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

• Things
• Omnifocus (Remember the Milk

What do you use to keep yourself organized?

A little while ago, a friend sent me a link to Sean P. Aune’s list of
16 of the Best Password Management Tools for Firefox 3 on Mashable, and it made me realize that I really needed a better password management system. Like most things, once you start looking, you find a whole world of ideas, issues and opinions that you had never thought about before.

I’ve always had lots of accounts. Why? I like to try new things on the web, and I like to use amasur as my public persona wherever possible. So I have about 200 accounts at various places, and I’m creating new ones all the time. I also try to keep work and personal things separate–nothing work-related on my home PC and nothing personal on my work PC–but web accounts need to be accessed from both. Obviously, this is way too many to keep straight in my head, so I had to find an electronic solution.

My first solution was to keep list of all my passwords in a notepad file, which is about the most unsecure (or is it insecure?) thing you can do. But after about two days, it got too big to actually find anything. Then, I tried the IE and Firefox features to manage passwords, but they don’t sync across browsers, let alone PCs. So, I decided to just use an Excel file that I kept on a USB drive. It was practical, and a little better on the security side, because the file was password protected. For a long while, I carried my trusty little file around on my USB drive, and it was a decent solution.

Like most people, with so many accounts, I found myself using the same (or very similar) passwords for many sites, and I was bad about changing them frequently. Then, I saw an article (can’t find the specific URL, but there are several stories out there) about identity thieves that buy computers from bankrupt companies, and that, the security at those companies can be very loose–passwords and account information not always encrypted. Hmmm…since I create new accounts at the rate of several a week, and many of the sites I’m check out aren’t around a year later, I should change the way I manage passwords, right?

Where to start? What should you look for in a password manager? Here’s my list of password best practices:

1. You SHOULD have a unique password for every site.
2. You SHOULD have to remember only a single master password (or a few at most), and it (they) should be very secure.
3. You SHOULD NOT store your passwords on a server or a website.
4. You SHOULD be able to synchronize your passwords for use at multiple computers.
5. You SHOULD have a way to get your passwords when you are using a public or friend’s computer.
6. You SHOULD NOT create passwords that people who know you would guess.
7. You SHOULD NOT answer “security questions” honestly. See Wired’s story on hacking Sarah Palin’s email account. If she had chosen to tell Yahoo! that she met her husband “at the summit of Mt. Everest,” she could have saved herself a bunch of headaches.

Now, back to that list on Mashable. Which one to use? It’s a tough call, and the criteria are often at odds with each other. For example, if you want to have a unique password for every site, you won’t be able to remember them all. So if you want to use them across mutliple computers, they have to be stored somewhere that all your computers have access to, right? Well, storing them centrally does make it possible for a really seamless user experience across multiple computers, but it also forces you to put a lot of trust in whomever wrote the tool to keep your passwords safe. I’m not that trusting, and you shouldn’t be either.

With most of the tools on Mashable’s list eliminated, I found that some tools don’t actually store your passwords anywhere, and decided this is the way to go. These tools rely on hash algorithms to actually recreate your password each time you need to log in to a particular site. Basically, they take a master password that you create (and only you know), and combine it together mathematically with information about the site you are creating an account for (usually the domain name) to come up with a unique password for that site on the fly. Here’s a picture to explain how this works:





This way, your passwords are not actually stored anywhere, and you only need to remember one, master password that you keep “super secret”. Aside from the obvious advantage of not having to worry about your password file getting into the wrong hands, the other benefit is that it’s a snap to keep multiple computers synchronized, because there’s nothing to really synchronize. You simply use the same hash algorithim and same master password on each computer, and you’re done. The theory is that even if you told someone what site you were logging in to, and what hash algorithm you were using (there are many), they would’t be able to determine your password unless you gave them your “super secret” master password.

There were a couple on the Mashable list that worked this way, but the one I ultimately chose is PasswordMaker (www.passwordmaker.org). This post is getting long, so I’ll dive into more detail about Password Maker later. Besides, the details of doing this are only for truly paranoid nerds. If you’re looking for something your grandparents can use, stick with what IE and Firefox do “out of the box.” It’s simple, and it works pretty well.

Let me know what works for you,

-Adam

I tried and started using Nozbe today, after playing around with it a bit yesterday. So far, I like it enough to pay the $7 for my first month, and give it a go. If it works well, I might have found myself a new ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) compatible application.

The first thing I needed to do was get everything out of my “old” system, and into Nozbe. After hunting around for a while, I couldn’t find anything in the application that resembled an import feature. So, I decided to make my own quick and dirty one that leveraged Nozbe’s, very flexible, email inbox. You can email tasks to yourself using a simple, plain text format that lets you specify a bunch of parameters. I copied the list of supported parameters below from the Nozbe blog.

1. Name of your action
2. D – stands for “Date”
3. T – stands for “Time needed”
4. @ – stands for the context
5. P – stands for the project
6. N – is to mark this as my “Next Action”

There was a catch, though. I had to import more than 100 tasks, and typing (even copying/pasting) them into an email one at a time would be very time consuming. Since I love Microsoft Excel, I exported my task list from Outlook, and made myself a quick, Excel template to massage the tasks into the right format.

Here’s my Super-Simple, Nozbe To Do List Converter Template. Basically, you enter your action items in column C, and fill out the other parameters as you wish for each action. The formula in each row crunches everything into a Nozbe compatible format. You just copy column A, paste it into an email, and send it to your Nobe Inbox—pretty simple.

It just saved me a few hours. Let me know if it works for you, too.