Comments on: Things 1.1 Brings a New Model for Working with Delegated Tasks

By: Jürgen

Jürgen — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:59:06 +0000

@Aron T: I can totally see your point. What you could do even now is to set all delegated tasks to Someday, which would remove them from your Next or Today focus.

One way I can see to give users the “option” your are asking for, is by introducing an optional “Waiting For” focus. When enabled, it could display all delegated tasks among other tasks you are waiting for and may not have a person explicitly associated with.

By: Aron T

Aron T — Thu, 14 May 2009 04:59:28 +0000

I just saw this post on the blog, and I actually reported this behavior as a bug before I saw it! Personally I do NOT want to see People’s stuff in either my Next or Today. When I want to look at my People I look at their People folder. Seeing all the people stuff in my Today folder adds a huge amount of clutter and removes the whole focus idea of GTD.

What I did now is use the “dont show in Today” option on the iphone side to move them into the Next but I still don’t want or like that. (and why isn’t there a remove from today option on the Mac side?)

Please, please, please add as an option the ability to continue to work with the old behavior. Sometimes ‘new features” detract rather than add, and in general, if you make a radical change like this, you should give people the option to stick to the old behavior if they prefer it.

Finally, please add People and Areas to the iPhone side and make the iphone sort consistent with the Mac sort (I really like your new sort by project or area)

TIA

By: Jürgen

Jürgen — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:39:40 +0000

@Brendan Erwin: This is a limitation we will remove soon. There will be more details in the forthcoming roadmap article.

@Marcel, Steve: This is indeed on our roadmap for Things touch.

@Magnus: What many users are doing is to add a tag “WaitingFor” for this purpose.

@tobias s buckell: You can use the menu command Item > Remove Delegate.

@Giovanni Toffoletto, William, Cavell L. Blood, Matt, Courtney, Paul, et. al: We hear you load and clearly.

By: John Erik Metcalf

John Erik Metcalf — Wed, 13 May 2009 08:32:59 +0000

very good comments by Rick, William and others.

here’s my +1 for
- clicking on the green dot to bring up a chat box
- William’s simplified delegations “1 – Drag the task to the person
2- Get a window allowing you to send them an email, and allowing you to set a date when you’d like to be reminded to check in with them.”
- or FTW, real delegation between Things users. as in, the person i’m delegating to receive a note in their Things Inbox asking them to accept the task i sent. (my gf keeps delegating tasks to me via ActionMethod and bc of that im finding myself using it more and more, even tho all my friends use Things.)

By: miten sampat

miten sampat — Wed, 13 May 2009 05:58:43 +0000

i was wondering whether you would enable a feature whereby when i assign a task to a team member …it automatically sends them an email ?

(assuming i have their email address in address book).

has anyone else asked for this?

…you might ask, how about making an update when they complete the task. that i think would be an additional feature you can add later.
perhaps by asking the team member to reply back with an email saying task complete (with some task id).

is this on your roadmap?

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 13 May 2009 04:21:35 +0000

Great app! I like the new delegation structure and would like to be able to see my “People” list synced to the iPhone. Then I could pull up a “follow-up” list when I’m meeting with a direct report.

By: tobias s buckell

tobias s buckell — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:51:23 +0000

Awesome. However…

I’m stumped by how to take a task out of delegated to a person so that its back to just me. I can change it from person to person, but how to I undo assigning it to a person?

Why can’t tasks be assigned to multiple other people?

By: rick

rick — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:17:57 +0000

This is not a big deal, but it would be great if when you double-click on the green dot for a teammate, it opens the same iChat dialogue that Mail does when you click the green dot there. It seems a little pointless to tell me a teammate is on-line but not enable me to launch a chat from the green indicator.

Fantastic app, though. I realize I’m picking nits. Whatever a nit is.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:06:48 +0000

Sync of people between TM and TT is key for me. When I’m meeting one of my team, usually away from my desk, being able to see at a glance on my iPhone what that person’s delegated tasks are, and their status, is invaluable.
As Brendan mentioned, being able to delegate project tasks is also much needed. Most of my work is centered around projects.
Pretty much everything else is perfect for me. Thanks guys!

By: Courtney

Courtney — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:22:54 +0000

I second, Giovanni’s and Cavell’s sentiments… The missing piece to TM and TT is the ability to easily collaborate with colleagues.

The point to this entire software set is to make GTD easier. Our colleagues are key in this effort. Making small, seemingly minor tasks easy to share, ensures that items which SEEM minor, but eventually end up being very meaningful, are shared early on in the process, b/c sharing is easy to do.

In response to William and Rob… certainly, I have no idea if this effort is difficult to implement from a programming standpoint or in building out the TM or TT flow. This is unfortunately part of the burden of the great team at CC. As a consumer, I assume this process will be well thought through and end up working very well. Once this is the case, I will feel that TM and TT are one of the best programs I have ever used!