Blog Yellek

The guys over at Geeks and God have a new podcast series up on podcasting and one of the episodes deals with sermon podcasts. One of the issues I have with Christian podcasting is that I can never find the good stuff. There are thousands of churches out there that are just putting their sermon audio out there as a podcast and the Geeks and God guys explain very well why this isn’t very effective, basically because the podcasts aren’t very targeted and don’t really work for people who don’t have a connection to the church involved. Thus they are ineffective as outreach tools.

Churches doing or considering podcasting would do well to have a listen to this, I think it has some good insights.

OK I give up. There are a bunch of features I have been carrying around in my head for a killer task tracking application for a while now, hoping one day to be able to implement it. I now realise that I am unlikely to ever get the time to develop this software and that I really want these features now so here they are, free for anyone to implement. If you want to give me credit or even some renumeration then I’m not going to say no but that is not a requirement for using these ideas. Here is my list:

1. Predecessors and Successors. Mostly what I want is to reduce my list of outstanding tasks to only those that I can work on at the moment so the whole list doesn’t freak me out so much. By filtering out tasks that have unfulfilled prerequisites I can reduce the list to those tasks that I need to get done so as to allow the successor tasks to be achieved.
2. The ability to split tasks. Often when doing GTD you realise that the task you have set down is not granular enough and that you need to split it into sub tasks in order to make them next actions. I want the ability to easily split a task and for all of the predecessor and successor information with other tasks to adjust accordingly.
3. Resources Rather than Contexts. GTD, because it was envisaged for paper based tracking systems, allows tasks to be placed into a single context, the idea being that you look at all of the tasks that can be done in any context you are in and do those. This is a way of reducing the task list. I find that I have tasks that can be done in multiple contexts. I can make phone calls anywhere I have a phone which is everywhere these days, not just in a specific context. In thinking about this I realised that tasks depend on resources and that contexts have resources available. Resources can be something you will need to do a task, such as a phone or an internet connection; a person; a specific place or something less tangible such as work time or personal time. Contexts have a set of resources associated with them. It is the match between resources required and resources available that determines what tasks you can do in a context. For example on the bus on the way in to work I have a phone, personal time and an iPod but I don’t have a privacy resource. Resources could be modeled using tags but there would need to be a way to filter for tasks containing multiple tags to represent the contexts.
4. Task Urgency Value. GTD abhors the use of task priority to determine which tasks to do next but it also introduces the idea of a tickler file for tasks that need to be done on certain days. This doesn’t allow enough flexibility for me because I have some tasks that have a hard date and some tasks that can be more flexible. For example I have a meeting every Monday that I need to have prepared for by that date but if it has been more than a week since I have vacuumed my floors one more day won’t hurt too much. My idea is this: introduce a task urgency value which gets calculated based on the date when something ought to be done and how hard that date is. Urgency should be calculated using some sort of mathematical function like an exponential function so that the closer the date the higher the urgency gets. Urgency would increase slower for softer target dates and faster for harder target dates. In this way tasks that need doing first would automatically bubble to the top.
5. Task Templates. In life there are situations that occur that will cause the same set of tasks to occur over and over again. For example my checklist for things I need to bring to my life group meeting. I would like the ability to have that list of tasks to be added to my task contexts automatically using a template prepared earlier. This would save me time and make sure that everything is covered.
6. Repeating Tasks. I want the ability to have a task or a group of tasks via a template repeat. For example tasks around the house need to be done periodically so if I have cleaned the bathroom for this week then I want a new task to remind me to it again in a week’s time. Fly Lady has built a business on this very concept. The new task shouldn’t be added until the first task is completed. Ideally this should be combined with task urgency values to allow some flexibility as to when tasks are completed. Update: There is an application called Sciral Consistency that does this. it doesn’t integrate with anything (such as RememberTheMilk) but they are on the right track.
7. Add Tasks From Everywhere. I want to be able to add tasks from everywhere and have them pop up in a holding area ready for me to review and categorise them. I want to be able to tag sites in del.icio.us with special tags to remind me to follow up (RSS?). I want to be able to SMS, email and IM tasks (Imified?). I want to be able to add tasks somehow from my phone and my PDA.
8. Get Task Lists From Everywhere. I want to be able to get my task list from any device I have, my PDA, my phone and any PC I happen to be on.
9. Wait List Tasks. I want to be able to delegate a task to someone and have it disappear from my active task lists but I then want it to pop up again to remind me to follow up that person automatically. A threshold based on task urgency value might be appropriate or, more simply, a number of days before a due date.

Any or all of these ideas could be implemented independently although some of them obviously have synergies between them.

So how about it? Can anyone pick these features up and run with them?

For more information I can be contacted either via the comments or via the temporary email address (20 emails only) taskideas.20.yellek@spamgourmet.com.

In recent times housing affordability in Australia has sunk to record lows and, despite the recent slow down in the property market in some of the major capitals, it shows no signs of improving in the foreseeable future. Since the early 1980’s the proportion of dwellings that are privately rented has risen from around 19 percent to around 27 percent today. Median rents have also risen from $123 in 1996 to $190 last year. Financial commentators are now questioning the financial wisdom in even buying a house in comparison to other investments. It appears as if the Great Australian Dream is under attack. Given the changing landscape of the Australian rental market it seems odd to me that the Australian real estate industry still treats tenants as second class citizens rather than as the valuable customers they are.

For example my current real estate agent, Ray White Real Estate Rose Park, refuses to conduct housing inspections at any other time than Friday mornings. This means that tenants must either take time off work to be present at the inspection or forgo any right to privacy when an inspector is present. The reason for this is the margins of the real estate agency not wanting to pay penalty rates to staff to inspect at more meaningful times. The residential tenancy act vaguely says only that inspections have to be notified in advance with no grounds for a tenant to object that the time is unreasonable. In the face of the power given to the property manager the tenant has little recourse but to buckle under and submit.

The crying shame of all of this is that the attitude shown by property managers creates the sort of environment that they are seeking to avoid in looking after the interests of landlords. By treating the tenants as second class they create the indifference to looking after properties and even hostility towards landlords. What then ensues are the properties being maintained to the minimum standards possible to meet inspection criteria which leads to a policeman role for the property manager which drives the problem on in a vicious circle. All landlords see is the bottom line and not the creeping maintenance issues that will eventually cost them money. This state of affairs hardly leads to building solid communities which in turn attacks the social fabric.

Wouldn’t it be better if the tenants were treated as customers? We are, after all, paying thousands of dollars a year for a service provided to us by the landlord and their agent. If we turned the power games that some property mangers played on their heads and started talking about customer service what sort of communities would we build? If we started looking for ways to retain tenants by good customer service instead of being the policeman always suspicious of their motives wouldn’t it lead to less rental turnover and greater profit for the landlord?

I know it is a forlorn dream to expect this to happen any time soon. I for one have given up and bought a house. I have given my three week’s notice and I am moving out to a place of sanctuary where no property manager ever has the right to tread.

I just had a quick look at the Zoho Chat application and I can’t for the life of me think what it might be useful for. I’m generally a fan of Zoho applications, Zoho Creator is fabulous, but the chat application seems less than useful.

The major flaw is that it doesn’t interoperate with any other chat services. I have ID’s on Yahoo, ICQ, AIM and MSN because of various groups of friends but I don’t see the value in asking someone to join Zoho Chat just so they can talk to me. Zoho chat is just too obscure to generate a relevant critical mass of users to chat with.

Zoho chat does offer the possibility of adding a chat widget to a web site which the aforementioned chat services do not but if you compare that to Meebo and the MeeboMe Widget it doesn’t really stack up. Meebo does interoperate with all of the popular chat services and offers a lot more features than Zoho chat.

The only redeeming feature of Zoho chat is possible future integration with the Zoho online office suite. Users collaborating on a document being able to use instant messaging to communicate from within the document would be an advantage but only a limited one.

All in all just go straight to Meebo rather than using Zoho Chat.

Classic quote from MeLo last night:

“You can’t have adventures without scary bits, that’s what makes them adventures!”