Forums / Ideas

I've been rambling and mumbling alot about empowering smartlists and the such lately.

Finally, I structured two very simple ideas anyone can grasp, and hopefully, support.

First off, and mainly, dropdown menus.
The idea is simple enough:
• you go to Settings, then Lists.
• select a few smartlists, and click a button to create a dropdown menu for them. Optionally, name the menu.
• go back to Tasks, and those smartlists you selected will now be all occupying a single field, wich shows an arrow and the name you inputted at the time of creation.
• click the arrow, and a menu drops down, allowing you to click one of the smartlists, therefore showing you it's tasks.

Let's go for an example.
You create 3 smartlists:
short - timeEstimate:"< 11min"
mid - timeEstimate:"> 10min" AND timeEstimate:"< 46 min"
long - timeEstimate:"> 45 min"

You then go to Settings/Lists, select those three, and create a dropdown from them. Name it "Task Duration"
You now go back to tasks and see only a blue "smartlist", named Task Duration, with an arrow next to it.

Dead simple. Could go long ways.


Next on my list, and a lil'bit more advanced, is cross-matching smartlists results.

What I mean by this, is that you select two or more (let's say two) smartlists, and have only the tasks common to both smartlists show up. It's like dynamically joining two smartlists' search queries with an 'AND'.

"But why don't you just do so (put the AND) and stop bugging us", you say.
Poor little you, who skipped your math classes.
An example might again shed some light on your long lost soul:
• take the 3 smartlists from previous example.
• now add 7 smartlists for contexts (GTD).

You could want any combination of those. Long task at home, short task at errand, mid task at work, and so on..

Three times seven ? Right! Just like you fancy bicycle!
But 21 smartlists ain't fancy, no sir.
Now multiply that by four possible states of physical and mental energy. Fun little way to test RTM's infinite list limit, nonetheless.

And finally, guess what ? The two features combined would stand strong to any specialized GTD software!

These two features could be so, so, so powerful. And yet it fits educately into RTM and doesn't add anymore complexity for anyone who doesn't want it (they stand out of the way).
Think about it. Tenderly.

Posted at 12:08am on September 25, 2007