I found GoodTask today. Or re-found it, anyhow, because the App Store had the little cloud/down-arrow icon that told me I’ve downloaded it before at some point. It’s pretty much a skin for Reminders, but it’s a skin that gives me stuff I’d otherwise pay a lot for OmniFocus to do that instead costs $9.99 once, and it includes some affordances that make some of Reminders' more fussy UI gaps less fussy.

It promises “From Simple Checklists to Complex Project Management,” but I don’t really want a complex project management tool and need just a bit more than “simple checklists” and just a few more smart list options than Reminders provides.

Doing an inventory today, I realized how much I’ve allowed the language of projects to slip into my mental model. I don’t have “projects,” I have areas that occasionally involve things that have a couple of other things nested in them. When something gets so complex that it’s a project, there’s a staff program manager sitting right there who can help with wrangling the work streams.

GoodTask includes a Smart List feature that works close enough to OmniFocus’s Perspectives for my purposes: It took about two minutes to make a Big Dumb List of date-sorted tasks in my Work group. If all hell broke loose and GoodTask stopped working tomorrow, it’d sort of suck but it separates its organizational metadata from Reminders' enough that the real fallout would be “well, I need to drag some of these groups I made into new Groups in Reminders.”

It also lets you tell it to leave some lists in Reminders out of its reckoning. I have a few shoebox lists that just gather recommendations, items of passing curiosity, to-read, to-watch, etc. I don’t want them in a tool I’m using to manage things I have to actually do, so GoodTask hides them for me.

This is all coming after a reorg I did with my group at work. I’ve got historical reasons to be a little averse to reorgs, but this was one of those times where I was watching managers tripping over each other to get capacity for their projects, unpleasant “everybody in the org is at the same meeting” experiences, and a realization two-and-a-half years into this place how few professional development opportunities we’d made for people. So we spent a month as a management team, talking about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, and how we could think beyond “this team is full of people who do this kind of work, and that team is full of people who do that kind of work.”

And for me, I felt mired in the day-to-day of the managers under me, trying to sort out what went where and playing a glue role all the time to hold us together at one level, with no room to figure out new levels.

Shifting from a very rigidly functional structure to a delivery-oriented structure is creating some definite short-term pain. We inventoried all the things we’re doing and decided that we could allow one particular kind of work to be much more distributed in order to concentrate management attention on other kinds. That distributed work needs some supporting rituals and routines to keep on track.

But for all the short-term tradeoff pain we’re dealing with, I came out of the planning cycle for next year with sign-off to build a new program and a new governance structure, and with a mandate to add a role that seemed out of the question a month ago. I have to refine my model of what I think work is.