General issues with Rapid Entry parsing - is there a way to catalog?

[Eric Wilson]

Searched a lot of threads and there are many specific cases of issues with the rapid-task entry parsing. Is there a general focus-group or thread or way these are being captured?

Loving MLO, getting back into it after some years of using other techniques. And love being able to Rapid Entry things.

But, holy cow, I've never fought software this much on doing what I mean. I have a whole notepad file up next to MLO to be a cheat sheet on how I have to fastidiously entry the right flags, with or without spaces, with the right date format, and have about 10 or more scenarios that do something bizarre that I didn't expect.

I'd love to help the dev team improve these or be a sounding board. If there's a way I can help, please let me know, such as making some lists of scenarios or etc.

(Couple examples, just from today:

• space after -s vs. -d act differently

• "remind Saturday" and "rmd Saturday" set the reminder IN THE PAST (last saturday) but "-r Saturday" set it for NEXT Saturday

• (biggest one) putting a simple m/d date (omitting the year) has very odd interpretation- it takes the first digit as the YEAR, then assumes CURRENT month, then the correct day. (Crazy.)

)

If that were fixed, and Emoji's supported without destroying data in round-trip syncs, that would make MLO probably 2x more pleasant for me to use. Love it anyway, but these make the fast/easy use nearly impossible (for me).

(Using 5.1.4)

[Stéph]

Oh wow, you've found some good ones there. I've realised I only use parsing in a very limited, repetitive way - probably repeating what works best for me - so hadn't noticed there were all these inconsistencies.

[Alyona (MLO Support)]

Thank you for sharing this with us! 

< space after -s vs. -d act differently

Reproduced.

< "remind Saturday" and "rmd Saturday" set the reminder IN THE PAST (last saturday) but "-r Saturday" set it for NEXT Saturday

< (biggest one) putting a simple m/d date (omitting the year) has very odd interpretation- it takes the first digit as the YEAR, then assumes CURRENT month, then the correct day. (Crazy.)

Couldn't reproduce these two. Can you please record a video or make lists scenarios and send to sup...@mylifeorganized.net? Thank you.

[DamianF]

I have to admit, while I love MLO in almost every way, this is one of the two showstoppers that means I mostly use ToDoIst now.

Actually, the two have opposite strengths. ToDoIst is *great* at getting tasks in. I can be anywhere in the app, hit "Q" and type "Bread #gro !!1 @tow 12p" and it'll add Bread to my Groceries project with the label "Town" and make it priority 1, meaning it's urgent, plus put it in my calendar for 12pm, which I can see in my iOS calendar. That project is also shared to me wife, so it'll pop up on her ToDoIst and joint calendar if she checks her phone while in the supermarket or at lunchtime while popping to the shops.

Or "Check if reclaimed doctor invoice @zJan !!3 #state 8p Fri @5m", which will add the Task "Check if reclaimed doctor invoice" to my #"Statements_admin" project with a label of "zJane" (which reminds me to ask my wife if she's done it next time i'm sat in some downtime with her), which will likely be 8pm Friday, so I time-block it in my calendar, but it's only P3, and it's also labelled as a @"5min_admin" task, which are the tasks I do when I have 5 mins of time at my laptop doing admin tasks. 

Basically, the autocomplete of project names and labels is an absolute game changer. I can confidently throw in a few characters for key project and labels, while being in a completely unrelated context/place, and know the task will end up in the right places to action it when in that time/context.

MLO has a challenge from its strengths in that any task can be a folder, and it would be an overwhelming UX to autocomplete on EVERY task/project/folder in the hierarchy. I love MLO's hierarchy, and this is a downside of it, but ToDoIst's more constrained task structure is an advantage for it here in autocomplete. Also, the fact MLO is not cloud-native I think means it can't quite handle these atomic tasks independently in the same way.

So - I can throw tasks into ToDoIst in a few seconds, and be confident that they'll appear in the right place at the right time. In contrast, with MLOs' requirement for specific structure and tagging, I have no confidence I'll get it right, and can't use it.

HOWEVER - while ToDoIst is great at getting tasks in, it's less good at getting tasks out into actual actions. Since there's no strong task hierarchy, inheritance of contexts, location reminders for folders, etc etc. tasks can easily get lost when I'm in the context looking for my next action. This is where MLO really shines, and I miss it hugely.

Let alone all the amazing things with MLO that I miss, like goal-orientated GTD methodology support, task context/date/property inheritance, extremely focused views and workspaces, etc. I still try to use it for goal-orientated tasks, because it supports focus like nothing else./

D