Nozbe 2.0 finally released

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

nozbe20-loggedAfter months of waiting (and being teased with a partially-finished beta a few months ago), Nozbe 2.0 has finally been released.

I’ve intentionally waited a few days to talk about it, because I wasn’t sure how I felt.  My initial reaction was pretty disappointed. While it looked much better than previous versions, it had some substantial problems.  Here are the comments I left for their developer:

1 — No filtering on Next Actions. Why?
2 — Next actions don’t show which project they’re from until you click on each one. MUCH harder to scan through them.
3 — The list of projects still take up WAY too much space in the sidebar. Granted, I have a lot of projects (53), but it’s pretty bad. On Nozbe Classic, the bottom of my last project in the list is 1490 pixels down the page. In Nozbe 2.0, the last project is 2053 pixels down the page — a 500+ pixel increase!

I was feeling kind of bad for them at this point.  While they were very legit concerns, the blog comments were full of things like that.  We were all appreciative to the team for getting it launched, but it appeared it was in big trouble.

In fact, I even started looking around again for an alternative to Nozbe.  The two that came the closest were Vitalist and Toodledo,  but they couldn’t measure up to Nozbe even with some of the broken features.  Nirvana HQ is looking pretty slick, but it’s a closed beta and I haven’t been able to get access to it yet.

However, the very next day Nozbe posted an update that addressed every concern.  Point by point, they answered each question and explained how they’d fix it (or why they wouldn’t/couldn’t).  They even fixed item #2 from my list above right away!  There are still some issues, but they’re getting resolved quickly.  On top of that, the new features (like “notes on tasks”) are very useful.

As it stands now, I consider Nozbe 2.0 the best GTD app out there. I’ve long felt that Nozbe has been the best, and with the recent bug fixes to 2.0 they’ve kept the crown.  Hopefully Michael and his team can knock out some of the other small bugs and feature requests in the next week or two and they’ll have a pretty awesome product.

Get rid of your email folders

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis tip might not work for everyone, but it has been great for me.  I use gmail for most of my e-mail, but I need to use Outlook at work.  For years, I had a complex series of nested folders in Outlook, along the lines of this:

  • Staff
    • Bill
    • Jane
    • Steve
  • Website
    • GoDaddy
    • Hosting
    • Problems
  • Programs
    • Adults
    • Children
    • Mission
  • …

And on, and on, and on.  Probably about 150 folders in all.  I was very proud of myself.

The problem was trying to keep myself at inbox zero.  Gmail makes it easy with their “archive” feature (and with cool things like “Send & Archive” in the labs section), but Outlook doesn’t do that.  Instead of quickly archiving an e-mail and moving on, I had to think about where it goes.  Does the one from Steve about the Missions part of the website go in “Steve”, “website” or “missions”?  I’d probably spend 10-15 seconds deciding where to file an e-mail, then drilling down to file it.  I get maybe 25 emails/day on this account, so that’s 25 emails x 15 seconds/each x 260 workdays in a year = 27 hours/year I spend just filing e-mails.  Brutal!

If you handle your inbox properly, you don’t need to fish for past e-mails very often — you just deal with them and move on.  I have Xobni installed, which makes the search process much faster when I need it, so that solves the search issue.

My solution? Treat it like gmail.  I now have a single folder called “archive” under my inbox.  When I’m done with an e-mail, I “archive” it.  Much faster and much easier.

How do you handle your folders in Outlook?

Snip-its forgot who their target audience is

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Reading Time: 3 minutesSnip-its is a cute place to take a young child for a haircut.  They have lots of bright furniture, TV screens, games, etc.  However, the store (and the entire company) seems to be falling apart quickly.

It started when we pulled up their website.  Are those AdSense ads on the bottom?  I certainly have no problem with a site using them, but this just seems tacky and desperate for a consumer business site.  Still, no biggie.

We arrived, and found the TV broken, just like it’s been for the last year or so.  Lovely.

02-tv

Not exactly the pretty happy-land they show on their site:

01-entrance

Still, that’s not the point of this post.  What shocked me was the number of signs around the store that said  “DO NOT” do various things like play with toys, climb on the chairs, touch the giant red tree, etc — things that you’d expect all of your “customers” to try and do!  Apparently the stores were designed very poorly or something, because this apparently is a huge problem.  I’m quite sure Seth Godin‘s head would have exploded in a place like this. Here’s a sampling of some of the signs.  Most were repeated all throughout the store — I was trying not to make a scene while taking the pictures, so I only grabbed a few:

dont-touch

do-not-play

do-not-play2

do-not-climb

It was staggering. The store was littered with these signs.   This last one isn’t too bad, but by the time we left I was sick of seeing lists of what we couldn’t do, and this stuck out more than usual:

10-no-checks

Wow.  It was amazing.  I’ve seen examples of stores with long “do not” lists before, but I’ve never witnessed one this bad.  What’s the worst that you’ve seen recently?

Inbox Zero is my key to GTD

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhenever I feel like I’m falling off the wagon with GTD, it always comes back to my inbox.  If I don’t keep it at zero, things pile up quickly and I lose some control.  Even if you’re not a believer in the complete GTD system, Inbox Zero can help you out a LOT.

This video is from a few years ago, but has some great tips on how to achieve (and maintain) inbox zero. Merlin Mann really knows his stuff. Check it out:

Do you REALLY trust your system?

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Reading Time: 2 minutesAs I continue to grow in my use of GTD, I’m discovering just how important the trust factor with your system can be.  David Allen says that you need to really

trust your system for it to work.  You can say you trust it all you want, but that’s irrelevant.  When it comes down to it, a trusted system works and a semi-trusted system doesn’t.

So what does it mean to really trust your system?  I have a few thoughts.

Trust it like a Christian should trust God
You may or may not believe in God, but the point still works.  Andy Stanley gave a great analogy for how a Christian should trust in God.  He held up the stool he was sitting on and said to trust in it.  To trust in the stool means to sit ON it.  Not on the edge.  Not with your feet on the ground a little bit.  On it with your full weight.  You might be nervous at first, but over time you’ll learn to trust the stool completely.

Trust it like you should trust your spouse
If you’ve been married, you can understand this.  Saying you trust your spouse is one thing.  Really trusting your spouse is another.  For a marriage to really work, you need to completely trust in your spouse.

GTD is the same way
If you don’t really trust the system, then you can never have a “mind like water”.  I’ve found that as I’ve learned the system works and I can trust it, anything I put into it is instantly out of my head.  Getting the junk out of your head is the key to focusing on the task at hand, and GTD is a great way to get it done.  Whether you use software, a website, your PDA or just pen and paper, make sure you use a system that you can trust completely.

New “Smart Navigation” in StreetView

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteGoogle has just released a new feature for StreetView that looks pretty simple, but it actually quite complex and intuitive.  When viewing anything in StreetView, you’ll notice your is in the shape of an oval or a rectangle.  When it’s an oval, you can double-click to quickly move to that location. When it’s a rectangle (usually on building facades), you can double-click to be taken to the best view of that area.

Google was able to accomplish this using some slick methods, as explained on the Lat Long Blog:

We have been able to accomplish this by making a compact representation of the building facade and road geometry for all the Street View panoramas using laser point clouds and differences between consecutive pictures.

For more info, check out the Google Earth Blog, watch this short video below, or go try it for yourself.

Virtual Earth / Live Maps being rebranded to Bing

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs you’ve likely heard, Microsoft has unveiled it’s new Bing search engine.  As part of that rebranding process, other Microsoft applications are getting renamed.  Of particular interest to us are the new names for their mapping products.

Live Search Maps will now be simply called “Bing Maps”, and the Virtual Earth platform will now be known as “Bing Maps for Enterprise”.  Much more about this can be found on Chris Pendleton’s blog or by watching the video below.

Site Review: Crossroads Christian Church – New Smyrna Beach, FL

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteChurch: Crossroads Christian Church – New Smyrna Beach, FL
URL: http://www.crossroadsnsb.org/

Another video review for you.  I kind of like doing these, so send us your requests via Twitter

and we’ll try to showcase your church.

Leave your thoughts about this review in the comment section below.  Thanks!