Philip Morton

Maintaining productivity without your tools

I recently started a twelve month internship at BT, where due to security reasons, I can’t take a laptop or any removable media to work. As a result, I can’t use my tried and tested system to get things done. At first, I was given one task at a time, so didn’t really need to organise myself much, but as time has gone on, I’ve had more and more things to deal with at once.

Working in a Microsoft Office environment, everyone has and uses Outlook, but its to-do list is not the most flexible tool and doesn’t scale nearly as well as a dedicated program like Things. Instead, I’ve started to use 37signals’ Ta-da List, a simple online task manager.

Ta-da List is far more basic than Outlook and much more than Things, but its beauty lies in the lack of clutter. To get to my tasks in Outlook, I’d have to open the application, click the to-do tab and then focus on the small portion of the screen in which the list resides. With Ta-da, I get a plain list with large fonts, devoid of emails, calendar items and other noise. Outlook is a wonderful program if you need total integration with the Office ecosystem, but when I’m deciding what to do next, I need as few distractions as possible.

I guess this highlights the divide that separates many programs; those that do one thing and those that try to do everything. When you’re reading your calendar, do you need your email there as well? Is it sensible to put your RSS feeds in your email application? Looking at the programs on my personal computer, it’s definitely a case of one application per task, with the notable exception of Coda. But I digress.

When your productivity system is suddenly rendered unusable, it’s initially difficult to adapt. Without your trusted tools, you have to invent an entirely new system within a set of limitations and this takes time to adapt to. However you manage, it’s important to remember not to lose control over your time because of unfamiliar surroundings and tools.

Published in Productivity, tagged 37signals, Outlook on 5th August 2008.