My usual first order of business in the morning is to “brain dump”. It allows me to download all the nuisances and then get to sorting my day.
Dumping is great if it can be done super-quickly. To this end, I have always found the following to be the best: A “Quick Task” field where I could type in a task, hit enter and then the focus would remain in that field, ready for task #2.
The task itself would be added to whatever active area you are viewing (I usually used it most of the time with the Inbox, although I suppose it could be used to quickly populate a new project with an initial task list).
Without such a “Quick Task” field, it becomes a bit cumbersome to quickly “dump” say, 7 or 8 tasks.
Yes, we did think about having a rapid entry panel… and we still could. However, because it is so simple to type in outline view, I thought people would just start using that to enter in their brain dump items.
I made some comments about this in another thread. But basically what I said, was that since the Projects view already functions more or less lika a quick-entry view, why not just implement this view in the Inbox as well :).
I can’t quite express what it is that I have trouble with… Neither the Inbox or the Project outline quite work for me, when it comes to capturing thoughts.
When a thought occurs, I want to capture it with as little mouse clicks and key strokes as possible, and I want the information not to clutter project view. I feel like, right now, I need an extra click to capture the data (Create button up top) which goes into the Project view, which clutters the project view.
When I go to the Inbox view, I have a list of items I captured, but to update any of them, I need to click the item, which takes me to the Project view that contains that one item… This is slightly confusing to me, because when I am “processing” I want to stick to processing. I don’t want to go back-and-forth between processing and planning.
Yeah, we know the inbox doesn’t quite work how it should yet. We will get to that for sure!
Question: If we had some sort of rapid entry box, easily available, would anyone still use the “create action” button? Or do you find yourself going into the project view and adding specific tasks there? (It seems that is what I am doing most often myself)
I think the fact that Create button is a button is a bit of a mental blocker for me. If it were a textbox, I would understand its purpose a little bit better.
If there is a textbox instead of the button, I would just start typing something into that box. I don’t mind if that causes the other controls in the “Create Action” panel to appear.
I know it makes no practical difference from having a button. The number of mouse clicks/keystrokes remain the same, but while I feel like clicking a button is an extra step, clicking inside a textbox does not feel like it. It is purely psychological.
I suppose that you could just clear the “Quick Task” field once the task is added to the inbox. Or just have the box blink and then empty itself, ready for the next task to be entered :)l
@Elurven in the build released today we cleaned-up this feature up a bit. It should now be clear that the action drops to your inbox and the dialog box will clear each time you press enter. This was our intention from the start.
