I’m absolutely buzzing today; I’ve started using ThinkingRock Version 2 on my mac. Having an effective tool to track what needs doing is critical to living successfully; ThinkingRock is that tool for me – see: a good tool is hard to find and get laddered with ThinkingRock.

For those new to ThinkingRock, you might want to wait a little bit, until the full release, so that you have the help files and full functionality. Windows users will also have to wait a little bit longer for the 2.0 release; I do love the fact that ThinkingRock works on both Mac and PC, I use it on my mac at home and PC for work.

Version 2 is at the ‘gamma’ stage right now, which the ThinkingRock folks describe as still having some bugs and some functionality to be polished, but otherwise stable and safe to use. Version 2 is a quantum leap forwards, now you can:

• Attach files to items
  • I use this to add scanned documents or diagrams – enabling me to be much more paperless and location independent in my working.
• Create recurrent tasks
  • This was a bit of a hole in the Getting Things Done system for me; This new functionality completely closes that hole for me. I’ll have no excuse for forgetting to put the rubbish out, or book that haircut!
• Sort by ‘created’ time
  • For me, taking into account the age of a task is a key part of monitoring productivity and ensuring that items and projects don’t hang around forever (see: dealing with the do its that just don’t get done). While I would have liked something based on last modified time, being able to sort by creation date works just as well, if you spawn a new task whenever you refactor something.
• Add more detailed task attributes
  • For the hardcore to do list geeks, this is a great one: you can now record the energy and time required for a task, as well as setting a priority. If you are feeling bright, you can quickly find a high energy task to do; If you are feeling a bit low you can jump to an easy win. Very neat and unique piece of functionality.
• Speed up actions review with a radically improved actions review screen
  • I had been hoping for some improvements here, but not expected any. I’m blown away by this one, it will save me a great deal of time during my weekly reviews. You can now effectively create custom review screens, so that you can pull up the relevant set of tasks in a single click. Settings are now remembered when the application next runs.

There are also some good work flow improvements, both for processing thoughts and for the automatic sequencing of task lists in projects and subprojects. Also some new house keeping, including a decent archiving facility – just in time, as my file was getting huge.

It has been well worth the wait for Version 2 – solid job Avente!!!

Related Posts: Get Laddered with ThinkingRock, A good tool is hard to find!