Taco: One Productivity App to Rule Them All?
Posted on June 14, 2013 in Asides, Productivity
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:24 am)
(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:24 am)
Troy Davis, creator of the cloud-based logging service Papertrail, suggested that I might find his current Kickstarter of interest. Taco is a meta-service that aggregates all your to-dos, tickets, and tasks from other services into one place where you can see everything. There’s a video on their Kickstarter page that gives a murky glimpse at the product…I’m keeping an eye on this. It would be interesting if the Emergent Task Planner could somehow interface with their printing functionality.
UPDATE: Backed!
2 Comments
I feel suspicious of apps that try to put everything together like that. There may be an advantage to keeping a few functions “separate.” I use Omnifocus to get new tasks entered quickly, including things from email. I store all kinds of information in Evernote. My academic papers –which I collect constantly, daily, are unfortunately in a mess and I’m not sure when I will ever have the time to fix the situation. I have Mendeley and I have on occasion managed to get some of those papers into it, but often I fail. I print out my Omnifocus “lists” and use ETP (new spiral book version is GREAT) to plan the day, or try to plan the day, to record phone messages and other things that come in. sometimes something makes it to ETP but not Omnifocus, but I put stuff into Omni if I didn’t take care of it right away. Etc. I don’t want an app that tries to connect everything. I would be more than a little hesitant to trust it. All programs have moments of failure, in accessibility, etc., which is why I love the paper-based ETP. Likewise I use Google for all hard edged appointments, but I transfer that information before the beginning of each week to plannerpad, so i have my paper record, no matter what hard drive crash or other electronic glich might take place. While I’m almost always online with my MacBook Air with me, sometimes we lose the internet connection, it just happens. Sometimes storms wipe out electricity. I feel far more comfortable having my work be digital, but also having my hands on records and work-pages in good old paper. But I’ll look at these sites anyway, just because you suggest them.
Hi Lynn,
Thanks for the comments. I think you’re right to start out with a cautious attitude, especially around privacy. This is sensitive information. I’d like to add some detail about that and a few other issues you raised.
Taco doesn’t replace any of the existing tools you already use. I’m creating it because I wanted to help myself finish more of the work I already have. Most of the time, I still interact with the services you use today, and a fringe benefit of that is not being dependent on Taco’s availability. Obviously it needs to be reliable, but it’s never the only way to retrieve your data.
Regarding “There may be an advantage to keeping a few functions separate,” that depends entirely on your workflow and personal preferences. For me, seeing everything in one place has been absolutely amazing, but in cases where there’s an advantage, one wouldn’t point Taco at those functions/services (or would hide specific tasks within Taco). It’s not all-or-none.
Finally, regarding privacy, our draft privacy policy has been called “groundbreaking” by unaffiliated people and it will be critiqued and collaboratively edited by backers. That said, nothing replaces the simple advice of not writing down anything which absolutely can’t be disclosed. I think the recent NSA PRISM disclosures proves that point: whether or not you trust Taco’s security, its operators, your ISP, or anyone else, it’s probably possible for a suitably motivated party to get access.
So although we’ll be at the upper bound of privacy-conscious services, that’s not a substitute for discretion.
Thanks again for the chance to think and talk through these comments, too.
Troy (for Taco)