To the first topic:  I’m fairly recently retired and, before retirement, was used to working on projects and tracking tasks. After retirement, I had so many ideas running through my head that would flit in and then flit out. I needed some place to record them all before I’d forget and miss something I really needed or wanted to do. I’m an iPad user and was not finding what I wanted in that App Store. I was frustrated. We were riding in the car one day and I was venting to my husband: “I want a program where I can enter a top level project and then add subtasks to it to which I can assign dates. I want to be able to look at these tasks on a calendar so I see what I need to accomplish. Because I’m overly optimistic, I want an easy way to change the target date. Why is this so hard?”

 

The next day or so, I was sitting in front of the Mini and decided to check the App Store there (as opposed to the one on the iPad). Voilà! There it was! I’m talking about DayMap by Whetstone. It was almost exactly what I was looking for. It had the features I had described to Bruce plus more. You can include (or not) your Apple Calendar entries along with the DayMap tasks on the calendar (by week or by month). You can easily move overdue tasks to the current day — that’s great for me! I was in heaven! There’s a Mac version (Lite for free or full for sale) and an iPhone version available through the iTunes store; they sync through iCloud. Until they publish the iPad-specific version, the iPhone version will run on the iPad. I wish they would add the capability to prioritize tasks, but I’m doing okay without; I can manually drag and reorder tasks and projects. Another app that I found later that I might have otherwise considered is “Things” by Cultured Code, but I was already pretty far down the path with DayMap. I’m just happy to have an app/program where I can capture the random thoughts of things that I need to do. I’m definitely getting more done, and I was tickled tonight by an entry on the Whetstone blog: “My question is, how much better could your life be if you became intentional about the direction you’re going, the things you want to do, the person you want to become?”  The emphasis on “intentional” is mine — just liked the synchronicity with my blog name!

 

The other task for Week 4 was tracking searches. What can I say — no searches this week, but I like what Thomas is getting at, especially regarding the repeatability and transferability of searches between sites. To keep in mind for the future...