Getting started with nubiDO

Welcome!  We're glad you joined us and the growing community of nubiDO users.  nubiDO is a beautiful task manager that's easy to use and purposefully built to help you manage your daily life.  It was built with the mindset that the key to productivity lies in one's ability to stay organized.  That's why we built nubiDO with a clean and logical structure, with the right balance between features and simplicity, so you can stay laser focused and get things done.  Though you can probably navigate and figure out nubiDO with little effort, the following Getting Started guide will help you get the most out of the app.

Firstly, nubiDO is a cloud based application.  That means all of your tasks are safely stored on our servers and automatically synchronized and accessible from the various nubiDO client apps.

nubiDO is divided into four logical views, the Workspace, Filters, Tags, and Task Calendar, each of which we'll discuss below.

Workspace

This is where it all starts.  The Workspace is where all of your task lists reside.  It contains three built-in lists (Today, Upcoming and Inbox) as well as a place for you to create your own custom lists and projects.

The Today and Upcoming lists inherently denote an order of priority or importance.

Today
The today list is your highest priority list.  Use this list to collect tasks that require immediate attention.  As its name implies, it's for tasks that you intend to do today.  Unlike other lists, the today list is a hybrid list.  It can contain tasks directly within itself but can also display tasks from other lists that you've marked to be done today (this is the focus attribute on a task).  The today list will also display tasks that are overdue or due today (based on due date).

Upcoming
The Upcoming list contains tasks that will soon become a priority.  This list will automatically display tasks that are upcoming (based on due date) within a defined range.  For example, you can configure this list to show all tasks that are due within the upcoming rolling week (not counting today), two weeks, three weeks or four weeks.  It's a great way to get a glimpse of how many tasks you have upcoming in the immediate future.

Inbox
Think of the inbox as a place where you can perform your brain dump.  It's where you enter all of the tasks floating around in your brain that you need to jot down before they're forgotten.

You'll eventually want to move and organize tasks into more logical lists and projects but having an inbox helps to gather tasks without having to pre-think about long term list structures.  It's a good starting point but can grow quickly so you'll want to keep an eye on it regularly.

Now that you've got the inbox ready and filled (hopefully) with tasks, you'll need to figure out the best way to organize the tasks so they make logical sense to you from a structural perspective.

Projects and Lists
If you're working with a small or moderate amount of tasks that are one-offs, these four lists will usually suffice in terms of categorization.  But many times, you need a deeper structure for keeping track of things.  This is where Projects and Task Lists come into place.

A Task List is simply a collection of tasks, whereas a Project is a collection of Task Lists.  Think of the Workspace as a digital version of a filing cabinet.  In fact, the structure of the Workspace closely mimics the structure of a filing cabinet, and for good reason.  A filing cabinet is a tried and true method of organizing, one that's stood the test of time.  Within a filing cabinet, are drawers. A drawer has a set of folders and each folder has individual items.  Analogously, the Workspace has a set of projects.  Each project has a set of task lists and each task list has a set of tasks.  So use projects when you need to group a large number of tasks together based on a common theme or subject.

Of course, not everything needs to be categorized into a full blown project.  Sometimes you just want a simple grouping of tasks.  For example, you probably wouldn't create a project for keeping track of grocery or shopping items.  This is where you create individual task lists within your Workspace.

Your workspace will most likely be very dynamic and fluid and you'll find yourself creating and modifying lists and projects as time progresses.  This isn't a problem with nubiDO as you can use nubiDO's built-in bulk move facility to move a set of tasks from one list to another.

Filters

Filters offer the ability to create custom perspectives across all of your tasks by allowing you to create virtual task lists based on a query.  nubiDO has a simple, yet expressive query language with over 80 rules so you can create innumerable combinations of filters to fit any workflow.  

For example the following query would create a list of tasks that have been completed within the last 7 days:

As you can see, the nubiDO task query language is simple to use, yet powerful enough for even the most complex uses cases.  

Filters are a great way to create lists that may not fit into your standard project or tag structure.

For further details on the query language and rule set, refer to the release note for Filters

Tags

Tags offer the ability to attach an arbitrary number of keywords to individual tasks that can be later used for filtering and task discovery purposes.  It's a very powerful tool that offers a more fine grained level of categorization.  The important thing to remember is that tags span projects and lists (in a sense, tags are global).  

For example you might use a tag called "Errand" to indicate a chore that needs doing.  And since chores can be spread across various lists and projects, a tag is a great way to group them together outside of their respective lists.  

Task Calendar

The simplest of the four views, the Task Calendar is a monthly calendar view for tasks.  The individual task cells within the calendar display the number of tasks you have due on any given date.  It's a great visual indicator of your current workload and tool to help you plan for the future.

Now that we've covered the main views within nubiDO, there's one more thing you should know about the Inbox.  Once you start fiddling around with nubiDO, you'll notice that you can also enter tasks from the tags and calendar task lists.  But these are virtual lists (filters) and not physical lists such as the ones in Workspace.  So where do those tasks end up?  In the inbox, of course.  For example, when you select a particular date on the task calendar, you'll be presented with a list of tasks for that date.  You can add a task directly in that list.  The particular due date will get assigned to the new task and that task will be physically placed in the inbox.

Get Organized

We hope this guide was helpful in understanding what nubiDO is all about and how it's structured.  It's clean and uncluttered, which is an important aspect of being organized.  Have you ever noticed how well organized people tend to have neat, clean and organized desks?

Also remember, there's no magic in being more productive.  Just make sure to keep ordered and well organized lists and to review your tasks on a daily basis, which is probably the most important piece of advice we can give you.  There's no amount of software magic or artificial intelligence (yet) that can do the work for you.  But once you get into this routine of collecting, organizing and executing, you'll automatically find yourself getting more done.