gtg-contributors team mailing list archive

[Bertrand Rousseau <bertrand.rousseau@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Radina Matic <radina.matic@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 18:10, Lionel Dricot <ploum@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>
>> The fact that GTG is abused is not bad at all. Users are free to
>> choose their own way of working, of course.
>>
>> But I think that it is the case because we didn't find a good way to
>> represent things.
>>
>> GTG should reinforce this idea of "prerequisite" instead of
>> "subtasks". GTG should also try to enforce the fact that a task is an
>> action that needs to be done. I've realized that most of the tasks I'm
>> procrastinating on are because they are not describe as an action.
>> Like "Kitchen sink" instead of "call the plumber".
>>
>
> How about we start with renaming the concept of Subtasks into "Pre-task"?
> It's not a word you'll find in any dictionary (yet), but it seems to be
> known and used concept specially in language learning field, and even in
> other task management apps. And a least to me it feels closer to the concept
> of the "prerequisite" then the word "Subtask"...

I agree that subtask does not convey enough the idea of prerequisite.
It just tells people it goes "under" the related task, but the
semantic of "under" is not defined anywhere. However "pretask" sounds
a bit artificial. I'm afraid that it might not be understood directly
by people. Users formulate their need in their own way, we have to
identify those and try to use them. IMHO, there are not many people
that think "I'd like to add a pretask to this task, how can I do it".

Btw, I created a bug for this [1]: ML are great to start discussion
about a project, but bug report insure we keep track of the issue and
its progress.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/gtg/+bug/969931

> Another suggestion would be to rethink the name of the "Workview" (not
> completely intuitive) as a placeholder for "actionable" task. Granted
> "actionable" is a known word that can be found in dictionaries, but is not
> very frequent. Let's try thinking more in the line of something
> straightforward like:
>
> Ready to do now:
> Ready for action:
> Do it now!
> Do-right-now list:
> Do-it-now list:

Yes I agree, by itself, it does not tell what it means. We should
either suggest it, by adding more information in the app (that was the
idea behind this branch and bug: [2,3], or improve the wording to
directly incude the idea.

I like your suggestions, but I think they still don't totally define
the functionality (example question: "are the listed tasks actionable,
or is it a randomly generated list of things I have to do, so that the
app decide for me").

I think GTD solved this issue by defining "actionable tasks" such a
concept, but this would still require to include some comment so that
everyone understands.

So all in all I would be in favour of a "Only view actionable tasks"
denomination, with an additional in-context explanation (that could be
dismissed not shown in the future).

I've submitted this issue as a bug [4]

[2] https://code.launchpad.net/~bertrand-rousseau/gtg/test-add-infobar-in-taskview
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/gtg/+bug/844963
[4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/gtg/+bug/969946

> If I wasn't an anti Nike fan, I would add "Just do it!" to the list, but you
> get the picture... :)
>
> Cheers,
> Radina
>
>
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-- 
Bertrand Rousseau