After posting my thoughts on potentially using something like twitter for a todo list, I was sitting at work Friday morning, staring at my IM window looking for someone to chat with while procrastinating and loathing the thought of doing my 2 weekly status reports. (Yes that is 2 per week)
And it occurred to me, (not for the first time,) the killer thing about twitter is it’s ubiquity, you can use it from the web, phone, or IM. And these are the same tools that everyone in corporate america uses on a daily basis almost every minute of the day, yet how many corporate applications use all 3 interfaces, zip, zilch, none at least that I am aware of.
For the time being I’ll focus on IM, as it is clearly the most underutilized of the 3, why? 1. It is perhaps the most used corporate app and yet at the same time probably the least intrusive to the daily workflow, 2. I can’t think of anyone using it for anything other than chat, and 3. It is just a command line (as is twitter, really), and to unix geeks, you obviously know how powerful and useful the command line is.
So, while putting off status reports and flipping back-n-forth between IM and my todo lists, I’m thinking it would be great to manage my todo list through IM.
Then as an extension there are quite a few daily productivity tools that could benefit from an IM interface.
This is the closest thing I’ve found so far: http://todotxt.com/library/todo_jabber_bot/ but it seems complex, and there is also http://todoist.com/, but that doesn’t seem to have an IM interface, but does have just about every other interface, it also seems complex. I need/want something remarkably simple.
I could, probably quite quickly, implement my todo methodologies via IM and provide a web interface to view them. This would help me out quite a bit, primarily by removing an application from my desktop, (which is critical when using Winblows), yet maintain a searchable and manageable todo list.
Anyway, it may be time to learn about jabber and do some tinkering.
