Walking Contradiction

Shortly after Steve Jobs passed away, back in 2011, Apple announced iOS 5 and the Reminders App. I immediately started using Reminders to help me be more productive. Before that I had been using a combination of Gmail Tasks and GMail Starred Emails to keep track of the items I needed to complete.

Since Apple announced the Reminders App I had been using my phone to remind me of all the tasks I had to complete.. but I had one issue with the Reminders app. There was no way to attached an email to an uncompleted task and 99% of the time I need to refer to an email when completing a task.  This meant I had to spend time sifting through my email in some cases when I forgot to star an item yet had added an item on my phones Reminders app, sometimes this took me up to 15 minutes and turned into a massive disturbance to  my productivity.

A quick anecdote, back in 2011 a company by the name of Orchestra released an iPhone to-do list app that was rendered obsolete when Apple announced their aforementioned Reminders app with the release of iOS 5 sending them back to the drawing board. Back in February, Orchestra went public with their new Mailbox App built on top of GMail and turns your email into a To-do list… only to get bought out a month or so later by Dropbox, Inc.

Back to the original point though. Until the release of iOS 5 I had been using a combination of GMail Task and Starred Emails as my To-Do list. Upon the release of iOS 5 I started using Apples Reminders app as my to do list but could not find a way to make it work for me since I could not attached an email to a To-Do item so I reverted back to using GMail tasks and Starred Emails until earlier this month when I was about to signup for the Mailbox app upon being granted an invite after waiting for about six weeks. Since setting up the app I have had my highest rate of productivity in my life. My turn around time from inception to completion of a project have increased tremendously and I have been more productive than any other time in my adult life. The app provides me the opportunity to Snooze an email for a later time and have confidence that I will not forget to take care of the task(s) that the email is asking me to take care of.

There are still the 1% of tasks that I have to complete that do not have an email I can attach to them, such as completing a proposal for someone who I have discussed a project with either in person or over email. In these cases, I set up a to-do item in Apple’s Reminders app and set it to remind me one to three days before I said I would complete the task, depending what the task is and how important it is.

Nearly a year ago when Google rebranded its Docs product as Google Drive I got rid of my Dropbox account nearly immediately in the name of Google Drive where I stored I was already storing most of my documents… but I have recently realized that I am way to dependent on the Google ecosystem. As a result of this, I am tempted to switch back to Dropbox as my main cloud storage solution and would do so in an instant if they found a way to allow me to attached a document or file to a to-do item.