I recently heard about Sorted³, a pretty nifty little iOS app for scheduling your day.
Go check it out.
What I Liked
Browsing through their website, I found some things I really liked.
First, the focus on scheduling. I’ve been calling it planning, or ordering. Sorted is a little more focused on choosing times to do all of the things in your plan, and that has some pros and cons to it. Cons will be discussed below. One of the pros is that having times for your tasks spurs you to act to stay “on schedule” or even get ahead of schedule.
Independent of those, however, the focus on creating a schedule for your day is exactly what I advocate for with Cue.
The calendar drawer is a cool way to handle moving tasks to specific dates. I look forward to taking some of those ideas and rethinking them around the concepts of natural cycles and ticklers, rather than just dates.
Auto scheduling is intriguing. Who wouldn’t want their device to figure out their schedule, given the tasks on their plate. And really, I suspect that the only truly successful form of scheduling will be done automagically. Because going through and choosing times individually for all of your tasks is just too much work. I’m open to this being possible. And if it is possible, then the benefits that can come from it are nice: reminders through the day of what you should be working on, a sense as you go of whether you’re ahead or behind the schedule, and the ability to see your day as a calendar that shows when you’ll be busy with what.
Magic select is pretty magical. It’s a great UI affordance. But not much more than that, really.
Reorganize is also great, as when your first step in a project is brainstorm what needs to be done. And when you occasionally need to dig deeper on something and flesh out a task.
Skepticism
My biggest complaint about Sorted is that it’s using an old, stale model for todo apps: inbox, dates, and then custom lists. This doesn’t take advantage of the natural cycles implicit in a good tickler organizational paradigm. It also puts the burden of list management on the user. And there are a lot of options with tags, filters, lists and folders. My gut reaction is that todo apps like this give the user lots of options when they should instead be giving them a framework for planning that doesn’t require lots of options.
Auto scheduling is also hampered by some pretty big hurdles. It’s nice to not have to schedule each task, but it’s just replaced by choosing a duration and an order for your tasks. In other words, there isn’t a lot of smarts to the auto scheduling feature. People don’t want to enter a duration for every task they add. And, it’s not necessary. It’s a level of detail that distracts from your own conscious awareness of what needs to happen. It’s delegating to a computer what should be delegated instead to your intuition and good judgment.
Related to those challenges is that it’s too focused on scheduling tasks. For certain types of work, that’s important, and they do have some nice features around that. But most work just doesn’t need to be scheduled at a specific time. And most work doesn’t have a set duration.
Sure, you can force yourself to work for 20 minutes on something and then stop. But usually you won’t. You’ll work longer and shorter, and adjust the rest of your day accordingly.
One other challenge with scheduling things for certain times is that if you get a little bit behind it can be discouraging. That problem isn’t totally avoidable except by always choosing to do nothing, but if you’re overly focused on a schedule, and there isn’t enough slack time, it’s easy to just give up when you get behind, rather than adjusting.
While magic select is a cool UI affordance, it is not without it’s costs. By letting the user drag to select, they give up the ability to use drag for other jobs, like moving items around, deleting, archiving, etc.
I am going to keep playing with Sorted, to see if creating and adjusting schedules is actually easy and natural. If it is, and setting up a schedule isn’t too painful, it might provide a marginal benefit. At this point though, I will publicly state that I doubt that happens.
My suspicion is that people play with those features for a few days, and then revert to using Sorted as a simple todo list, with a couple nice features: magical select and reorganize.
I’ll do a follow up in a week or so with any further thoughts I have.