Yurii Rashkovskii's Blog

I should say I like OpenID. It was serving our authentication needs for Issues Done very well and still continues to. Though few days ago we’ve decided that we should simplify the process how users get into the system. And, thanks to MyOpenID, it is possible now — I’ve created an Issues Done sign up in just few minutes. Isn’t it nice? I think it is :)

By the way, we had an internal Groups release today. That means that we’ll soon announce first bits of Groups functionality to our early adopters, so they will be able to share issues within their teams effectively.

Stay tuned :)

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Who is Issue Pal? Issue Pal is a system user that will help you planning and reaching your goals, using various techniques to push you towards effective work. That is one of important aspects of Issues Done — it is not like confessional where you leave your “sins” (issues that you will never resolve). We will not leave you alone with your issues, we’ll help you manage them.

So, finally we’ve got a first Issue Pal function working! From now, Issue Pal will move all your late issues into your Inbox. Here is a short Q&A:

• Q: Which issues are considered late?
• A: Currently late issues are those that reside in a queue that has reached its time span. I.e. if you had issues in Rightnow and/or Today, when next day comes, all your issues in Rightnow and Today will be moved to Inbox. When next week comes, all your issues in Week will be moved, and so on.
• Q: Why?
• A: Practice shows that almost nobody actually replans his or her queues even if there are issues from yesterday, or previous week, month, etc. That means that your queues will remain non-empty each evening leaving no place for your own satisfaction of everything being done! So, moving late issues into Inbox will give you a chance to think more about their planning and assign your issues to an appropriate queue. This is a great analysis tool.
• Q: Could I opt out from Issue Pal functionality?
• A: No. Issue Pal is a unpluggable component of Issues Done and we see no reason to escape from his guidance (unless you don’t want to be effective).

Enjoy!

We’re moving to a new sharing system these days. While we haven’t yet released groups, personal sharing got changed. Unlike before, you will not be able to find anybody within the system by trying to autocomplete different names.

As from now, the only names that you are able to autocomplete are your ‘contacts’, or ‘friends’ (we have not yet decided how to name them). How you can actually add somebody as a contact/friend? That is pretty simple if that person allows you to by giving you his/her e-mail address. So you only need to enter this e-mail address in the sharing input field and press Share. If user with such e-mail is found, then you’ve shared your issue successfully and this person is already in your contacts.

And yes, if you have shared issues with somebody before, they will remain in your autocompletion list.

While in early private beta, we are not allowing to share with e-mails that are not yet registered within the system. Once we’ll be able to handle more users, we’ll make it possible to invite users by simply sharing issues to any e-mail address.

This functionality is pretty much new, so please report if you have any problem with it. You can either e-mail us or share an issue to yrashk@issuesdone.com

Enjoy!

SEPTEMBER 1, 2007

Now we’ve enabled an instant registration for Issues Done account. You just enter your OpenID, confirm your email address and you are in. That simple. Number of accounts to be registered is limited to let us balance it with our resources and plans.

Issues Done is a GTDish approach to tracking issues, implemented in Ruby on Rails. It is at its early stage these days. We’re going to improve it significantly in the coming weeks, introducing new sharing system, Issue Pal, due and reminder dates and milestones.

You can get your OpenID account at MyOpenID.COM or any other OpenID provider.

Interested? Sign up !

We’re working hard these day to launch an early version of Issues Done early Fall 2007. It is not yet feature-complete, though we already use it internally and leaked a few accounts to friends of us. It is by no means final look, but you can have an idea of what ID will look like:

What is Issues Done? Issues Done is a new tool to eliminate busy people’s procrastination stress — it is an opinionated application that implements GTD methodology and pushes you towards following it.

What do we have already:

• GTD queues
• Tagged issues
• Issue sharing
• Keyboard navigation
• RSS aggregation (early version)
• Changes monitoring (early version)

What do we plan to implement soon:

• Late issues
• IM/e-mail notifications/nagging and communication interface (SMS will come later)
• Work groups
• Issues autosharing
• Milestones
• Issue filtering

If you’re interested to participate in early testing rounds, drop us a line to team at issuesdone dot com.

Andrey Khavryuchenko has posted first article about Issues Done and GTD queues on Issues Done’s blog

This article describes why we’ve chosen particular paradigm for managing issues and how it looks in Issues Done.

More articles to come soon!