ShadowPlanning6 August, 2001 I started writing this review months ago, but I'm starting over from scratch. Something happened to me recently that's made Shadow indispensable, and really highlights what you can do with it. So what happened that makes Shadow so useful? Well, let me explain. I lost my job. No, I didn't actually lose my job, I mean, I know where my job is still. It's just that they don't want me to show up and do it anymore. The company where I had my day job lost half their market value in the last six months (damn "R" word) and was forced to let go of 20% of their staff. Unfortunately, I didn't make the cut. So now I'm adrift in a sea of... well, fun, actually. I have a decent severance package, and tons of free time to write. I'm enjoying being laid off a lot more than I thought I would. But I know that won't last. I have to get it together, find a new gig. How do I do that? Enter Shadow. For those that haven't taken a look at it yet. Shadow is an outliner for PalmOS. It's the most flexible outliner I've ever seen, and Shadow blows away the competition, notably BrainForest and Progect. Its to-do integration is so seamless that Shadow has usurped Arranger as my planning outliner of choice. I haven't run it head to head against Natara's Bonsai, but it seems that Bonsai's big claim to fame is great desktop application and conduit, and anyone who knows me knows I don't generally care about the desktop end of things. My palmtop is my computer. So that leaves Shadow. But what's so good about it, exactly? Okay, I use Shadow for lots of stuff, but here's the important thing, especially these days. I created an outline in Shadow called "Life Planning". You can create as many outlines as you want in Shadow, and even categorize them. I have multiple shopping lists in my Shopping category, but I've found through experience that planning works best if you keep everything in one outline. It's harder for things to get overlooked that way. So I have one outline called "Life Planning". The really neat thing about Shadow is that you can have multiple "views" for your data--tasklist, checklist, note, flat and custom--all of which are just different settings for which UI widgets you want. You can have a Shadow outline look like a flat checklist, a la the Palm To Do List, or you can make it look more like Progect, with its indented tree structure and progress bars. The really cool thing about Shadow is that you can mix and match these views in the same outline, on an item by item basis. So the top level items in my Life Planning hierarchy are in the Note style. Just the text, no checkboxes, due dates, progress bars or other stuff. These are just containers for things I have to do. Currently, I have just three top level items. Job Hunting is self explanatory. Writing houses all my writing projects, in addition to things I have to do on the business side of the pen, like finding an agent. The last is Self, which includes personal goals like "175 pounds by age 31" as well as what the Covey folks would call "Sharpen the Saw" items. Under each, I have big goals, usually set to the Tasklist view, so I get a progress bar showing the state of child tasks. Under each of these, I have my individual tasks, broken down to subtasks where necessary, but I try not to go too many levels deep. For example, under Job Hunting (note view) I have Technical Writer (tasklist view), one of the things I'd like to pursue. Under that, I have:
Each of these is in Custom view, which I have set to show priority, a checkbox, the target due date and the to-do link box, a combination of find most useful for individual tasks while leaving as much display space for the task text as possible (and important consideration for a Palm-sized screen). Most of the above are self-explanatory, but the to-do link box is particularly cool, and a key feature that lured me away from Arranger. This is a little box on the right-hand side of the screen, that when tapped, is filled with a little "t". What this does is create an item in the system To Do database for that task, with the same priority, note (which can include additional info for DateBk or Action Names) and due date. Every time Shadow is run, it synchronizes linked tasks with the system To Do list, so if you change the due date of the To Do item in another application or on the desktop, the item in Shadow will adopt that change. In and of itself, that isn't so different from Arranger's linked tasks. The really cool part is that you and uncheck the to-do link box, and it deletes the task from the system To Do list while retaining it in Shadow. This is great for doing all your long-term planning in Shadow, but only placing things in the system To Do list when they actually become "active". I found that Arranger tended to clutter my To Do list with things I had no intention of doing for months or more. I don't have that problem with Shadow. Also, if you have an active task that gets shelved, you can put it on the "back burner" by unchecking the to-do link box in Shadow, then rolling it back into action at a later date. So let's look at what we have so far. Shadow's a great outliner that allows you to see each item the way that makes the most sense to you, and the to-do link feature makes it a great "Master Task List" that doesn't clutter up the system To Do list with stuff you don't need to see. What else does it do? Shadow supports powerful filtering options. In addition to the standard "show only unchecked" kind of filtering, Shadow also supports more sophisticated filtering, like showing only those items that start this week. On the flip side of filtering, Shadow also supports highlights, where items that meet the specified criteria will be bolded or in color. Shadow supports automatic sorting, on multiple criteria. Useful if you want to keep your planning outline sorted by target due date. Shadow links with more than just to-do items. One useful feature is that is it can link to other Shadow outlines, giving you the ability to spawn of "sub-projects" with outlines of their own. I still haven't mastered the best uses of this feature, although I do see how it could be useful for very detailed plans. Shadow also supports linking directly to the Datebook database, where you can set alarms on appointments related to your outline. Although Shadow can only maintain one link a piece from an item to the datebook and to-do list, it can link to as many memos and addresses as you need. You can also specify the program you want to use to view those kinds of records from Shadow (if, for example, you'd rather view memos in WordSmith than the default Memo Pad). For writing, Shadow supports text outlining with autonumbering. This is great for any kind of writing that requires a great deal of structure, like school papers or non-fiction books. You can do all the draft writing in Shadow, then... Use Shadow's excellent export features to dump the whole thing to Doc format, for touch up and revisions in WordSmith or another Doc editor. Shadow supports four different options for Doc export, including HTML, so you'll be sure to get the outline in whatever format works best for you. So what are the downsides to Shadow? Well, there aren't many. The biggest is probably the same as you'd see for any powerful PalmOS application: it's not easy to pick up and run with. Shadow does more than any outliner I've seen for any handheld platform--it shames ListPro for the Pocket PC--but all this functionality comes at the price of a high learning curve. Shadow comes with a fairly comprehensive manual, and I suggest you read it. Other than complexity rivaling DateBk4--but in a good way--there isn't much to criticize. This is a polished application and the developer seems very responsive to working on it. One caveat for CLIÉ users, though. If you run Shadow in hi-res, turn off the ledger-style colored rows. For some reason these conflict with Sony's hi-res implementation. It works fine with colored rows in low-res, or without them in hi-res, but just not both together. Shadow is a heck of an outliner and planning tool, the best that I've seen. And now that planning where my career goes from here has become so crucial, I'm glad I have it on my CLIÉ. |