Changelog (July 2020)

In the last weeks we have been working on improving the application performance, adding some functional improvements, and solving small errors or friction points that you have reported to us.

List management

Although it is not as “visible” as a new feature, this is the biggest change we have made: We have optimized the internal management of the lists at all levels (database, back-end and front-end programming), mainly in how to get and display the list items, with all their associated information, including the context & people tag lists used to filter each list.

The result of these structural improvements has produced a significant impact on the response speed of the application, something that you will notice especially in the management of long lists, those that contain several hundred elements, or those that contain a multitude of tags.

Thanks to this speed improvement we have also been able to incorporate a couple of functional improvements in data filtering:

• When you apply any filter to a list, the associated tag list is regenerated immediately to show only the tags that appear in the list items. This will allow you to use multiple tags much more effectively. For example, you can classify the books you would like to read in the Someday/Maybe list with two tags, a generic #book tag, plus a more specific one that indicates the type of book (#thriller, #technology, #business, etc. .).
• In addition to filtering by multiple context tags, you can now also mix context tags with people tags in your filters.

Weekly Review

We have improved some issues related to the new Weekly Review and fixed some errors that you have reported:

• Links are allowed to be used in the personal checklists of each step of the review, which can be useful if you have to review information stored in other web services.
• Capture is allowed when your are in a custom stage.
• In the Next Actions list, the “hide project actions” filter didn’t work under certain circumstances. It has been fixed.
• In the Someday/Maybe list, the “excluded tags” filter didn’t work in some circumstances. It has been fixed.
• In the Someday/Maybe list, the project actions don’t show up, as they are supposed to have been previously reviewed in step 7 (Projects).

Other improvements

• If you don’t like the 24-hour time format (“23:50”), now you can configure the application to work with 12-hour time format (“11:50 PM”). To do this, simply go to your Account and update the time format.
• We have removed the restriction that a task must be at least 4 characters long, as some of you like to use very short acronyms to capture stuff. Now the minimum is 1.
• In calendar views the full description of the event is displayed when you mouse over it. This way, you don’t have to click the event just to read the full text.
• Events before 7 AM are displayed in the calendar views (you need to scroll up).
• For consistency, now when you change the project associated with an action, the “focus” field of the action inherits the value of the “focus” field of the project.
• We have made some improvements in the encoding of emails that reach the inbox.
• We have fixed other small bugs.

Blog

Now you can subscribe to the FacileThings Blog. If you subscribe, you will receive all the blog articles in your email and some exclusive content that we are working on. In addition, you’ll be able to download the ebook “The Pursuit of Mastery. How to Improve Your Life Through Increased Productivity” for free. You can subscribe here.

We have classified all the published articles (more than 600) with relevant tags, so you can browse related articles in case you are interested in a specific topic.

We will soon add a search tool to quickly locate articles containing certain words. In the meantime, I remind you that an alternative to do that is to use Google with the site clause (for example site:facilethings.com gtd guide).

As always, thank you very much for the information you provide about the problems you encounter and for your suggestions for improvement.