Gneo - Kanban Calendar (5b)

Preamble | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4  | Part 5 : 

(Intro) | 5a | 5b | 5c | 5d | 5e

Twos

Many great things come in twos. There's Laurel and Hardy, Tom and Jerry, your smartphone and its charger, sugar and spice (not including all things nice)... and then there's Gneo and Evernote. Just like Bonnie and Clyde, these two get along like a house on fire. They've got notebooks and tags in common. That's a good start. Gneo (for iOS) offers one of the best visual experiences possible when it comes to extrapolating your Evernote tasks to a 3rd-party app. Plus... it's one of the most minimalistically beautiful/ beautifully minimalistic apps I've had the pleasure of using.

De do do do, de da da da 

Gneo, is the Irish word for "do". Quite fitting for a task-management app. If you're familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix which was popularized by the late Stephen Covey in his book, "The 7 habits of Highly Effective People." The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the greats in the area of prioritization. I sometimes like to call it the Covey Quadrant... but it was his forerunner, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who mouthed the words, "What Is Important Is Seldom Urgent and What Is Urgent Is Seldom Important" It's not the only prioritization method - but it is a darn good one in balancing your life's priorities. 

Some tasks are "more equal than others"

I'm not going to run through the 4 quadrants and what they all mean, except to say that once you've got a basic working knowledge of the underlying principles, one can't ignore your quadrant 2 priorities staring you in the face. A constant reminder that there are truly important things in life - the activities that enrich our lives. The things we invest in that pay off in the long term. Those things are seldom urgent, but we need them to nudge at us. We need them "top right" of our field of vision. That's where Gneo's got you covered. 

If you've got more time on your hands than you know what to do with, I go into more detail in a guest post on the Gneo blog.

As you can see from the above list, you authorize Gneo to fully integrate with the notebooks, notes and tags within a Gneo stack in your Evernote account. Changes you make in either of the two apps are reciprocal. Besides any number of tags you can apply to your tasks, whenever you drag and drop tasks from one quadrant to another in your Eisenhower Matrix (in Gneo), the tags will automatically reshuffle to reflect the Urgent and Important categories your tasks are in. A beautiful thing to behold. 

In a nutshell

• Gneo's tasks are the equivalent of Evernote notes 
• Gneo, too, has notebooks - each of which show up in Evernote as notebooks
• The sum total of your Gneo tasks fit like hand in glove into a Gneo stack in Evernote
• Tags will be tags

In very much the same way that I set up Kanban Calendar using the Reminders list in Evernote, in Gneo we'll have a set of about 40 notebooks to cover the 3 Kanban Calendar sections:

1. A notebook for each of your Project/ Backlogged sections
2. Just one notebook for the "Today" section
   • ... since in one fell swoop it includes the 4 matrix priorities, plus tasks can be checked off (Done stage of our Kanban Calendar)
3. A notebook for each of the 30+ up-and-coming days
   • We'll also slip in a "Smart Notebook" (which is pretty smart) - more about that in a bit.

Just as I promised in the previous post, in the following video clips I've included scores from another of Charlie Chaplin's silent movies "The Kid" (1921) .

In this 1st video I'll give you a quick overview of:

1. A list of the notebooks in both Gneo and Evernote
2. The Matrix interface in Gneo, together with a List View thereof
3.  Dragging and dropping tasks within a Matrix in Gneo and the subsequent tag reshuffling in Evernote (after a sync)

In the 2nd video you'll see how you can...

• Check tasks off (which I forgot to include in the 1st video)
• Create/ edit a "Smart Notebook": Smart Notebooks allow us to filter any selection of notebooks by certain parameters, including due dates, tags, etc. At its simplest, we can include any combination of notebooks to form a new context. I find it handy to be able to view a combination of notebooks for between 3-7 of the next days ahead. You simply check/ uncheck the notebooks from the notebook list that you want to include/ exclude while editing your Smart Notebook. 

Then there's that

Gneo and Evernote sync rather nicely. Especially if you want your tasks to be searchable in Evernote. Another interesting thing one can do with Gneo is piggyback on Evernote and use IFTTT recipes to send data to a specific notebook in the Gneo stack in Evernote... which will in turn sync to the Gneo app itself. You can also send emails through to Gneo using your Evernote email address - if you include a notebook within the Gneo stack in your email subject line or use the Evernote web clipper in Gmail accordingly. 

There are many brilliant features that are part of Gneo's toolbox which I have not so much as hinted at, such as calendar integration (including a whole calendar view), a host of swiping gestures to postpone tasks and access the editing menu to include notes, location, reminders, file attachments, audio and more. Not to forget the search feature which one can use to filter for keywords and tags. 

If you're big on the Eisenhower Matrix and you're determined to have your tasks in Evernote too, Gneo is the best way to view those tasks in an intuitive and palatable way... so, by all means, explore Gneo for yourself. 

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