MLO Workflow: help and suggestions needed!

[DBvc]

I'm new to MLO and i'm valuating if can fit my actual task/project workflow.

In my business life i'm managing around 300 tasks most of them part of not so complex projects (max 20/30 tasks each)
Obvioulsy only few are active projects i'm working in, but i'm used to stack all tasks including ideas that probably will never be active.
Tasks and projects are sorted and grouped in areas and context

My workflow is the following:
1 - Use Inbox to quickly generate new tasks
(MLO is ok)

2 - Organize tasks and projects into their Areas/Context 
(MLO is ok with context and folders)

3 - Plan my time weekly
Before the week start i prepare my plan for the wole week, assigning for every day/hours task and projects that i i will focus in.
This is a very important step  because i need to have on monday my week agenda ready for whole week.
In that way me and my team knows when i'm busy and in which task/project i'm working in
(i have'nt found a way to do that with MLO;
this seems the most important missed function in this software, so i'm really curious how do you manage it.
MLO seems a very good task/project management system but without that you are only managing tasks but not your time/life)

4 - Sharing information
My agenda is automatically shared with our company CRM calendar and with mobile; we are using Google calendar integration to accomplish this
(MLO seems to be unable to sync with with GCalendar but i see that there's an open discussion about his possible implementation;
as second option we can use Outlook as a bridge between MLO and GCalendar, even if i don't like Outlook nor i'm using it actually)


This is a summarization of my workflow and i would like to know your considerations and suggestions about it (mostly on point 3)

Thanks for help
Dario

 

[Robert F]

Hi Dario

 

I am in a similar situation. I've been using MLO for years. I find it great for getting things into one "trusted" place. What I haven't figured out is how to use it to drive my work. Every couple months I realize I've dropped a bunch of things that I should have completed. They are in the system. But I don't seem to be able to use MLO to trigger my actions.

 

You may want to take a look at the "Goal" setting. There is a checkbox for "week". This would make the task a goal for the week. It doesn't seem to map to a calendar week or any specific week period. It seems to just be a flag for filtering.

 

Another option would be to create a context for the week you want to assign the work and then assign each task to that context. Then you would have your weekly tasks to review with your team.

 

You could create a tab with custom filters and views for that context to drive your focus.

 

I say all this, but don't seem to be able to get it working easily for myseff. It seems to take a lot of maintenance to keep current and valuable.

 

Hopefully some of the guru's will chime in ....

[DBvc]

Thanks Robert for the answer
So, unfortunately i'm not alone....
It's a pity because WLO seems really a good task manager very complex and with a lot of features but to complete my plan i need to arrange sorted tasks  in a 5 days time chart to be published for sharing purpose
We can't be alone in that way and i have not found  a softawre able to do that in the right way.
Dario

[Dwight Arthur]

On Monday, April 20, 2015 at 8:06:11 AM UTC-4, DBvc wrote:

I'm new to MLO and i'm valuating if can fit my actual task/project workflow.

Hi, Dario. You are not the first person in your position and you won't be the last. There are a lot of people with pretty similar situations around, some still looking for help in figuring out what to do and others resigned to some uncomfortable compromise. This is just my personal opinion and I really don't know enough about your situation to judge but my take is that you are stuck at the boundary between task management and project management.

Task management involves capturing my whole backlog of things that need to be accomplished, organizing them in a way that helps me quickly and easily determine what I am supposed to be doing now, get a short list of useful things to do next, prevents urgent or important things from getting lost, and minimizes the amount of time I spend managing my backlog instead of completing it. It may involve figuring out which things in my backlog are just never going to happen and helping me abandoning them. It may involve keeping track of what's already done. It may involve figuring out what's dependent on what so I don't waste time working on things that are not ready to be completed. It may involve the relationship between my tasks and somebody else's tasks.

Project management involves identifying resource pools including resource capacity availability and schedules, planning the allocation of resources to tasks in a way that maximizes productivity, estimating timeframes and resource costs for project completion, budgeting, tracking actuals against plan, adjusting plans to accommodate variances with minimized adverse effect on profitability, and finding early indications of problems with the plan and making appropriate adjustments, and so on.

I consider MLO to be the very most powerful and capable task management software available. I do not consider it to be project management software. MLO is such a good task manager that it even includes some rudimentary project management capabilities, maybe even enough to get you and Robert through your day. maybe not, maybe you really need project management software. Wikipedia offers a list of 166 different applications for project management software, maybe one of them would suit you better. I have previous experience with one of them, Microsoft Project. It required some expensive hardware and software, a skilled sysadmin to keep the wheels turning, one to two fulltime team members devoted to ensuring that all the project plans were up to date plus finding and explaining variances. In addition every team member spent around a half hour per day recording what was accomplished, how many hours work remain on each open task, what open dependencies are blocking their progress, and what unplanned tasks occupied their time.

It's tempting to try to achieve the high levels of control and documentation that come from fullblown project management but to do it with an inexpensive, easy to use task manager. Some people actually do figure out the compromises necessary to succeed at this. For most, it's like the search for delicious filling food that isn't fattening, or the search for a low-risk high-return investment.

Maybe Andrey and the MLO team should invest in making MLO a better project management tool. It has been suggested often by a lot of people, including me. But at this point, I think that would just move them from being the best and most powerful task manager into being a rudimentary, unsophisticated also-ran project management tool. I wouldn't recommend it.

[DBvc]

Thanks Dwight for your clear point of view.
You are right: i'm, as probably many others, in the "middle earth" between real project management and task management needs.
My working needs are mostly about task management but then i need to fit them into a working agenda.

Project management software (i have used and tested many of them) are too complex and have a less efficient way to do that: indeed they  are tailored to large business projects that may span for long time, managing resources, constraints etc...
Due to their complexity generally they a need a resource fully dedicated to managing it.

On the opposite side 99% of task managers are too simple and have so many limitations that they can't fit my needs: they seems more tailored to common people than to business people.
Being based  on GTD scheme they lacks of the key points needed for a real working life.

If i can dream a Planner those will be his main features :
- Task management
    - Task is organised in catagories and  contexts
    - Each task has a due date, start and end date, effort and resource (this is just a note not a real resource managemnent, just to highlight when i delegate a task to someone) 
    - Task can be grouped under a Project that inherit task efforts to calculate the total project effort

- Calendar management
    - arrange tasks into calendar

- Publish calendar
    - sync and share calendar to a common platform (google calendar or any other with similar features)

- Mobile access
    - have mobile access thru his own app to manage even less features than desktop app (inbox and calendar management are enough)

- All process must be very efficient so that i will not spend more time managing my tasks than task himself.
In that way i found that i can't work well with the many online solutions that lacks of efficient interface as with pure project management softwares that are too complex and overbloated for my needs.

At the end unfortunately this software does'nt exist yet.
I found few of them, including MLO, that are not far away from this (MLO lacks of calendar management and few project management points), but i can't avoid any of the above key points to fullfill my needs.

Obviously i'm open to pay more for such software: the fact that all task management softwares have a cost that is not more than 100$ show the market they adressed to.
For a  more professional and business approach to my needs i can pay up to $400-500, but the software must really help my life.

Maybe i will found something as it in future, for the moment i'll continue to check around (including monitoring MLO software)

Thanks

[Elizabeth Lindsay]

I must be in the minority.  I think MLO fully meets the needs of managing a project, but it obviously depends on the situation.  What I mean is that I don't manage projects with a ton of people - it is mostly myself and my "waiting for" items.  I manage those with the context field".  The other difference is that I don't believe in spending time building a week-long, month-long, view of what I'll be working on.  I follow GTD and validate the plan each time I pick the next action.  This way, I have a rough outline of a project and don't ever have to throw the how plan out when half-way along the goal changes, the action I just finished changes the path to done, or the goal is cancelled.  Plus I can accommodate having a new action thrown in that wasn't considered before without all the hassle a full-blown project management tool (like MS Project) can cause.

I don't view MLO as a project management tool, I view it as a mind-capturing tool that can be applied to projects.

[Robert F]

Great dialog. Depending on how you define a project I probably use it for both project and task management.
What I'm having trouble with is how to use MLO to drive my daily actions without having to do detailed review of thousands of tasks. It's clearly the most powerful tool on the market. The power and flexibility is partly what is challenging me. Sometimes when I come up with the workflow and stay with it I'm able to use the tool to drive my work. The moment I fall out of step with my plan, it all falls apart and I'm not even aware that is falling apart.

Additionally, I have the windows version which is my primary tool, along with the iPad version, and the android version and I use cloudsync for all of them.

I would love to see how people are using MLO on a daily basis to drive the tasks that they focus on. I understand that that's part of, and dependent on, an individuals workflow. My struggle is still with using the tool to drive my work versus its capability of getting everything out of my brain and tracked into a system.

[damoski]

Very late reply here.

I have the same pain - I would like to be able to grab a bunch of tasks from various views and drop them into a timeslot on my calendar. In terms of when I'm planning now/next, the most dominant context of use is the timeslot - I know I'll be in the city "this afternoon" so will focus on some client meetings, or admin tasks at the post office, for example. I know I'll have the house to myself "tomorrow morning", so will select some deep-focus tasks for then.

The new calendar feature in MLO iOS does show tasks from the calendar, and tasks due on that date in MLO, on the view for a given day, but I find I can't use it - if I followed it, then I would only complete each task on the same day it was due!

So - what I have working for me is a set of 21 contexts:

!11 Monday morning
!12 Monday afternoon
!13 Monday evening
!21 Tuesday morning
!22 Tuesday afternoon
.......etc
!63 Saturday evening
!71 Sunday morning
!72 Sunday afternoon
!73 Sunday evening

I then have a view called "Daily tasks", which is a list of Active Actions, filtered for "any" of the 21 contexts above, and also grouped by Context.

What that gives you, is a single collapsible view with each timeslot and the tasks under it, with the timeslots in chronological order from Monday to Friday. Hence, if I want to see what I have planned for Wednesday afternoon, I can view "Daily tasks" and expand the "!32 Wednesday afternoon" context in that view.  I can keep the current context open, and tick off the tasks as I work on them.

This allows me to insert tasks into periods where I think I would be in a position to work on them, but also spot periods that are getting busy.

The reason for the "!11", "!12", etc, is that it keeps them all in chronological order in the context list, rather than appearing disorganised if sorted alphabetically. The "!" puts it at the top of the context list, so it is easy to select those contexts in both Windows and the iOS app. The number also means you can click in the context field and type "23", and it will autocomplete as "!23 Tuesday evening" - so you can quickly add the context with just two keypresses, and avoid spending too much time on organisation.

I have the view as a flat list aside from the context grouping. The view works fine in both Windows and iOS.

Also - if I want more focus than that - say, I go to the shops and want just the tasks that afternoon relating to shopping, I'll just 'star' the tasks, and use the starred list. After that context is over, I'll clear the stars and go back to "Daily actions".

Not ideal, but the closest I've found that works - you're "adding" an "I'll work on this at this time" tag to tasks for the upcoming week, but you don't have to rearrange hierarchies, confuse due dates, or modify anything else, and you can add/remove tasks from those timeslots as events transpire.

D

[Robert F]

This is a VERY interesting idea. I wish you could post some screen shots. I imagine it's a lot of work to set up and start using. But this might easily be a "stickie" for me to come back to when I have several hours to play around.

Thank you for sharing this !