Enleiten: A Social GTD
June 13th, 2008Categories | Software
Editor’s Note: Author Steven Borsch has played both contributor and senior executive roles in technology companies (e.g., Pioneer New Media, Panasonic Communications & Systems Company, Apple and Vignette) but left that all behind several years ago as the Internet and Web accelerated and a participation culture emerged. He now concentrates on management consulting in social media and the biggest shift in human communications, connectedness and collaboration any of us will ever experience in our lifetimes.
Blogging at Connecting the Dots and Minnov8 , following 171 bloggers and numerous media sources, keeps him in the game and connected with other thought leaders. Without GTD, he’d have no hope of staying on top of all the projects and tasks he’s involved in daily!
By Steven Borsch
You have a keen interest in personal or group productivity which is why you’re involved with David Allen’s GTD system. As more of us seek ways to coordinate and orchestrate our projects, tasks and activities with an ever widening number of other always-on, always-connected and willingly participative people (many of whom have already embraced GTD), a new company and their product has significant opportunity to become a preferred and social way to get things done.
Due to the success of Allen’s GTD methodology and the sheer volume of software developers among the ranks of the faithful, you know that tools abound for using the GTD method. From David Allen Co’s own Microsoft Outlook add-in to dozens of offerings for PC’s and Mac’s (as well as other types of tools), most work well but suffer from an increasingly evident fatal flaw: using GTD is a problem if all of your data is sitting on a single computer. More and more of us are on multiple devices and mobile…using a laptop, smartphone, desktop at home and the office (and even casually using computers in coffee shops, airports or at a friend’s house) and need to use GTD but be able to access it anywhere we have an internet connection.
In 2007 Eric Hedberg, an economics major from Carleton College, worked at Secure Computing and Stockwalk.com, the latter in financial sector software. Hedberg became aware of the direction applications were taking by being delivered “in the cloud” (i.e., as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hosted and available to anyone with an internet connection) and started looking at ways to implement a SaaS data warehousing/workflow management application for the financial services industry.
After some prototyping and user feedback, he and his college friends who’d joined him (Doreen Hartzell, CEO, and Steve Bentley, in charge of interface design) realized that the best part of what they’d built was the project management piece, which delivered collaborative online workspaces using a GTD model. That revelation spawned the current company focus, Enleiten, which is a collaborative GTD application delivered in the cloud and available for single consumer users, small groups or businesses.
I interviewed CEO Doreen Hartzell about Enleiten and their approach on taking the to-do list and project management paradigm to a new level.
“To-do lists can be very good for supporting individuals working through and organizing their tasks. They tend to be weaker about the collaborative nature of work - how to delegate and track things without creating a lot of duplicate entries or extra steps to capture things you’re waiting for. In many cases, those are also applications that can support GTD work-flows, but are not necessarily designed for it.”
She continues,
“Project management applications, in our experience, are great at presenting things to managers, but not as well designed to handle the actual specific actions that need to be done to move the project forward. The separation of tasks by project can make it difficult for users to extract their tasks and integrate those with the rest of their work. They can also be problematic if it’s difficult to reorganize projects in an iterative work-flow. We believe the efficiency of those applications can also break down a bit if members of a project team have different personal systems and then need to do double entry to their own system and the team’s project management application.”
When I asked about multiple device types and access from anywhere there is an internet connection, Ms. Hartzell touched on several of their roadmap directions and this is clearly directional for them. The Pro edition for groups includes all of the current features with these additions appearing in about a month:
- File upload
- Creating workgroups to share full projects (vs individual task delegation in the basic version)
- Ability to create custom checklist templates to streamline business workflow or commonly used lists
They have a long list of planned features, and prioritization of those will be driven substantially on user feedback. Their goal is to deliver simple software, but they’d like to accomplish that through good user interface, and careful choice on adding features.
Finally, their short list of features to add include:
- Increased input/output options including Jott integration, iCal import/export, custom RSS feeds, SMS, and within a week daily email task notifications
- Greater customization of information display by the user (what you want on your Next Actions page, maybe color coding of projects, tasks or contexts, etc.)
- Mobile and offline versions
- Establishing a community library of templates to allow users to share them.
My brief exposure to Enleiten has caused me to consider their approach carefully. While admittedly not a left-brain dominant analytical, I do understand enough about myself that I realize I need the analytical as well as both visual and experiential elements in an application to truly and intuitively “get it” and continue using it. While I found the Ajax-y goodness of dragging-n-dropping tasks into other projects compelling, I did find the application to be too transactional and thus mostly left brain (and I’d buy the upcoming “Pro” account to get rid of the advertisements in the free version as they’re visually distracting as they are with most “freemium” versions of other, cloud-based applications).
That said, 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.
It’s worth a few minutes of your time to check out Enleiten, a likely candidate to become a preferred and social way to get things done.
Enleiten could be interesting, but the add are so irritating that they will probably drive potential customers away before they are able to really evaluate the product.
Thank you so much for the feature, we really appreciate it, as well as the chance to get feedback from so many GTD-ers.
Pascal - yours is the second comment we’ve gotten about the ads. So we’re turning those off for a week to let all the GTD Times readers kick the tires.
When we bring them back, we’ll work on making them interfere less with free account use.
Doreen, Eric, and Steve
Many thanks. This is what I call being responsive.
It’s a very nice product. I lead a small research group and this kind of task delegation tool could be very useful. I have been testing Mentat (gomentat.com) lately and Enlieiten seems to deliver similar functionality with a less flashy interface. And more stability. The appeal of Mentat vs Enleiten is a native smart phone interface (both RIM and iPhone). I look forward to the evolution of Enleiten to see the directions the developers take. It’s a hard name to type, though, and this could also hurt.
It might be worth considering making this the default modus operandi.
Allowing new users to test the product for 1, 2 or 4 weeks without advertisement, would allow them to make an informed decision about the product and whether they would rather choose to upgrade to the paying version or stick to the free version with the advertisement.
I must say that I like what I see and that after starting to play with Enleiten, I think it will be a strong contender for Nozbe.
Hi! Love the site and read it often.
By the way, you have a broken link to the GTD Outlook add-on (which is great and I use it constanly). The link has “http://http://…” in it.
marty
@Pascal
GTD web-app space is a very competitive one and there are tens if not hundreds of to-do lists and gtd-like web apps… and Enleiten is just one of the new ones.
There is another gtd-like-web-app coming up each month and Nozbe has to stay strong to withstand so much competition.
We’re improving Nozbe constantly, we’ve just added new Nozbe calendar, new family-friendly subscriptions and most of all, we’re constantly tweaking the Nozbe interface to make it work better and better for you.
Other competitors appear, develop strongly for a month or two… and later forget about their users.
One of the most amazing things about Nozbe is the fact that I AM USING IT EVERY DAY, because my company created Nozbe initially for me and for our internal use.
This means: I want Nozbe to be perfect, I know which features are great and which not… and which I still need there… and my amazing users help me improve Nozbe to make it even better, which I love.
Over the 1,5 years I’ve been on the market, I’ve had lots of emails from users saying: “Michael, I ditched Nozbe to try the XYZ web app as it sounded great… but eventually came back to Nozbe and won’t be going away anymore… Nozbe is the way I work…”
To sum up: I treat all of my competitors seriously, but instead of focusing on them, I’m focusing on my users and on making Nozbe as perfect as can be for them… and for myself.
GTD systems are highly individual, and I believe there’s more than enough room for multiple applications that address different user needs.
We love what we’ve built and run our lives and our company in it daily. Our first draft of this system got started in January 2007, as a way to handle workflow in specific business project management situations. We’ve spent a long time refining it, and will continue to do so. But I wouldn’t presume to think that we’ll necessarily replace index cards for someone who’s found paper works better for their life.
We’re especially interested in the problem of how to create a centrally managed system that makes minimal assumptions about how much members of a team will be willing to use the same solution. I’ve spent too many years working with people who couldn’t even agree on which one of 4 very good calendar systems to use to think that always works. That idea has driven a lot of our decisions about how to handle things like task delegation, but we realize that isn’t necessarily going to be the top feature priority for every user.
Regarding the longer ad-free trial - we’ve been looking into ways to offer that gracefully. I think that’s a good idea and one we’d been planning for the pro edition, it makes sense to extend it to our personal version as well.
@Steve - thanks for the encouragement. And with a small laugh - as soon as we can figure out a good pronounceable URL we can register that’s more obvious to spell, we’ll look into it…
Hi
Just a quick question.
I currently use Outlook for my GTD, which is irritatingly static on one machine, but ‘back-up-able’
Is there a back up for Enleiten?
If I put my whole life in the cloud what if I log in and it’s all gone (As my virgin inbox did last yr… with no help or explanation from virgin)
Many thanks
Olly
@Oily-
There’s not actually a published link for this yet (though it will be), but: http://www.enleiten.com/todo/tasks.ics will dump the whole shebang out in iCalendar format, which you can import as you please in to just about anything. That work for a backup?
-Eric
Thanks Eric
Sounds good.
What about adding a ’scrapbook’ function? An area to pull info together from your ideas/ the web, to allow brainstorming which will generate tasks and projects, and also hold the reference materials or planning stages for the tasks/projects in Enleiten? Maybe a 2 way integration with an existing product eg OneNote or Evernote (maybe using hyperlinks)? Or a dedicated area of Enleiten?
Just a thought =)
Olly
We’ve updated the application since this article was written, with more support for email and some other tidbits, which I thought I’d share:
http://enleitened.com/2008/06/25/whats-new-at-enleiten/
Olly -
Love the idea - we’ve been playing around with it. Currently it’s limited to attaching files to tasks in the Pro edition. It’s a feature set we’ve been mulling over for a while, but haven’t really settled on the best way to do it.
Hyperlinks will work from the task details page (clicking the “i” next to a task gets you there) currently.
Adding full-fledged reference has been on the “Someday” list for a while now as we collect use cases. If you’re willing to spare a few minutes and share yours, that would be great. Feel free to email us, or I’d be happy to set up a call.
Doreen & Eric
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