As our lives get busier and the world gets faster, our workload seems to be just too much some times.
Web apps are getting faster, better, with incredible user interfaces and maybe similar or even better than stand alone local applications.

These two statements above seem to have nothing in common, but in my view they both led to the increasing number of quality web-based task management tools.

Being a fan of David Allen’s GTD methodology, I’ve always tried to apply the method using software tools that could be better than the old pen and paper.
Just a few years back, finding a task management software was a quite hard task itself, especially on a Mac.
Today, I think that choosing the “right one” for you has become a stressful experience because there are too many!

When I started using these task management tools I basically didn’t have much choice. The first ones I’ve used where:

- OmniFocus
- Things
- Remember The Milk

But as a nice intention for the new year I decided to have a deep look into many of the  alternatives on the market. First, because I did not like the fact that all the above mentioned products where basically not evolving and seemed to be frozen to a few years back (the only improvement comes from Things that is now offering a cloud based version of their tool, which has now been in beta for an unbelievable amount of time and is becoming obsolete before going out of beta..). Second, because I now feel the need to be more “social”, and these new tools out there are giving more space to your social needs and to sharing your tasks with your teams.

Although the list I’m presenting here is not exhaustive and could be increased every month (or week) when new products come to life, I believe it is a starting point for many who wish to dive into this world of getting organized and getting things done without using pen and paper.

Some of the tools I came across convinced me more than others and therefore I’ve given them extra time to test, try, install. Others did not receive the same treatment probably because the user interface did not capture my full attention and that is why I’m reporting just a few names and relative web sites with no comments.

The first three of the list are still valid tools and I’m not writing anything about them since I’ve done so already in this post: To-Do Lists and tasks management

1. Omnifocus
2. Things
3. Remember The Milk
4. HiTask: not very GTD oriented, but with a very nice UI. Tasks are generally organized with due dates and priorities. Also projects are very well organized. One of the most interesting things about HiTask is the ability to assign a time to each task and track your time with a built-in timer. You can either start and stop the timer or manually enter the amount of time you spent on each task, in order to get very nice reports on how you spend your time. Very useful for people who need time-sheets.
5. TeamBox: the version 4 has some really great improvements in the UI. If you and your team are always online, then it is a perfect tool for sharing your ideas, and commenting on each task instead of using email.
6. Doit.im: this one has really impressed me! Very GTD oriented, wonderful UI, very nice iPhone and Android versions, Mac app, very responsive customer care. Even if some other professional tools are probably better, Doit.im handles very weel shared task with your team. You can easily create several teams, assign tasks and track them over time. Contexts are also very clear and GTD-style. BTW, for now Doit.im is FREE!
7. Flow: Flow is incredibly similar to Doit.im. I don’t know which came first, but I would say one was inspired by the other one! Very clean and GTD oriented user interface with possibility to share your tasks. The only big difference with Doit.im is the price: 99$/year.
8. Producteev: very nice UI and I think excellent for collaboration and teams. You can easily comment on each task and see the task history as a Facebook page with comments from co-workers. Also available: iphone app, android app, stand alone app for mac and windows. Excellent for collaboration and sharing but I think way too expensive.
9. Do: Do is one the most simple tools I’ve seen. Not GTD oriented but with an extremely easy to use interface: just projects and tasks. That’s it. You can delegate your tasks, comment on each one and create shared notes (for meeting minutes for example). iPhone and Android apps are very clean and easy to use.
10. Basecamp: Basecamp is intended for a more professional use and for larger companies. Although I don’t think it offers a GTD style and did not capture my full attention with its UI.
11. Pagico: Pagico really impressed me at the beginning. More than a task management tool I would say it is a project management software. Maybe the only one with Gantt charts, it could help you manage complex projects with deadlines. The big bug about Pagico is that there is no web version, no iPhone version (only iPad) and sharing tasks and projects with co-workers is just not straightforward.
12. Wunderlist: very popular on the Apple app store. Very clean UI but I don’t think it can compete with many of the others.
13. GetItDone
14. ActionMethod
15. Nirvana
16. 42Task
17. SmartQ
18. Goplan
19. Vitalist
20. Podio
21. GTDAgenda

Since efficiency and productivity is almost always measured in time, optimizing our time is one of the most challenging adventures of our days.

I’ve been using several different project management applications in the last few years, but I must say that their learning curve and usability benefits is not always worth the price.

On the other hand I’ve discovered several low cost (or free) apps the are excellent companions for your time management needs.

Being a Mac guy, I’ve used Omnifocus and Things for a while. They are great tools but lack cloud computing and collaboration features. That’s why I went back to the nice and clean Remember The Milk web app, with excellent versions for mobile devices. Using it to its full potentials, with an intelligent tags and lists organization, I believe it is a great GTD and productivity enhancer.

One of the key features I’ve being using lately is the “time estimate” for each singe task. This is a guess you should be making for each task you create. If tasks require more the 8 hours I think you should rethink them and make them become a project instead.

Now you can start planning your day and week according to the estimated time. For instance, if you create a Today list, RTM gives you the total time required to accomplish all your tasks! From my experience, if you have a regular 9 hours working day, try never to exceed 6-7 hours of tasks time otherwise you’ll never make it! (you do need to eat or go to the toilet sometimes..)

Here is where my wonderful experience with Paymo comes in place.

Paymo is a very clean and easy to use time tracking system. You can enter projects, tasks, clients and your entire team. Then you can start tracking your time either by editing the time after you have finished your task or in real-time by using Paymo’s chronograph on the web, on your desktop as a widget, or on your mobile with the iPhone app.

At the end of your day you know how much time you have worked, on which task, on what project, for which client and you can then check if your estimsted time (in RTM for instance) was correct.

Paymo’s reporting features make it a perfect choice if you have timesheets needs, if you have to complete reports for your company with your team or if you have to calculate the amount of hours you need to invoice to your clients.

The only thing I could imagine in my wish list is a sort of integration between my time management (RTM) and my time tracking system (Paymo). In that way I could find my tasks in Paymo without having to re-enter them twice.

RTM, Paymo, any plans for open APIs on either side?

As standards of living improve, people are placing an increasing emphasis on leisure, dynamically seeking ways to relax and eliminate stress. This is why travel has become a popular leisure activity. Numerous factors influence the destination choice, including advertising campaigns, travel agency promotions, airline ticket discounting, movies or TV programs, personal preferences and word of mouth.

In particular, the Internet has dramatically changed the competitive dynamics of the lodging industry, since a continuously growing number of tourists use this technology to collect useful information for their travels. Marketers, who have long sought to harness and manage interactions such as these to their own advantage, have recently begun to consider and devise strategies to manage online interpersonal influence.

Especially hospitality and tourism marketers find the issue of critical importance in view of the fact that recent research has demonstrated the influence of both positive and negative word of mouth upon tourism products in studies across a broad range of nations.

I think marketers in the tourism market cannot ignore word-of-mouth today and therefore cannot ignore what is being said on the blogsphere about specific locations and type of accommodations.

Competition is increasing in the tourism industry as tourism businesses move into the electronic marketplace. Increased competition calls for more customer orientation. One way to obtain competitive advantage is trough customer satisfaction, a factor of increasing importance in the more competitive electronic markets.
Today users can easily spread their comments and complaints which, in turn, can significantly affect a company’s image. Electronic word of-mouth is a useful tool to disseminate positive and negative observations on companies and brands via websites, chat rooms, and consumer forums.

Tourism organisations need to recognise these changes and to develop personalised services to address individual needs. Proactive services may be offered based on the anticipated needs resulting from known and declared or previously experienced customer profiles. Although a number of research studies regarding web sites relating to the tourism/hospitality industry have been conducted worldwide, few have been found that deal specifically with consumers’ opinion and the way brands or travel operators react to positive or negative word-of-mouth. I think the tourism industry still lacks in analyzing and gaining marketing intelligence from social media, underestimating the potentials of brand engagement in the blogsphere.

This is why I believe tourism organizations should investigate sentiment analysis software, capable of helping in re-arranging marketing campaigns “on-the-fly” with best practices.

What I think is important, especially to tourism agencies, is the ability to analyze and react in near real time. The majority of tools available today are SaaS based web application that enable users to define search terms (products, services, company names, brand names, etc.) and configuration parameters from a browser.
When a sentiment analysis software identifies an article relevant to a query topic (such as “Ischia Island”), it first retrieves blogs and news articles relevant to Ischia Island and then analyzes their content using a mix of natural language processing and statistical methods.

Finally, another interesting point is to compare and contrast findings between different time periods, since consumers change their perception frequently. What could be of great impact could be the integration of sentiment analysis tools with existing marketing applications.

Anyone has used commercial sentiment analysis tools for tourism marketing?

We often read about time management and tasks management. I have to say that GTD has really changed the way I work and the way I manage my time in general. David Allen has done a great job at putting into simple words a great process and approach to work/life management.
Following the GTD success, many software applications are now available that really help you in managing time and tasks with the GTD process in mind. I have previously posted a few articles about interesting apps that can make your GTD time management easier, such as To-Do Lists & Tasks Management.

Although these apps are all excellent for managing your tasks I have found that none of them put together time management and time tracking.
What about if you have the following requirements?

1. track the amount of time you work on your projects
2. track the time you work on each task or type of task
3. bill your customers according to the time you spend on their project

Unfortunately none of the software I’ve tested really put together these two aspects. It would be great if you could write down each of your tasks, insert an estimated time-to-complete and then actually track how much time you have spent on that particular task.

I’ve found a few apps for time tracking that are very well thought:

1. Yanomo
2. Paymo
3. Yast

All three offer a limited free subscription, which I would give it a try. The last two also offer a free iPhone app that lets you track your time on the go. But syncing your favorite GTD system with one of the above mentioned time tracking apps could be really time consuming. If you have very few tasks that are not updated very often, then you could also consider the possibility to manually update your time tracking application with the data in your task management software.

An interesting solution I’m (still) evaluating is to use Google Calendar.
What I’ve found viable is to create as many calendars as projects you have. A good idea could be to create calendars named “PROJECT XYZ – TASKS”. When you want to insert a task within that particular project you just add an event into the calendar. In case you have sub-projects you could name the tasks “@SUBTASK: task”. Quite trivial up to this point. But how do we track time?

Well, here is where Youcalc comes in. Youcalc is a very interesting software that can be hooked to you google calendar. After you have created your free account, you can start tracking:
- the amount of time you have spent on each calendar
- the number of events you have on each calendar

Although it seems like an interesting (and free) solution, it still has some bugs I’m trying to sort out:

1. you have to decide if you can manage to copy your tasks from your GTD app to your Google calendar
2. inserting your tasks only into Google calendar could be dangerous if you don’t complete those tasks, because they won’t show up anymore in the future
3. you have to decide if the tasks in your calendars are SCHEDULED or COMPLETED tasks

I would be tremendously happy to hear about your opinion or some alternative solution.

I used to post tweets and blog posts as soon as they were ready, as soon as I had something to share.
But lately I’ve figured out that choosing a time and date to put your content out there could be crucial. Also, with the help of very easy to use tools for  tweeting and blogging, I believe choosing a correct time has become really easy.

Some studies show that posts on Facebook are more often shared between 9.00 AM and 10.00 AM. Also, it seems like there are more chances of your message to be re-tweeted in the early afternoon, from 1.00 PM to 3.00 PM.

As far as blogs, posting in a given time is something you can do from the publishing options of any blogging software such as WordPress. The correct time for posting your blog is a bit less important than the correct time for tweeting and Facebook. This is because your blog post will be there for a long time, obviously unless you have some incredible news you want to share with the world as soon as possible.

Your tweets and posts on Facebook are the ones you should pay more attention to, even because you might want to share here a link to you blog posts.
There are several tools that make scheduling your tweets easy, such as Tweet-U-Later.
But the one I have found very efficient is HootSuite, which makes you schedule twitter tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn posts at the same time at a give time and date. You can also see your pending posts and post links when visiting web pages with the Firefox or Chrome add-on.

In our always-on social media world I think we are assisting to a new phenomenon: the “social loneliness“.

Social media has changed the way we interact with our friends, colleagues, loved ones. Mobile devices and their wireless and cheap connections have changed the way we use social networks. We are using mobile devices to update our status on facebook, twitter, tell friends where we are having dinner using foursqaure, and upload pictures of what we are looking at.

Wonderful! I would say.
But the strange thing I would like to address here is that not all of us are as social as they might appear on social media!

I was running in a public park in Milan a few days ago and I’ve noticed a noticeable amount of people who were sitting or walking alone in the park playing around with their mobile device. Most of them were probably updating their status on social networks, reading posts from friends and sharing their position somewhere else. In a situation where you would expect some lonely and contemplative thinking or reading, these people were actually trying to feel in the middle of a crowd. I often update my status or position from mobile too, but usually this is while I’m on the way traveling and do not have the chance to have face-to-face chat with friends. This is also a nice way of feeling close to friends.

Hence I have two open questions:

1. since they are walking alone in the park, do you think these people are really as social as they appear on social networks?

2. could spending a bit less time updating our status from mobile devices in the park help us in getting a few real drinks with friends at the pub?

This makes me think that some people are not expressing their real inner soul, appearing much more social then they truly are.
Also, should we try to be a bit less lazy and go outside to meet with people instead of updating our status from our iPhone? Are we going towards a social loneliness?

Any thought or ideas are more than welcome.

I came a cross a few interesting new web apps that maybe represent the social answer to the economic crisis we are living today.The first one is called Fiverr where the slogan is “The place for people to share things they’re willing to do for $5″. And that’s exactly what it is. A kind of social network where people offer the most strange performances and services for just 5$!

Even if the bigger number of proposals are technical ones (such as debugging web sites, installing wordpress themes, etc.), you can also find pretty strange announcements such as: “I will call your girl and tell her that you are gay for $5″, or “I will send you

a hi res photo of me doing any yoga pose for $5″, or “I will be your friend and send you an email every day for 14 days telling you how wonderful you are for $5″…

The other (very similar) service is called TenBux. Given the “expensive” quotation – from 5$ to 10$ – you can find here more complex offers, which in some cases really seem to be unrealistic, given the amount of time needed. Great attention is on social media and new marketing concepts, such as “I will send an email ad to 92,000 people about your business or website for $10″, or “I will make a basic but nice-looking blogger blog for $10″. Silly proposals also play a key role, like: “I will eat a whole onion and send you a video for $5″, or “I will sing happy birthday in spanish whilst drunk to your chosen person for $10″.

These, and probably other web sites, are an interesting phenomenon a proof of evidence of what the social media experience has been dragged and how an economic crisis can lead people to work for a few bucks.

Whan I was young and romantic, I loved my to-do lists made with my best pen and written on my elegant agenda. They were fascinating and useful but I do remember I had some productivity issues. First of all I wished all not completed tasks could magically shift to the next day..

Probably less romantic or fascinating, electronic to-do lists definitely changed the productivity levels of my working day.
Which tool you use really does not make much difference. But the way you use it sure does.

Whatever you use (my favorites are Things, Omnifocus and RememberTheMilk) be sure to:

1. Write don’t remember: following David Allen’s GTD approach, don’t try to remember things, just write them down. Don’t use your CPU in trying to keep everything in your mind, but use it to think and be creative. Anything the catches your attention, that you understand you have to take care of should go in the Inbox list for later processing. This is something I do several times a day but you have to do it at least before closing your day and as soon as you start your day. Some people say this is too much time consuming. I think they don’t know how much time it takes in trying to remember lost tasks and how much useless space is occupied in their memories for things that could fit in three lines of text.
2. What next? All GTD based tools are able to handle next actions. This is the place where you should put things you must or should do as soon as you have the time. If you are not able to take care of them, they should probably go in the next day’s actions.
3. To-do lists not calendars: often people confuse to-do lists with calendars and therefore to-do list tools with calendar applications (such as google calendar). They are NOT the same thing. Your to do lists should only contain those elements which are a portion of a project and that do not have a given date or time to be taken care of. A meeting with your boss is not a task, and “complete the marketing report” is not something that should be scheduled in you calendar.
   Using your calendar as a to-do list will only make you forget all the actions which you where not able to do during the day, because they will simply remain in the “past”.
4. Not now? Then when? If you just know a specific task is something you cannot take care of right now, then you should schedule it for a specific date. If you don’t know when and if you are going to accomplish that task, then it is probably a candidate for the “someday” list you should have in your tool. Here you can park objects you are not sure about how to treat them and if you will ever complete them.
5. Projects and areas: all tasks should be part of a project and a given area. Projects can be anything from “business start-up” to “paint the house”. Any task should be the atomic element of a project. Also, each task (and therefore each project) should go into a specific area, which could be “personal”, “business development” or “friends”.
6. Waiting for: I have a list of people I work with in order to assign tasks. Not all tasks are things you can actually do, some of them have to be assigned to someone else. Be sure not to forget these tasks just because they don’t depend directly on you. Sending an email containing a task for someone does NOT mean you have completed the task. You have to keep track of it until you are sure it has been done.

A I said, the tool you use is not important. It could be a very expensive software application to any paper system you like. But in my experience I’ve found that the more you like your tool the more you tend to use and respect it. So use nice looking apps, or elegant pens and papers.

Probably I’m obsessed by this word: synchronization.
But if I’m not the only one who tries to keep all calendars, emails, to-do lists, files, contacts in sync, then I would like to share some of my considerations and some of my experience with a pretty good cocktail of tools I regularly use. Truly enough, I would love to hear similar thoughts and experiences from anyone.

First of all let me say that I’m a great fan of David Allen‘s GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology and that I love to be organized, efficient and productive. Second, I must admit that I’m also fascinated by new technologies and not very keen anymore to use paper and pen.. Oh, and I’m a Mac man.

What I would like to share are some experiences, workarounds and ideas I came up in the last years in order to try to keep my life (and work tools) in sync.

1. Files: it is since I first discovered Dropbox a couple of years ago that my file sync and disk backup has become a game. Dropbox is a wonderful application which automatically syncs your files on multiple computers. Each time you are connected to the Internet the latest changes on your computer are reflected on all other computers (including iPhone). This is also a wonderful method for backing up all your file, forgetting about it!
All your files are stored both on your computer and on remote servers. This means opening and saving files is as fast as before, plus you can access and change all your files also through a web interface if you’re not using your computer.

2. Calendars: many have tried to imitate it.. but I think there is nothing like Google calendar (read more). Clean, web 2.0 interface and hundreds of features it is really one of the greatest tools from Google. Obviously there is nothing to sync from one computer to another since it is all remotely stored. But there is some work to do in order to sync with your iPhone. Here is how to do it.

3. Tasks: if your life is (or tries to be) organized using task managers, then this is another piece of life you need to keep in sync. You cannot write down a note or to-do on your mobile device while on the go and then don’t have it on your pc!
If you are satisfied with what a web 2.0 interface can give you, then I would suggest web tools (such as Remember The Milk) that obviously don’t need any sync, since all data is remotely stored.
If you prefer stand-alone applications, you might want to try Omnifocus and Things. While OmniFocus comes with a pretty good sync process using MobileMe or any WebDAV server, Things does not: you need to have your computer and iPhone/iPad on the same wireless network and do the sync manually

4. Contacts: having a Mac, I think you basically have two options for syncing your contacts. One is using google contacts and selecting the “sync with google contacts” from iTunes or Address Book. The other option is to buy a MobileMe account! While the first option is free, the second is 79$ / year.
Syncing your address book with Google Contacts now works much better than in the past, but still I think there are some issues like duplicates or wrong first and last names in your contacts. Also the type of info you can sync is restricted to  Google contacts.
Obviously using MobileMe I did not find any of these issues: all contacts’ infos are perfectly synced (including photos) and it also works in near real-time.

5. E-mails: even though it is probably unnecessary to mention, email sync is very easy today using IMAP.
Configuring your accounts with IMAP you can have all your emails synced in real-time with all your clients. One suggestion: forward all your email accounts to a Gmail account. IMAP on Gmail works great with Apple Mail or any other client. In this way you will have an advanced catch-all account which you can read from your Mac, iPhone, iPad, having all in sync!

For those of you who think can keep all your activities and To-Do list in your mind, for those who still rely on paper and pencil, for everyone who does not believe that technology can improve your productivity… stop reading this article. For all the rest I hope this helps!

Given as requirement that I’m a Mac user and GTD (Getting Things Done, by David Allen) passionate, I will try to illustrate several options I have personally tested for To-Do lists and task management.

OmniFocus
OmniFocus is a complete (and maybe a bit complex) task management tool. Calling it a to-do list would be a bit reductive. It has everything you need for complete organization of your work and private life, both if you use or don’t use the GTD methodology.
Different views, contexts, tags and projects makes OmniFocus a complete way to manage your activities.
Probably the weak point is the user interface, not very clean and very crowded.
On the other hand, a very powerful feature is the sync over-the-air funcionality which makes it easy to sync tasks with more than one Mac and/or with other devices (iPhone app available for 15$).
The cost of OmniFocus is 79$ for single user license.

Things
Things is the real (and maybe unique) competitor of OmniFocus. It has most of the features of OmniFocus, but with an excellent mac-style user interface. Probably this is the most noticeable strength and it is what has brougth Things to fame.
Even if it lacks some of the features of OmniFocus it is probbaly suited for the majority of people working with task management.
The “assigning” feature is pretty intereseting, even if it is only a virtual assignment since there is no real “sharing capability”. You basically work by yourself and remind yourself someone else has a task in charge.
The real missing feature is syncing. You can only sync (between Mac an Iphone) on a wireless LAN and you have to do it manually! Things for Mac is $49 and iPhone app is $7.99

RememberTheMilk
RTM has a totally different approach: it is totally web based, hence it automatically syncs all your computers and mobile devices (support for symbian, iphone, ipod, ipad, android, blackberry..)
Even though the UI is a very clean 2.0 web app, obviously it is not as advanced as its stand-alone apps competitors.
The iPhone App though is very celan and works perfectly well.
Tabs, tags and other interesting search features make RTM a suitable task management system even for the most demanding “organizers”. Using tabs you can easily create multiple projects, create deadlines (which will will have a push notification on iphone), assign tasks to people (really sharing or sending the task).
RTM is free or $29/year for a Pro account. iPhone app is free when buying a Pro account.

As a conclusion I can say that the first two tools are for a more personal task management, with no real need for sharing tasks with a team and for those who are really focused on user interface.
Remember The Milk is a bit of a paradigm shift, moving your tasks to the cloud and using at its best all the cloud computing advantages. No need to sync: all tasks are stored remotely and you will see them up to date when you use your pc, iphone, ipad.
Also sharing tasks is as easy as sending an email to colleagues and friends, who will find the task in their RTM Inbox and can then move it to a specific folder or project.
Oh and finally, RTM can obviously be also used by PC users