I am beginning to see that the headaches I have when using Everdo are likely related to a difference in how we schedule and track our tasks.
I have a feeling that you are using a calendar to track times and dates for your items. This means that Everdo for you is a place for brainstorming what you need to do and then you take that to your calendar and set the dates.
This would explain why so many have requested things like timed reminders in everdo but you did not see the importance. The reason is because you use a calendar for that functionality and are okay with doing things in two separate apps.
But you are making so much extra work for yourself with that workflow. Using a separate calendar app means that everything you had created in Everdo needs to be copied and pasted into the calendar and then the times need to be set in the calendar. You are doubling all of your work.
If you implement the features that we suggest, you will easily be able to give up your calendar for scheduling these tasks.
The following features will protect you from needing to double your work in an external calendar app:
timed reminders inside of everdo
adding due items to the Scheduled list
ability to group by start date in the Scheduled list (which of course includes items which are due without start date)
These are the features that you of course will not value due to your double everything in an external calendar app workflow.
sigh
In addition, should you decide to add some kind of sync with calendar functionality, I would not use it because I don’t want Google calendar knowing all my ins and outs and life projects and plans. That is why I use Everdo, so I can protect this data.
Even If there were such a function I would then need to manage the calendar app.
When it comes to my workflow, I don’t often find myself duplicating Everdo tasks in my calendar. I assume the majority of Everdo users does not either, else they would not be users for long. I use the calendar for different things - time blocks, meetings and such.
Since the reminders feature was added on mobile, I don’t even see very much value in one-way calendar sync.
It is clear that you are not using everdo to schedule things because everdo cannot be used for that in its current state because I can’t even sort things / group things by date.
my stuff that is due today is underneath stuff due next year.
sort by date is a basic function
Look at this picture.
How is this acceptable.
In defense of @Andrei, keep in mind that Everdo is a “GTD” app. In GTD, your use the calendar for your “hard landscape” only, the rest is done via inbox, tickler file, lists etc. which are the things supported in Everdo. Of course, there are GTD apps that include a calendar or synchronize with calendars, but it is very hard to implement that with very little benefit over using a good calendar tool separately.
On the other hand, @joshuarobison is right in that Everdo lacks some elementar features such as reminders or the ability to sort by due date which really would be desirable to have. The reminders could work for very important tasks as a safety net for times when I do not look regularly enough in my Focus list, or for tasks that need to be done at a certain time. Such tasks should normally be added to the calendar, but sometimes I have tasks which can be done any time during a day, but there is a certain time that I really must start working on the task, and I want to be reminded. So reminders would be nice to have. And sorting by due date and other attributes is really useful when you are in the planning/reviewing mode.
Everdo is the only GTD app that does not sort by due date.
The reason I don’t use a pad of paper to do GTD is because technology has the benefit of sorting by date.
Everdo is based mainly on categorizing, filtering, searching and the automatism of moving scheduled and due tasks to the focus view. All of this is not possible with a pad of paper. Sorting is not supported very well (though e.g. the Scheduled list is sorted by date). See also my comment here for why sorting is not considered so important in Everdo.
Com’on Joshua, Basically your are not doing GTD. It’s really long to explain you all the concepts you are misunderstanding. It’s tooo late. I’m going to sleep. Maybe tomorrow, if my bad English let me explain.
