Overview

Jalot is a new and efficient way to organize your task lists – your list of things to do. Jalot is different from the thousands of other task management systems in two key areas – it is very fast and easy to use, and it can manage tasks across the various groups of people in your life. This document describes some of the key features of the Jalot system, and makes recommendations about how to use Jalot effectively, both by you and within your groups and organizations.

Most people choose to keep track of their tasks using a combination of two techniques – “sticky notes” of things to do and keeping email in the inbox until the task is completed. The sticky notes might be literal Post-It notes stuck to a computer monitor, or may be an electronic notebook such as the many task list software like Outlook or Palm’s organizer. Our favorite example from our graphic designer: Post-Its stuck to the back of a Palm Pilot. People use these techniques, rather than software like Project or even the more complex features of Outlook because it’s easy, fast, and reliable.

Jalot strives to be as easy to use as those common techniques, while still providing the powerful tools necessary to make shared tasks – tasks viewed by multiple people – useful.

You can use Jalot very effectively to keep track of your own tasks, but most of Jalot’s power comes when groups of people use it to maintain a collection of tasks across the entire group, keeping everyone up-to-date on the creation, updating, and completion of tasks related to that group.  And where Jalot becomes uniquely useful to you is when different groups from different parts of your life – work, family, organizations – all coordinate and come together in one place, while automatically keeping permissions managed correctly.

Respect the J

Jalot is an acronym – “Just a Lot of Tasks.” Jalot doesn’t aim to tell you what to do, it tells you what needs to be done. This is a subtle, but important, point – Jalot doesn’t prioritize or explicitly tell you what to do next because tracking all of the details necessary to make those kinds of decisions requires enormous amounts of information. The more information you need to enter into a task management system for it to be useful, the less likely you are to use it regularly. Jalot is not a project management system – it’s just a way to manage lists of things to do.

The average person does not use heavyweight project management software, such as Microsoft’s Project, because they are far too complex. Complex projects with milestone dependencies, interrelated clusters of tasks, and dedicated project management staff need the power and organizational skills of Project, but the software requires too much effort for all but the most sophisticated users, and that complexity creates a barrier against its regular use.

Many times, new users to Jalot love the system but want to add “just one more feature” to make it truly useful, such as priorities or due dates. To keep Jalot simple and fast, it is important to resist the temptation to keep adding features which slow down task creation or end up not being used.

For example, task management systems that are shared across multiple people – or even more dramatically, over multiple groups or people – tend to misuse priority information. What is a priority to one person is not a priority to others, and what is a high priority on one task list may be a very low priority compared to tasks in other lists. Jalot just tracks a task – it assumes that by showing you a list of things for you to do that you can pick out the most important and most timely tasks to focus on. By not tracking priorities, creating tasks in Jalot is faster and requires less thinking effort. Besides, eventually everyone marks all of their tasks for other people to do as “Important,” because only important tasks will be at the top of the task list – unimportant tasks are sometimes never even seen.

Tracking due dates is a similar situation. A due date, by itself, is not very useful – a simple project due tomorrow may be less important or less interesting than a project which isn’t due for ninety days but will require much more effort to complete. For a due date to be helpful, task systems need to know how much time a task will take, how much of the task has yet to be completed, what portion of your time you will spend doing the task in the remaining time available – and suddenly, Jalot’s simplicity has been completely lost.

This design goal – removing information that you can track yourself and is painful to maintain electronically – is called “respecting the J.”  Respecting the J means making sure that Jalot stays just a lot of tasks.

Group Tasks

Jalot organizes tasks into “task lists:” a listing of tasks associated with a common purpose, such as a project, client, or just an ad hoc group of people. This task list can be shared across multiple users who want to be kept up-to-date on the pending and recently completed tasks.

Jalot keeps track of when a task has information that has been updated since the last time that you’ve reviewed the task. The update may include that the task has been completed, a comment from the person assigned the task, or a change in assignment. The new information is brought to your attention quickly, keeping you informed as the task changes and evolves. Likewise, if a task is assigned to you and you add a comment to the requestor, it is brought to their attention and they can clarify the task; their response to your comment is then highlighted for you.

A task list has a list of people who have access to the task list, and therefore access to the tasks within a task list. But you can also give access to a task merely by assigning it to someone – they then have access to that task, but not to the other tasks within the task list. The permissions and security are taken care of by Jalot, behind the scenes and unobtrusively.

Different Groups, One Screen

The different groups in your life – work, family, volunteer organizations, and so on – can all share space on your Jalot screen. Each group will be kept separate from other groups, so that your work colleges do not see that you have personal shopping tasks on your master to-do list, for example.

The more parts of your life that are kept organized in one place – be it Jalot, your PDA, or your calendar – the more likely you are to use and check that one place. Jalot provides you with the tools you need to keep the various aspects of your life in the same task system, without making every task visible to all.

Usage Suggestions

Everyone uses their personal task systems differently, but with Jalot, it is somewhat important that people in the same group have the same expectations of what to expect. Here’s a collection of tips that seems highlight some of the ways to make Jalot as effective as possible, particularly when a group of people are sharing tasks. Some of these tips are taken from Getting Things Done and talk about how to manage your tasks in general.

• Collect everything. Many task management experts advise that you have one location to gather everything that needs to be done in your life. Jalot has the tools to be that place, or has the tools to synchronize with other locations where you may be collecting information. But get tasks out of your inbox, post-it notes, calendar, and cell phone memos and into one, organized place.
• Do not use your calendar for tasks. Use your calendar for events that have a specific date and time associated with them, but do not use your calendar for tasks. If you want to remind yourself to start a task on a particular date, start a Jalot task and defer it until that date.  This keeps your calendar clear and focused on events, and if you miss checking your calendar on that date, Jalot will still have it waiting for you when you return.
• Get multiple groups to use it. You were probably invited to use Jalot by someone who wishes to share tasks with you. As you get more of your information talked into Jalot, it becomes more and more useful to have the people that you work with to get their tasks into Jalot also, so that you can keep track of cross-assigned tasks and watch tasks get completed.  Jalot functions best the more groups in your life use the software, even if the groups are not related to each other at all.
• Watch lots of things. Even if you’re not involved in a project, watching a project’s tasks and comments on the tasks can help keep you informed about other projects at your organization. Good cross-project pollination also happens when you read a comment and can provide constructive input or feedback.
• Review all tasks daily. Each day, you should review every task on your “Your Tasks” screen. This makes sure that tasks that have little activity or recent comments do not get forgotten, and also reminds you of when tasks that you have assigned to other people have not yet gotten done.
• Keep main screen manageable – defer tasks. In order to keep the list of tasks on the “Your Tasks” screen manageable, you need to remove tasks that you are not currently working on or thinking about. By deferring tasks, they are removed from your primary list until a date you specify; it also lets the task creator know both that you are not currently working on the task and when you expect to get back to it, keeping everyone in the loop.
• Review deferred tasks weekly. Your tasks which have been indefinitely reviewed – your “someday maybe” tasks – should be reviewed each week, just to keep their interest in the front of your mind.
• Keyboard shortcuts. Almost everything in Jalot has a shortcut key, which is shown as an underlined letter on the action’s link name. Some shortcuts don’t have underlined words; the mouse-over tip frequently shows the keyboard short cut. One in particular is the space bar – pressing the space bar from either the main screen or show task screen will show you the next task with new information that you have not yet seen. It’s easy to press space over and over and get caught up on the various tasks you are watching.