Comparisons, Contrasts, Use Cases

[mep...@gmail.com]

i've been spending a bit of time comparing a variety of tools since I
want to have a solution that mostly works by Tuesday when I start a new
full-time job. The job will require me to manage multiple projects
simultaneously with tasks, contacts, appointments all integrated. My
choice way is to have a list of projects which then blossom into a
variety of project manager speak like:

1) requirements generation
2) scoping and definition
3) delivery objectives
4) testing
5) acceptance and conclusion

Each of these may then have "child tasks". Like requirements
generation may have sets of deliverables like this:

1) requirements generation
1.1 definition of current status
1.2 production of draft requirements document
1.3 review of document
1.4 submittal to blah blah for acceptance

Also within this whole thing are tasks which are not really assigned to
projects or deliverables. I'm sure that most people have these orphans
around that are not part of projects or deliverables.

Now comes the part of trying different solutions. I've focused on MLO,
a product called UltraRecall, ThoughtManager, and Natara Bonsai. Two
of these will sync to my Treo which means I can create, edit, change
and update things on my mobile platform. I don't particularly care for
Windows Mobile platforms since I also sync and want basic calendaring
functionality on Linux or BSD.

On MLO, I've defined sets of "places" which allow me to control what I
see and when I do a review I get filtered or complete views of things.
This is important to isolate and distill the information for me. On
Bonsai, I can write custom filters and then have those filters moved to
my Treo and sort, review, update remotely. On UltraRecall, I can build
complete sets of projects also including tasks, appointments, contacts
and have all of them "nested".

So, basically, my use case requirements are to have sets of projects
which often define themselves as nested sets of requirements,
deliverables, todo's, contacts that are appropriate. Todo filtering
should allow me to focus on discrete project level tasks and then move
on to other projects or tasks. I should also be able to built out sets
of non-project tasks or todo's which allow assignment of dates, notes,
etc.

All of my testing platforms allow this; two of them allow me to sync to
my palm and use a portable keyboard. MLO offers a nice set of
functionality in a light application while UltraRecall does it all and
seems heavier. Somehow, I think I could use UltraRecall as my
"everything" container at some point since it strives to do it all.

Any thoughts on these use cases and how have others solved similar or
even different problems using MLO?

[David Rees]

I do think filtering is sorely needed in MLO. I personally need it for
something similar to what I think you describing.

I use goals to split my tasks intro "active", "soon", "pending", and
"someday".
During the day I only want to see the active.
During daily review I only want to see active/soon.
During weekly review I only want to see the first three (and I move tasks
between these).
And finally during monthly review I want to see them all.

I will add that I currently use a combination of goals, hiding and parent
tasks for this. I would like to just use goals, projects, or maybe contexts
for this, but without color/icon coding I can't see a glance what type a
task is. So right now I do this:
active - Week Goal
soon - normal
pending - in pending folder (hidden) (one pending folder per area)
someday - in someday folder (hidden)

d