Adding an efficient, higher-level project view layer to Things 3: a proposal

Task manager applications are great. They help you get things out of your head and easily accessible. One of the major issues with task manager applications is higher level planning, particularly on the fly decision about committing or not a new project. This is because you need in one look an overview of everything going one right now, including deadlines. This is something not easy to do only with a Task Manager and your electronic calendar apps. Also for what I am thinking about, a planning software is not that useful either. I tried OmniPlan for that purpose alone, maintenance is higher than I would like and I am still not convinced this is the best way of doing it.

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Free, multi-platform pro-like applications for students

Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free

– Free Software Foundation

 

Going through graduate studies (or even undergraduate studies), is about creativity, hard work and learning not to loose information, not to drop the ball on ideas and projects. In order word, part of it is also about being able to put your ideas to work for you in an efficient manner. In the following are a few applications to help you along the way. Of course, nothing precludes the good old pen and paper. I personally really enjoy my Lamy 2000 fountain pen and a Leuchtturm 1917 whitelines notebook (but this is for another post!).

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Things 3: clean, efficient and simply beautiful!

Ever since moving all of my projects an tasks planning digital, I have used a dedicated task manager. I started with Cultured Code Things over 11 years ago with the very first beta; something like version 0.7b – can find my old e-mail about it. When it came out, Things was not only the most intuitive and beautiful dedicated task manager on the market but also the best (at least mac-wise).

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An Efficient and Fun iOS E-mail App: Spark by Readdle

Except for a few months of BitNet e-mail on a VAX mainframe server, I have been using the default UNIX mail app for almost 25 years now. Started with a SUN workstation, moved from SunOS to Solaris, Linux RedHat distribution (and a few others) and ended up on OSX. The nice thing about this is that all my e-mail archives transferred easily from one UNIX flavour to the other!

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