Improvements in the Engage Stage

Today we have updated the Engage stage of FacileThings, whose purpose is to provide good options about what you can be doing at any time of the day, according to the GTD four-criteria model for choosing actions.

As you probably know, this section was previously called Dashbaord and, although it also served to help you work on your day-to-day, it had a slightly different purpose than what the Engage stage of the GTD workflow should have. That is the reason why we have modified its design.

With this new design we wanted to give greater relevance to both work lists, the Calendar for Today and the Next Actions list, improving the structure of the page and the scroll system so that its use is smoother in all browsers. Now the lists occupy the entire length of the page:

You can even hide one of the two to better focus on the other:

The list items now show the Area of Responsibility and the Objective assigned to the action.

The system reminders now appear on the top left, with a dimmer color that darkens when you hover the mouse over it.

The charts and the text of your purpose have a solely motivational function and that is why they have gone into the background. They appear in the lower half of the left panel, they are smaller and you will only have one of them at sight. Choose the one that most motivates you with the “dots” menu that appears in the upper right part of that panel.

• Done Actions: It shows the actions you are completing throughout the day and in the previous days. The effect of “crossing tasks off” can be an important motivation when you are focused on the tasks of the day.
• Areas of Responsibility: It shows how you are distributing your time among the different aspects of your life. This chart can motivate you more when you are looking for a better balance in your life.
• My Purpose: Having your purpose present at any time will motivate you to get things done from a higher perspective.

Other improvements

• Now you can set the duration of the events generated by Routines. The field is activated when you are editing a routine and, in the Advanced section, you select a time of the day.

• The drop-down list to select the Calendar view has been changed by four buttons, so you can switch among views directly with a single click.

• In Kanban-style projects, the reminder of the action is now shown if it belongs to the Calendar. In this way, the scheduled events are easily recognizable.

• The list of most used tags that appears when Capturing, Clarifying, and editing actions, so you do not have to type the most frequent tags, is now refreshed every 5 minutes.
• Integration with Evernote: Now the notes’ titles are synchronized when they are updated in Evernote. However, the Evernote tags are not synchronized, as they often have nothing to do with the context topology used in FacileThings.
• The use of the CTRL+1 shortcut (Capture) is blocked when the Capture window is already open. Before, the window opened again and you lost what you already had written.
• When the user cancels the FacileThings account, the integrations with Evernote and Google Calendar are totally disconnected, if they exist.

Originally published at facilethings.com.