Tasktop

I recorded the talk that I gave at this year’s EclipseCon, JAX and JavaOne conferences. While I was stuck sitting in a chair during this webcast, and as such it may not have quite as much flare or hand waving as a conference presentation, this is the same talk that got me voted into the JavaOne Rock Star Hall of Fame.

The theme of the talk is the idea that focus and flow are key to creative work, and that tool support can facilitate focus and help us maintain flow, dramatically increasing our productivity. I then describe some of the motivations and foundations behind Mylyn’s task-focused interface, including the split between our brains’ semantic and episodic memory systems. After that, things get more concrete with several demos of Mylyn 3.0, followed by a showcase of the tools that make up the Mylyn ecosystem, including open source connectors as well as commercial tools such as the SpringSource Tool Suite and Tasktop.

Enjoy, and feel free to post any questions on the talk, tools and technology. Oh, and since I’ve already been teased about the weird looking drink I take sips from a few times during the talk, a free Tasktop Pro license will be awarded to the first few who can figure out what it is.

The Tasktop Team is very pleased to announce the release of Tasktop Summer 2008. Summer is a great time to offload your brain, so we’ve packed this release with features that will help you do just that. This release’s splash screen commemorates a summer hike in the mountains overlooking Vancouver.

The coolest thing in this release is the new time tracking and reporting feature, which gives you full transparency into your work activities with automatic to-the-minute tracking of time spent working both within and outside of Eclipse. As usual, we put all of the control at your finger tips, enabling you to do things like adjusting timings. You also get flexible reports so that you don’t have to stress the creative side of your brain when needing to report activity or fill out time sheets, and can save your creativity for more interesting activities like coding. As an example, take a look at my time report for the week after the Mylyn 3.0 release, from which I can immediately see that I spent most of my time on the Tasktop working set (blue part of pie chart on far right), a bunch of time went to managing (the gray bars in the graph) and thankfully a higher proportion to working on the tasks I had scheduled (colored bars in the graph). From this I can immediately see why I was itching to write code by the end of the week, since most of my week went into non-programming activities.

Eclipse Mylyn users will be pleased to learn that we are now providing a free version of Tasktop called Tasktop Starter. This allows us to deliver to you some valuable features that are out of the scope of Eclipse and Mylyn. Below you can see a snapshot of the welcome screen that will get you started exploring the features in Tasktop Starter, such as one-click install of partner connectors, automatic Mylyn updates to either release or weekly builds, and a time tracking dashboard for the current week. We’ve also included the Gmail connector for free, which lets you easily tag conversations in Gmail have them appear in Mylyn’s Task List and be accessible when working offline. You need Tasktop Pro for the main productivity features such as focused web browsing, desktop integration, customized time reporting and additional connectors such as Microsoft Outlook. But with Tasktop Starter you get both a useful day-to-day tool and a glimpse at what it’s like to have Mylyn’s task-focused interface keep you focused and productive for the non-coding parts of your workday.

I drive at least 90% of my workday from Tasktop/Mylyn/Eclipse, and one of my favorite new features is the one-click switching of working sets. It seems so rudimentary, but this makes switching your project/work/role contexts as easy as switching task contexts. In addition, you get to see how far behind you’re getting on any particular working set, thanks to an indication of the number of incomings. This is just one part of the additional streamlining that we’re providing with Tasktop as part of our mission to save you clicks. Less is more.

We hope that you enjoy this release of Tasktop and continue sending us your feedback and votes for future enhancements and integrations. For more info see:

	InfoQ interview about the release
	Upated Tasktop site and product tours

Note from Mik: I have updated the title of the blog to Less is More, which reflects the design ideology at Tasktop. While I’ll continue to be the main author and editor, I’m happy to announce that others at Tasktop will be posting about our journey towards the task-focused desktop, starting with this post by Gail.

Have you ever wondered what you did last week? Some of the time, you might ask this question because you want to keep improving your productivity. Other times, you have to fill out time sheets or report activity to your organization. If you have ever struggled with this, check out the dashboard view below that will be available in the summer release of Tasktop, coming at the end of July.

What you see above is a screenshot of Mik’s activity. At a glance, it is easy for him to see how much time he spent on each task last week and when he was working without a task active (gray bars). On the right hand side, the pie charts break down his time into categories and working sets, which are split along the different projects on which he works.

The really great thing is that you don’t have to change how you work with Tasktop to get this information, as it is gathered automatically in the background. In addition to giving you an overview of your workweek, the Tasktop Summer release includes a reporting feature that enables you to created sophisticated reports with activity from any past period. If you are a Tasktop user, a generated report includes all time spent at the keyboard. If you are a Mylyn user, a generated report includes time spent with Eclipse active. When reporting, Tasktop allows you to adjust the time spent on a task (up or down) so that you can account for such activity as time spent in a meeting.

Internally at Tasktop, we’ve been benefitting from being able to see where our time goes, even if it’s sometimes frightening to see how long some tasks take! It’s exciting to be able to share these benefits with others. Get on the early access list now to try this if you’re already a user, sign up for notification of the release at http://tasktop.com or watch this blog for news about the upcoming release.