I’ve been using Nozbe to manage my ToDo’s for about a year. It’s a good system, web-based, has an iPhone app that synchronizes pretty seamlessly, and has some powerful importing capabilities. It works, but for some reason I don’t love it. My subscription runs out in December, and I’m going to switch.
For background:
- I try my best to implement GTD.
- I lead an eight person marketing team in a company of about 50 people.
- The marketing team uses Basecamp for large, multi-person projects.
- I have been using Nozbe for personal projects and work projects that don’t involve others.
- I use a PC at work, and until last week a PC at home. Now I use a Mac at home.
Nozbe is exclusively web-based. There’s nothing more convenient and cross-platform than keeping everything up in the cloud. You don’t have to worry about synchronizing data among computers. And, you can access your data from any machine–including ones that aren’t yours. That’s good. The downsides are that it’s slower than a desktop application and the development of some really powerful features is hampered by the web interface. Suggestion: Take a lesson from Evernote, and let me have the choice to use the cloud or the desktop.
Nozbe has a free iPhone app. The Nozbe iPhone app is very good, and it’s free. Thank you for not asking users to pay for an iPhone app on top of paying for the basic service.
The “+ New Action” button isn’t always visible. I find that when I’m adding lots of actions, moving actions between projects, and assigning contexts, the button disappears and I have to reload the page to get it back. In any ToDo program, the most important feature is to be able to add new action items anytime. Suggestion: Create a Facebook-like toolbar at the top or bottom of the page with key commands on it. You’ve got it on your iPhone app. Do the same thing on the site itself.
Nozbe supports multiple contexts. Nozbe contexts work like tags, and are pretty effective. The catch is that the number of projects and contexts you can use depends on the plan you purchase, and to really implement GTD, I find that I need to tag my stuff in lots of different ways. The limits aren’t too bad, because I can always purchase a bigger plan.
What’s most frustrating about contexts, however is editing them. Let’s say I have an action assigned to three contexts, and I want to delete two of them. I have to open the action for editing, delete one context, confirm my choice, then I have to open the action for editing again, delete the other context and confirm my choice again. My personal style is to be fairly liberal with tags as I enter items, and to clean them up once a week-during my weekly review. The way this works makes that process pretty frustrating. Suggestion: Let me delete and edit all the contexts and click save changes only once.
Nozbe has a powerful, flexible importing mechanism that is difficult to remember. Nozbe has developed a very powerful system for importing tasks from many different sources. You can upload a file, send an email, and even tweet your new action items and projects to Nozbe. The problem is that it requires that remember a fairly complex syntax to do all this. It’s powerful, but I can never remember all the rules. Suggestion: Send me back a confirmation when I add items letting me what you did with them, so I can fix it if I made a mistake. If I have to go to website to make sure I did it right, the importing feature looses it’s utility.
On the off chance that Michael (the Nozbe guy) reads this, I hope you find these comments and suggestions constructive.
Right now, I’m searching for a new system, and have been checking out
What do you use to keep yourself organized?