost.
And Microsoft have failed to reproduce one of the nicer features, which was that you could drag a task from one list to another, if say you had put it on the wrong list or were starting a new list called “Jobs for my PA” and wanted to move lots of jobs across to that new list. Now you have to go into editing the task, which is a pain. (In fact looking at the app again I can’t even work out how to move a job to another list). This makes even Trello better for organising your work (I like Trello), and that’s not even designed to be a time management app.
To be fair, you can add steps (sub tasks), repeats, reminders, and files, and you can drag to change the order of tasks within a list, which I like. Although some of these features are more for diary items than for jobs to do items – should jobs to do have dates at all? Should they repeat, or is that more of a diary function? Is this app trying to replace your diary, or are you going to use both in a sort of overlapping fashion? Where is the dividing line?
Overall the original app, and now this worse-quality copy, has always felt to me like a dog’s dinner which had never been thought through, as if it was made by people who don’t really understand time management. What goes on your jobs to do and what goes in your diary? Importance and urgency are sliding scales not one/off qualities, and importance is relative not absolute so adding more tasks should change the values you have given tasks. What about size of tasks? Should you organise your tasks by context, or project, or date? Can something be urgent without assigning it to Today? (I think so). Using this app to organise your day will just leave you more confused and overwhelmed than before – at least that’s the effect it has on me.
I just want to have one list of all my stuff, and be able to sort it by urgency (to make sure nothing bites me) and importance (to make sure I focus on what matters). And it would be nice to sort tasks by size in case I jsut have a small space of time to use, and also to sort them by how fun vs unpleasant they are so, you can do an easy one if you feel like it, or get a horrible one off your list.
That’s why I made my own (free) app called Jobs To Do, which does everything I want – download it and read about it here! http://www.jobs-to-do.com
onwards and upwards
CC
