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This is the
time of year when lists breed like guppies — masses of them
everywhere, on desks, refrigerators, dashboards. Not just any
lists, but the worst kind: to-do lists. Some can be sweet, like
those naming future trips or friends’ birthdays. But to-do lists
are strident things demanding your attention and your precious
time. They exist because you must accomplish certain things this
month, this week, this moment and forget the novel that’s
beckoning from your bookshelf. To-do lists wait for no man or
woman.
In our
household, spring and summer are prime breeding seasons for
these things. Between the outside that needs to be seeded,
weeded, fertilized, planted or mulched, and the inside stuff
that demands fixing or replacing, our lists are worse than
rabbits. One thing’s for sure, Steve and I never have a problem
generating lists. Our problem is crossing things off — actually
getting the chores done. Which is why when I read the following
article published in Technology Review, I wondered if I
was the only sane person left on this planet.
According to
the author, Lissa Harris, “The problem with to-do lists and
schedules is that you need to fill them out….. Now a new
generation of free online schedulers promises to end that
drudgery.”
Uh, Lissa, I
hate to burst your techno bubble, but that’s not the problem for
people like me who live in the real world. The last thing I need
is a new generation of on-line schedulers that seems to be
suffering from the same proliferation problem as my lists!
Making the list is not the drudgery part of it. That part is
easy. You sit down with a quill and parchment and write stuff
down, thereby creating a tiny bit of order out of the chaos of
your life. Sometimes, if you’re an organizing nut like me, it’s
even fun. But let’s explore Lissa’s premise further. It seems
that there is now a new generation of schedulers out there
designed to unburden us.
These
new web applications use natural-language processing to
interpret spoken commands and ordinary written sentences to
build calendars and personal organizers.
So now,
instead of simply jotting a few words down on paper, we’re
building techno-edifices. How is that getting my work done?
Actually doing the chores has somehow gotten lost in the whole
romance of creating the perfect list. Does this not smell
suspiciously like work avoidance? I can just see me saying to my
boss, “Sorry I couldn’t do my work today, but I somehow ran out
of time while building the to-do list.” Yeah, that’ll work.
But I’m
being crotchety and set in my stone-age ways as usual. I’ve got
to be fair and give the computer geniuses a chance to show me
how these schedulers are going to set me free. Lissa writes,
The
simplest of the schedulers, Presdo, helps users schedule events.
Type in “have brunch with Margaret on Sunday,” and it translates
your command into data. By taking its cues from the ways that
people naturally talk about time, the software frees users to be
general about dates and times, says Presdo founder Eric Ly.
Imprecise phrases like “next month,” which would be impossible
to put on a calendar without picking a particular date and time,
are allowed to stay fluid for as long as the user wants them to.
Actually,
that sounds kind of interesting since I’d love to be so
time-fluid that my list would quietly slither down the nearest
drain. The problem is when I get a little too liquid I’m left
with a filthy house, no food in the fridge and dead plants. But
Ly insists that that’s a good thing.
“There’s no
widget in our system that looks anything like a calendar, and
that was intentional,” says Ly. “We really wanted to make it
very easy for people to express what they wanted in terms of
time.”
The only
thing that I want in terms of time is more of it, and something
tells me that these schedulers aren’t going to do that for me.
But I really love how another developer named his product.
Tim
O’Reilly named his scheduler Sandy, after his real-life personal
assistant. It can read e-mails and text messages. Telling it to
“remember” something generates an automatic e-mail or
text-message reminder and places it on your to-do list. A
lot of the things Sandy takes down would never have made it into
a calendar in your lifetime — it’s just too painful.
Imagine
that. Without the automated Sandy, a lot of the useless garbage
that you have on your mind would have just fallen through the
daily cracks! But please, forget the automated Sandy, just send
the real one over to help me with the stuff on my list. Good old
Tim certainly wouldn’t have had the time to invent anything
without the real live, breathing Sandy managing his life!
But it gets
better. Yet another program allows you to make a toll free call
to India so you can leave a message that the software then puts
on your to-do list. Now how’s that for a timesaver?
I admit that
I may be stuck in the Shakespearean age of to-do list making,
but as for these new whiz kid schedulers — can they spell
p-r-o-c-r-a-s-t-i-n-a-t-i-o-n? But wait, let me call India or
they’ll never get around to it.
June 26, 2008
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