What’s new at Enleiten

You’ve been sending us feature requests and suggestions to improve our interface, and we’ve just rolled out a bunch of the changes you’ve been asking for

If you like to prioritize your projects, you can now choose the order your projects are in to customize the display order of your projects. (The “all projects” link is at the bottom of the project panel in basic accounts)

Adding tasks directly to projects has been improved:

Under “Profile”, you can now also set a variety of email options. Add additional email addresses so you can forward tasks directly to your Enleiten inbox.

In your profile, you can also opt to receive a daily email of your next actions list, or any contexts you choose.

We’ve also added basic search, so you can locate your tasks individually.

Got any questions? Feel free to leave a comment or send a task to us at Enleiten support.

Spread it: |||||

How GTD saved the wedding. (well, at least the flowers)

A few months ago I’d offered to help some friends with their wedding and put together their flowers. In GTD style, I put everything in my system: requests for the list of corsages needed, requests for photos of bouquets the couple had found online and liked, information about when the flowers needed to be available for photos at the ceremony, etc. And most importantly, the RFQ I sent my supplier.

I’d used this vendor before for flowers, because it was quick and easy to email in a list of what I was looking for a checking prices. So off it went, with the waiting task in place, and out of my head.

Having the system in place saved me on this one, because my weekly review came around and that request had been sitting too long. Turns out my supplier was no longer in business, even though their email didn’t bounce and their website and price list were still up and running. Running across that outstanding item on my list was an excellent prompt at a time I wasn’t thinking about the project all the time, with the focus on picking up hardware and getting my schedule at work in order.

With that prompt in mind, I had enough time to call on my request, find out what was happening, and deal with the crisis of locating a new supplier who still had time to get my order placed with the growers.

For any other aspiring wedding couples out there, we’ll be putting together a set of wedding checklist templates. You’ll be able to sign up for an account and do all your wedding planning online, a great way to coordinate with family and loved ones dispersed across the country to get your wedding plans done.

It’ll take us a few more weeks before those checklists come out of beta to play, but if you’ve got samples of your checklist you’d like to contribute, or would be interested in getting into the beta early to help us finetune it, drop us a line at info@enleiten.com.

Ad free for everyone for a week

A big welcome to GTD Times readers.

We’ve had some comments about the ads interfering with trying out our application, so we’ve turned off ads on all free accounts for the week. Ad-free accounts are $5 a month, and we’ll work on bringing back less obtrusive ones when we turn them back on.

If you’ve got comments or suggestions for us, please feel free to leave us a comment or drop us an email at support@enleiten.com. We value your comments, and user requests weigh heavily in deciding what changes and improvements we make.

If you’re looking for some quick ways to get started, we’ve got screenshots outlining the feature sets in our help documentation, and some short screencasts to let you see how things work.

A quick note for users of other apps: Checking off the box next to a task entry marks it as complete. To edit task details, you can double click on the item you want to change, or click the “i” on the right to get into extended details.

Review: Enleiten by MInnov8

I had the pleasure of chatting with Steve Borsch earlier this week. He’s a GTD fan, longtime tech advisor and expert, and contributor to Minnov8, a community blog covering emerging tech in MN. In addition to giving us some excellent feedback, he’s reviewed Enleiten’s GTD and project management application.

…Enleiten has nailed the workflow and functionality (Projects/People/Contexts) in much the same way that Google nailed search vs. cluttering up the page with lots of ads, upsells and cross selling. They’ve hit the sweet spot of GTD and lightweight project management and coupled it with a group approach — one I’d term a “social GTD” application.

As more of us seek ways to coordinate and orchestrate our activities with an ever widening number of other always-on, always-connected, and willingly participative people (many of whom have already embraced GTD), Enleiten has significant opportunity to become a preferred and social way to get things done.

Read the rest:
Enleiten: A Social GTD

Instant Shiny Forms with Rails and YUI

This tutorial will demonstrate how to convert standalone Ruby on Rails forms to a YUI dialog (hey, it’s one less page load) in only 4 easy steps.

We’ll start with a quick and dirty (and all scaffold) blogging app. I assume you know a thing or two and don’t need me to walk through this. You’ll note that there are no changes required to your controllers to make this work.

Enleiten tutorial videos

We’ve been working on getting some screencasts together to show how Enleiten’s project management app works. I’ve added the link over there on the right, so you check out the collection at your leisure.

Here’s a quick little video telling you about the three way you can currently add tasks to your Enleiten account.

And here’s a quick run through of the different ways you can retrieve and sort your tasks when you’re ready to get down to work.

If you’ve got any other requests for video tutorials, please leave a note in the comments or send us an email to support@enleiten.com.

Sneak Preview: Enleiten Pro

Enleiten Pro in is beta right now, but if you’re curious what we’ve added, here’s a sneak peek.

You’ll be able to share entire projects with your groups, instead of just delegating individual tasks. You can also create project templates so you can streamline your group’s workflow or have a handy place to store your own checklists.

Your account doesn’t limit the number of groups you can create – just pick group members from your “People” list and you’re ready to go.

Yahoo!’s been on a roll

Yahoo! has been on a roll the last couple of weeks, which is excellent news for those of us that have become (maybe a little too much) attached to some of their front-end tools.

Let’s see, we’ve got:

• A new wireframe stencil kit that integrates both their excellent Design Pattern Library and YUI. [ed. Why didn’t they have that a year ago?] (via the YDN Blog)
• The Yahoo User Interface javascript library has been bumped to 2.5.2 — DataTable users can finally take out that mess of patches, and they’ve added support for Firefox 3.0RC1 and Opera 9.5b2. (via YUIBlog)
• BrowserPlus looks to be a promising way to bring in some of the goodies that Firefox has made available for years (and that WebKit is fast catching up to). Now if they’d just do a public release, there’s way too much in there I want to use.
• Oh, and Douglas Crockford has a new book out. Javascript: The Good Parts looks to be all kinds of useful — I’ll post a review as soon as I lay my hands on it. If you’ve not watched them, I can’t recommend the series of training videos he did a year or so ago highly enough.

Cleaning out your Temporary Internet Files

Now is probably as good of a time as any to clean out your Temporary Internet Files if you’re an IE user.

Of course, this has been a common recommendation for years, but in this case it looks like we went a little bit crazy with mod_expires in a recent update, so if you’re using IE and have noticed things not quite updating the way you’d expect, this should probably help. And hey, there are about 2.8 million other reasons to do it anyway.

MSP GTD Study Group Mondays!

Survey results are in, so we’re ready to get going.

Monday or Tuesday evening, once a month was the clear winner, with location preferences all over the map.

So…

Second Monday of the month, 6:00 PM.

We’ll alternate between Minneapolis and St Paul, to even out the driving for everyone.

Our first meeting will then be
June 9, 2008
6:00 PM
Common Roots Cafe
2558 Lyndale Ave South
Minneapolis, MN 55405

For our first meeting, let’s introducing ourselves and our personal systems. Plan to talk about what capture tools you use, how your track your tasks and projects, what contexts do you find helpful, and so forth.

Common Roots has a small but well-chosen selection of beer and wine, N/A beverages, good food, and free wireless access.