Projekt Categories

Categories or tags are one of the most useful ways of managing actions using an outliner. They allow a kind of cross-cut view orthogonal to the normal tree-like structure of the action list. For example I keep all my plans and actions in an outline that has Covey-like 'roles' as the top-level branches. These are my main areas of responsibility - father, husband, son, friend, developer, student etc. Under each of these roles I have a list of projects, and under each project there are list of nodes contain plans, notes and actions.

That's fine for planning purposes, but when I'm about to visit a particular client, friend or perhaps just a shopping mall, I want to cut across that tree structure and just see a list of the next actions I need to do in that context. By tagging actions with the context in which they need to be carried out it's then easy to display only the actions needed in a particular context, even when they are for different projects.

On the Palm, using Shadow Plan and the built in Tasks application it was easy to tag each action with a category such as @laptop, @shops, or @desk. But Projekt on the Nokia E61 is not quite so slick. I was disappointing to find that, although it supports 26 categories (an improvement over the Palm) they can only be named 'A' to 'Z'.

Although it is not that difficult to remember that category 'D' is for next actions that need to be done at my desk, and 'L' need to be done on the laptop, I don't understand why Projekt doesn't support more flexibly named categories. Even if using a single character field is a limitation of the underlying database it should be easy to add a mapping between more meaningful names and those single characters. It seems such an unfriendly limitation.

Even more annoying is that it doesn't support blank or space as a category - every entry has to have at least a default of 'A' or 'Z' as the category. Not a problem when filtering, but if the category column is enabled in the list view it is hard to see the meaningful category symbols between all those 'A's.

On the other hand I love Projekt's filter. It allows entries for multiple categories to be selected for display. So it is easy to display all next actions for say, a 'laptop' context and an 'anywhere' context, but hide all others.

E61 Projekt Revisited

My initial excitement on buying a Nokia E61 soon after it first appeared in the UK was quickly dampened on first contact with its built-in PIM software. Here was the spiritual successor to the Psion Series 5 with a To-do manager that was barely usable. I was bitterly disappointed.

I had been hoping to move my GTD management from Shadow Plan on a Palm to the E61 in the expectation that the built-in keyboard would be much quicker than Palm Graffiti. I looked at a wide range of third party Symbian PIM applications over the following weeks, and Kylom's Projekt came closest to my needs. However I found its user interface to lack consistency and to be somewhat fiddly to use. It just didn't feel 'right'.

So ever since the E61 has languished as a (very good) mobile e-mail and Web terminal and I've continued to carry around the old Palm Tungsten.

Well, the Palm's digitiser is beginning to show signs of age, so it is time to take another look at Projekt. Initial impressions of version 1.10 are very encouraging. The user interface has a tight, slick feel and seems to require fewer keystrokes than before for the main functions. I was quickly able to create a small tree of information and to-do nodes without recourse to the manual.

Over the next few days I'm going to transfer my Shadow Plan data to Projekt and give it some serious exercise - though I already suspect that I'll be parting with €24.95 in the near future.