How Do you Do your ToDo’s?

Getting things done is an art on to itself. There is a reason a management philosophy sharing this name and many others that focus on helping you to manage your tasks and time exist. NomiNote does not limit you to a specific method for getting your tasks done; NomiNote is agnostic to how you get your ToDo’s done. However, our goal is to facilitate you to execute your tasks according to whatever strategy you prefer. As such we are very interested in how you get your ToDo’s done. Feel free to let us know by responding to this post, or shooting us an email. What are the possibilities? Below we outline the current ToDo functionality in NomiNote.

Open the ToDo browser from any note. You’ll immediately see the ToDo’s accompanying the current note and you can quickly navigate sub-notes to see what has to be done on individual branches.

If you have read our first post, or are actively testing the app you will likely be aware that you can add ToDo’s to any note in NomiNote. The main way to browse these is using the ToDo browser that utilises your tree structure to traverse these ToDo’s. The browser allows you to look at all ToDo’s at once or navigate down the branches all the way to just the ToDo’s attached to a single note. Thus, your ToDo’s are automatically organised in the same way as your project is organised. In many situations this will work well. Say you want to work on the user interface of your very special (and very hypothetical) Project-X. You simply open the ToDo browser and in a few simple steps you navigate down from the top of your tree, via Project-X, to its UI branch.

However, often when you’re working on multiple projects, certain tasks have to be done by a specific date and your aim may not be to complete ToDo’s of a single part of Project-X, but you need to work on tasks from several projects in order to full-fill your responsibilities. In NomiNote, we have incorporated several solutions to manage your ToDo’s.

Switching to Calendar mode will organise all your ToDo’s by date. You’ll see which ToDo’s are scheduled for today, tomorrow, etc. Scheduling a ToDo can be done by editing its properties, or, when in Date Mode, drag it to the date you are planning to work on it.

If you want to organise ToDo’s by date, you can simply switch to a Calendar Mode. In this mode ToDo’s are categorised by date. Those that aren’t organised yet are found at the bottom of the page (under Uncategorised) and can easily assigned a date by holding and dragging it to any day of the week. Of course doing this for all your ToDo’s at once would be cumbersome; Again, NomiNote’s tree structure allows you to bring organisation. Rather than trying to organise all ToDo’s at once, just navigate towards a specific branch before you switch to the Calendar mode and you’ll only see the ToDo’s in this specific branch. In this way you can easily assign dates to the ToDo’s of Project-X and when you want to see all ToDo’s that have to be done on a specific date you will find them together when you open the ToDo-browser from a higher level.

Aside from Calendar Mode there is also a Priority Mode: you can assign priority to a ToDo by using a star system (from 1 (lowest priority) all the 5 (immediate priority); 0 stars leaves a ToDo un-prioritised). Priority Mode works in a similar fashion as Calendar Mode. But now, rather than days of the week, you can drag ToDo’s to one of the five priority levels.

These two manners of reorganising your ToDo’s may not fulfil everyone’s need and you may have ideas to improve on the current system. Hence the title: How Do you Do your ToDo’s? In the further development of NomiNote we are naturally interested in how people handle the management of their tasks and the possibility of optimising the current systems and potentially adding different options for managing ToDo’s. Just comment on this post, or shoot us an email.


Preparing for Launch

Currently I’m working hard towards the launch of NomiNote, a note taking tool specifically focussed on not only taking great notes, but also keeping them organised and utilise this organisation.

Why NomiNote?

While most of the current note taking apps provide functionality for creating beautiful drawings, personally, I often find them impractical in daily use. My notes never come out as pretty as the preloaded notes and, while my purpose is to create clear notes, pretty is not the first priority. 

More, importantly, as my thoughts and ideas progress notes often become so messy that they loose their utility and are not suitable to communicate ideas and thoughts to others. As such one of the main pillars of NomiNote is providing an interactive environment where typical drawing actions as well as amendable objects live together. This way you can not just make drawings, but improve on them and adapt them with your evolving ideas.

However, the main difference between NomiNote and the mainstream note taking apps is the ability to organise your notes and utilise this organisation. How is this achieved? In NomiNote every note is also a node on your tree. While this is very comparable to the folder structure nowadays offered by many note takers, in NomiNote the tree structure is a much more integral and amendable component and many features explicitly allow you to use this structuring. Let’s start with an example: If you have created any kind of diagram, you have likely run into the issue where you want more text in a single box than reasonably fits in it. In NomiNote you can easily extend the content of a box by creating a sub-note that links from your box and the sub-notes contents can be popped up witha simple click. In essence you can use the tree structure to extend on your notes. In the current example it allows you to zoom in and out. Say you made an overview of the hierarchy of your staff. Perhaps in this hierarchy each employee is represented by a box containing a name and function. Ifyou wanted to add more information, like say a face to the name, you just add a picture as a sub-note that you link to the object for the specific employee. A single tap shows you the picture. The ability to add a picturealso highlights the flexible nature of NomiNote; a note is not necessarily a canvas for scribbles or diagrams. NomiNote offers a wide variety of note types allowing you to make drawings, create text notes, annotate pdfs and even audio recordings.

Returning to NomiNote’s tree structure, there are many more ways to  utilise it beyond providing detail to your content. When you are adding notes to your tree, you are implicitly structuring your project and this structure offers a lot of value. Firstly, traversing the tree allows you to quickly retrieve individual notes that, at least personally, I keep loosing in other apps (a hashtag I thought up months ago often doesn’t cut it and long searches and page flipping are the result). As you work on your project and adapt and expand the structure it resembles the core organisation of your project. And most likely you will have tasks belonging to the different components in the structure. How do you manage these tasks? Again NomiNote offers ways to utilise the structure to get things done. You can add ToDo’s to any note in the app. With a separate ToDo browser you can now browse those ToDo’s and check out what has to be done for a whole project, just a small subcomponent, or perhaps everything you’re currently working on.

What is NomiNote not?

While one of the pillars of NomiNote is to create good-looking, legible, communicable notes, making pretty drawings is not a top priority, for the moment. In future versions I aim to work on making your handwriting, drawings and any other creations look the best they can. However, for now, NomiNote offers basic smoothing options to ensure not every perturbation becomes a problem. But what NomiNote lacks in pretty options, it makes up for in flexibility, because no one is forcing you to draw. Are you more fond of the sound of your voice than your drawings? Just create an audio note and record, organise any audio. 

When should I check back?

We aim to launch the public beta before the mid February, which will be open to anyone who would like to join the project. Only want a fully finished app? In the spring of 2019 we aim to launch the final product. 

What if I can’t wait that long?

Currently the beta is not open to the outside public. The main reason is that I would like the Beta to seamlessly connect to the app in the app store. As I am still changing some of the data structures in the current version, loss of data when transitioning between versions is still a risk. However, it is always possible you have a good reason to be an exception. Please use the contact page if you have a good reason to skip the queue.

Will NomiNote be free?

Obviously, quite some time has been invested into the app. Most of this investment has been a great learning experience. However, in order to keep improving the app in the future I am looking for users to value it sufficiently to be happy to help the project along. As such, I will most likely be putting up a free and paid version of the app. Current thinking is that the free version will not be very limited in functionality, but there will be a cap on the number of notes you can have in your tree. For those who find a benefit in the app and want to continue using it I will offer a full version priced at $5. If there is continued demand, I hope to add subscriptions with online storage and data sharing for a small fee in the future.