Get Everything Done

I have always liked Above&Beyond as an application http://www.1soft.com , although I never seemed able to consistently use it. I think part of the resistance was with the Dynamic Scheduling and floating items that in essence 'told' me what to do. Rather than give me options of what to do overall.

Over the last few weeks I have been experimenting with Above&Beyond as a DIT Task Diary/Closed List. It works remarkably well, but you have to use it in a slightly different way than you would traditionally.

For most people the benefit of Above&Beyond is floating items that are given a priority, time boundaries, then they are automatically scheduled via Dynamic Scheduling based on the amount of time you have available, your fixed appointments etc.

For a DIT Closed List approach I think you need to forget the Floating items to a large extent in favour of Anchored items, anchored to a specific day. But that doesn't mean you loose all the benefit of Above&Beyond.

You can still set items to be done during specific business hours or off hours. Above&Beyond still shows you a graphical view of how busy your day is overall, by colour coding the calendar. You can still use Projects/Time Spacing/Colour Coded Status markers, filters etc. You can still see the stats for the day. Items can still rollover to the next day if not complete etc. Items can easily be moved to a new day. You can still use Memo Items, Appointments etc. I still use a certain amount of floating items which are defined but then use the split function to chunk them down into smaller manageable chunks. This I think works well with the 'little and often' approach.

One thing Above&Beyond does really seem to help with, is focus. Because you start a timer on an item, go away and do it. End the timer, move onto the next item. I think it works well with the principle of 'one thing at a time'.

Above&Beyond is not an easy application to get to grips with, and to get a lot of the benefits you need to run it in Pro mode. But over the last few weeks I have really been pleasantly surprised at how useful and adaptable it is overall. It certainly fits well with a DIT Task Diary/Closed List approach with a few minor changes.

All the best

Steve