iPads, writing and Gadget Zen

Yes, it’s another one of those “Hey, I got a shiny new bit of kit and I’m going to bore you all to death by talking about it” posts. I recently got my grubby (if the smudges I am constantly cleaning off the screen are any gauge) hands on an iPad. Thank you, local PC World.

When I first started talking about getting an iPad, rather than just internally musing on it while staring at blogs, Bloke asked me the question everyone really should answer before buying pretty much anything: do you really need it?

With the iPad, that meant thinking up scenarios in which I imagined myself using a tablet, and asking myself whether I already owned tools that would do the same job just as well. I use a Samsung NC10 netbook – a laptop-like device designed with portability in mind, and yet I still find it heavy and cumbersome to lug around with me on a regular basis. I’ve always imagined myself getting more writing done if I could easily move about, gathering inspiration from the places and people around me. Squinting at my iPhone screen, trying to write long passages on the fly, just wasn’t working out. The iPad felt like the perfect middle way.

Of course, I considered the opposing points of view, particularly those from people like Marco (of Instapaper and Readability fame), who hadn’t found the iPad useful for any sort of Real Work.

Gadget Zen
I pitched my final usage scenario to Bloke with my new philosophy of Gadget Zen. I’m finding these days that I don’t obsessively want every single new device on the market*. I’m mellowing, somehow, and actively embracing it.

Gadget Zen philosophy states that every gadget in your life must fill a hole in your workflow. It must justify its place in your life by fulfilling a need that is both identifiable and unique.

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How I Recreated Things in Remember the Milk

I‘ll admit it – I’m a tweaker. As an unabashed nerd girl with N.A.D.D., I spend a lot of time chasing after the next Shiny New Thing, and there is nothing more tweakable to me than task management systems.

I’m not a staunch adherent to the GTD system, preferring a more free-flowing way of managing tasks, so when I came across Cultured Code’s Things back when I first got an iPhone, I swallowed hard and coughed up the £5.99. This was the app I had seen on the home screens of so many tech writers, designers and developers. And oooh, it is so pretty!

Seriously. Look at it. Even the icon looks like it belongs on the home screen, and that is one of the things I take into consideration when picking my apps (I am also slightly shallow in my shiny-hunting).

But the development of this app has been slow and features seem to take a long time to show up. Recently, I was overjoyed to see that Things has finally implemented repeating tasks on the iPhone (I have no Mac to sync repeating tasks from), but it doesn’t get away from the issue of ubiquitous access to my tasks. For that, I have been using Remember the Milk.

The flexibility of Remember the Milk is both a boon and a drawback. For those of you with tweakaholism, enter with caution. This nifty little service can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. For me, the tweaking became a quest to recreate my favourite features of Things in Remember the Milk, namely, the Next and Someday lists.

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