03 October 2010
You just need a Little Vitamin R
I am big believer in David Allen's "Getting Things Done" approach to To-Do Lists. The concepts of getting everything you need to do out of your brain an onto a list and then organizing that list into projects and contexts works great for me. On my Mac and my iPhone, I use Omnifocus to manage my To-Do list. The trap that may people fall into is that they spend more time organizing and less time doing. Moreover, most GTD applications don't help with the execution part of the "Getting Things Done".
Well, Vitamin R from Publicspace.net focuses on changing just that. It is a tool that helps you break down large tasks into a series of short time slices. It helps you focus on the task at hand, usually 15 to 30 minutes in length (e.g. Pomodoro Technique). That is important because our brains are not meant to multitask; in fact, excessive multitasking leads to less efficiency.
To avoid distractions, Vitamin R can hide or quit unnecessary apps during a given time slice. After a time slice is completed, you can evaluate the effectiveness of the time slice on how distracted or how "in the flow" you were. A quick "Now & Later Board" can allow you to quickly dump ideas that occur while accomplishing a time slice without breaking your concentration.
Finally, Vitamin R can integrate with Omnifocus. By dragging an Omnifocus task into Vitamin R, you can automatically close the task complete in Omnifocus once it is done in Vitamin R. Very cool for closure. In short, Omnifocus+Vitamin R are an excellent combination of GTD and Pomodoro techniques.
Vitamin R is $19.95 for a single user license. They have a free trial so you can try to out yourself.
