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The Tudumo Times |
Yesterday during my time in the salt mines I received an email that brought a new productivity (or anti-productivity? I'm not sure) blog to my attention.
The man seems quite insane but in-between lurching around in his underwear and being arrested for shoplifting he finds time to produce insightful commentary on the state of productivity. I think.
Help me decide: (it's a bit naughty, but read it anyway)
I find the links toolbar in Firefox very useful. I add all my commonly-used links, grouped into folders. E.g. under "Tools" I have "application" sites like online banking. Under "News" I have Google Reader and a few news sites I like to keep up with. Under "Discuss" I have a few forums. That's not the trick, though - here's the trick:
A few days ago I moved all forum and news-type sites to a new folder...
..."Waste Time".
Seriously, it works. Now instead of unconsciously opening a news site when I'm thinking about something and blowing half an hour (that I can't afford), I'm very aware of what that folder represents! I'm treating sites in that folder far more gingerly. Every time I wander over to get a dose of news I see "Waste Time" and I slink back to doing some work!
Just in case you weren't aware of the link between procrastination and somebody swallowing random stuff from your medicine cabinet, there's an article over at the GTD Times, the new "semi-official" GTD blog, that will reveal all!
There's also some useful reading over at www.procrastinus.com, including a definition with synonyms (shillyshally? that's a synonym?), some really interesting research on why we procrastinate and various treatments.
"Of note, most procrastinators have a wide streak of impulsiveness in them and likely are looking for the "quick fix." Unfortunately, the more powerful the remedy for procrastination, the longer it takes to work."
So my advice is:
Today I received a comment on my previous post asking if Tudumo should support Remember The Milk (RTM) - partly as a solution to multi-instance 
syncing. I thought I'd answer it here so you're more aware of my roadmap.
On the face of it, it could help the business case for Tudumo and be pretty useful for the many people who already use RTM. RTM is one of the most successful web task applications, so it wouldn't be a bad choice, if I were supporting only one app.
However, I get similar queries every so often - for Remember The Milk, BaseCamp, Google Calendar, even a project management system that a user sells! For the record, there are also calls for Palm support, Windows Mobile support, Outlook, Mac, iPhone, Lotus Notes - you get the idea. Even if I were only supporting one app it would mean differences in data between Tudumo and the target website and likely some limitation in what the API will let me do. All of that doesn't feel right to me.
<vapourware alert>
I'd prefer to have a default Tudumo online service that has a focus on syncing between Tudumo instances and which can be a gateway to all the online service providers. This reduces the amount of code I need to shove into Tudumo to maintain every possible sync target. It also increases the quality of the sync between Tudumo instances because the peg and the hole are both round.
</vapourware alert>
Google App Engine excites me because it should be able to handle high-load sync with ease and should never cost me very much to keep running. That ties in nicely with my wish of providing the sync service for free and having run as well as possible. While my current server could likely handle it fine, with Google I don't have to think about "what happens if".
I could add other reasons but the vapour level is really getting to my head...
I received an email from a really supportive user (http://www.howtogeek.com) who pointed me at a page on Lifehacker - a vote for the best GTD app. So if you have a minute, take a look:
http://lifehacker.com/377609/best-gtd-application
In other (geeky) news, I also got one of only 10 000 Google App Engine invites so will be thinking hard about how to use infinite online power for Tudumo. Need more time, time...
I've been a bit quiet on the blog this year. If I see the blog numbers drop I feel a twinge to post something. Then I remember that this is VERY secondary to just writing code and I do that instead. So I take pride in my useless posting frequency!
Tudumo did nicely during the first "live" month. It was very evident was that people generally took advantage of the earlybird special - as soon as it finished the orders went much quieter! That's cool - people are obviously using the full 60-day trial period and the downloads certainly haven't slowed.
To all of you who stuck it through the beta and have decided Tudumo is the app for you - thank you for the support. My job will be to make sure you get more than you paid for. If you're still deciding - that's great - exactly why I made the trial so long. I want you to be happy with it when you do buy.
To those that have spread the word some - huge thanks. I definitely notice it when links start coming in from somewhere new!
Note - there's a new version up. Smallish changes but quite a few of them and a couple are pretty important. The next should be in a week or two. In about a month I'll start on adding a few bigger features.
