Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Over the past 7 or so months, since getting the Samsung Blackjack, I have been using my phone for a lot more GTD task management. The keyboard on the device makes it practical for doing so.
I've evaluated a few applications to manage my tasks, and ultimately settled on using OneNote Mobile and SmarterTasks. For a long time I was using Oxios Todo, as it has an amazing amount of flexibility. However, what I found was I was tweaking it to get to a point where it was like SmarterTasks out of the box. I also have a few complaints about SmarterTasks, but they have all been rectified in the latest release, 1.1.
IMHO you won't find a better task application. It removes all the unnecessary clutter UX from a task, and just focuses on the core features. It lets you enter a subject, priority, category and project. New to 1.1 is the fact that Projects are persisted using the increasingly common format:
[Project Name]
Where the name of the project is surrounded by brackets. This method is employed by ClearContext and Jello.GTD.
A recent GTD hack I started when I was on parental leave and had errands to run every day was to create a task in the @Errands category with the name of the store I was going to. Then in the notes field I would list all the individual items I needed such as:
@Errands @Whole Foods - milk - new york strip
@Errands
@Whole Foods
- milk
- new york strip
and so on. When I got something on the list I just changed the dash to a plus sign. When everything was purchased I just marked the errand task as complete.