As a general philosophy, I am big fan of the Agile system contra to the GDT mainly because Agile could clearly show the big picture, much beyond everyday activities. I generally plan my life in Tinderbox using the Agile philosophy.
Last year, I used to write my logs and schedules side by side in Tinderbox; like this guy: Personal Log in Tinderbox: Day Rollover in Map View - YouTube
I also learned that that some time constrains imposed on me could motivate me to get things done. Agile is not also the best system on every day activities. I have to supplement it with either Kanbans (GDT) or other small techniques like Promodoro. I then started to use Vitamin R.
I have been using Vitamin R alongside Tinderbox for a while. It is fast for jotting down ideas. It helps me to program my hours to accomplish tasks. I further learned that Vitamin R keeps the logs of all my activities. These logs can be exported to CSV format. They contain the Objective, start, end, success,completed,actualDuration, uuid and tag fields.
Tinderbox perfectly recognizes many of these fields.
Some useful modifications:
- put the Objective as the first column in the CSV file (opened in any spreadsheet editor).
- Delete the uuid field in the CSV. I don’t see point of importing that field: doesn’t contain any readable material.
original:
modified:
Finally,
- Tell Tinderbox that the actualDuration is interval attribute. You can do this before or after you import the CSV file.
I copied the CSV to Tinderbox, voilà, I have a wonderful recording of where I have been spending my time for the last year; which of the books took me long time to read; which articles took me long time to write. I am using the tags as project names.
This is very wonderful combination. You put the big pictures in Tinderbox; and schedule the small tasks in Vitamin R–> finally, you have all the records in one place for achieving. It can also function to objectively measure my progress throughout the year or the month using the Automation capabilities of Tinderbox that I have never investigated yet. I think this technique of self-assessment method will be more efficient and tenable in the long run than systems build on cumbersome tools: like Spreadsheets. Look at such an attempt here: Main: mySelfQuantifier – CogZest; Screencasts: mySelfQuantifier – CogZest
Another interesting part of this workflow, I just remember, is that Vitamin R wonderfully integrates with the popular todo apps such as OmniFocus, Things, and the Hit List (it doesn’t yet support 2do). If you have a task list in OF, and drag it to Vitamin R, when you are done with the task and mark it completed in Vitamin R, the task is also marked completed in OF automatically. Very cool. I have seen some people trying to archive their task logs from these todo apps to Tinderbox using different scripts. Vitamin R closes that hassle, a natural bridge between these todo apps and Tinderbox.
I love this combination. I want to share it you guys if you find it helpful.
Cheers,
Desalegn.
