Some dependencies allow for lots of slack, so they can be delayed and possibly done more cheaply. If there is a delay in one task, it ripples through the system to a greater or lesser extent. The so-called Gantt chart captured the notion of task dependencies: you’ve got to bang out the dings in your fender before you paint it. That changed with the Panama Canal, which was the first large operation to use the task management invention of an American mechanical engineer. So instead of managing tasks, you managed the task managers. In fact, the watch was the paradigm-buster of its age.Įarly management of enterprises wasn’t very methodical at all: decisions were allocated down the line using the French-invented “bureau” until there were so few tasks that they didn’t have to be managed. It has only been 150 years or so that portable timekeeping devices were available to the average person. It is a little hard to swallow, but the industrial revolution doesn’t go that far back, and the rise of large modern enterprises is even less old. But the history of modern task engineering is much simpler, especially if you focus on certain ideas. The history of task management goes back as far as civilization, I suppose. But I do hope it is ATPO material, the kind you can use to help discover some things about how you work and might want to in the future. As a result, the column you will read here and next month is much less thorough and even more unpolished. That, dear readers is what I hope ATPO to be. This journalist may even help users express such philosophies in a way that the developer community can respond with experiments. This person will be read by users who want to control their own creative environments and find (or create) just the right tools. She will indicate new directions and philosophies that could be explored. Those two have precisely the same underlying philosophy.Ī good journalist will report on the different underlying approaches that are being explored in this new breed of applications. What matters is the underlying philosophy of the product. They aren’t they just have different user interfaces. Just as the nature of the applications will change so must “application journalism.” It is not enough to write about FreeHand and Illustrator as if they were two different products. “Outlining” isn’t definitive it just happens to be a handy way of clumping tools that are at the cusp of this new generation. Nowhere will this be more apparent than in writing tools, organizing tools, task management tools, and different combinations of the three. No one will kill the others no monopoly will emerge. So a great many approaches will find similarly many different products, and those in turn will support the imagination and work of different types of users. Savvy users understand that their own ways of thinking, creating, and organizing aren’t the same as everyone else’s (or shouldn’t be). In this new generation, different philosophical approaches to organizing information are pursued by different developers. For those new to ATPO, this is a column that supposes outliners are the vanguard of a new breed of desktop applications, a breed in which there is no king-no winner by having the most features.
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