Guest Post

Note: I have requested this article from the company that built Attune Task. I have not received any compensation for posting this article – Marlon R.

Attune is a new productivity application built to keep you in tune with everything you need. We built Attune because we have long been frustrated by the inflexibility of existing productivity tools. They almost always seem overly rigid and unable to capture the complexity of our thoughts and projects.

We wanted to build a flexible solution that could handle both the brainstorming/note taking side of things as well as structured lists of tasks. To our knowledge, there isn’t a tool out there that handles this duality well.

Further, we wanted to connect the vast array of existing tools and technologies, allowing people to use them to maximize their use of specialized tools while still having a single integrated organization experience.

After we had built the core interface, we received positive feedback on its usefulness, even without the integrations. Thus, we decided that it would be a good idea to release that core as Attune 1.0 and let people get started immediately. Beginning with Attune 2.0, we will release integrations with existing tools.

Let me dive into a few of the distinct characteristics of the Attune 1.0 interface that we think are so powerful.

The first thing Attune does is elevate all of your different types of data to the same level. This means that the core interface doesn’t have different places for notes, links, tasks, folders, projects or lists. They are all fully populated entities that we call “items.” Further, Attune’s drag and drop features can be used to relate any item to any other item.

To help you understand what this means, let’s look at a simple example.

Prior to Attune, if you were taking notes during a meeting you would have many scattered pieces to look after. You would have your notes about the meeting content, perhaps some action items, people to talk to, things to check on and perhaps a list of ideas that were sparked in your own head.

Most of these would end up scattered around your notes for the meeting, requiring a lot of discipline and effort to remember what was where and re-capture them in an appropriate place.

With Attune, this type of interaction becomes much easier. You create your note item for your meeting notes, and as action item come up, you can create new sub-items under these notes.

Any ideas, things to look into or people to talk to could be other items you attach to the meeting note. Since these are now items, Attune treats them with the full privileges and power of any other item. You can drag the action items to your list of “Outstanding Action Items” or drag your ideas to you list of “Things to Think About”.

You can relate items to each other in powerful ways that allow you to address things in the context in which you are working.

The second thing Attune does a little differently than existing productivity tools is notes. Most existing productivity tools treat notes as either a minor addition to a task or as a document that must be contained within something else.

What if instead, notes where fully recognized items that could be related to other items and contain sub-items. We have already seen this in the meeting notes example above, where the notes had attached actions and ideas.

So often in my own organizational activities, I have to start with free-form notes or a stream of ideas and words to get my thoughts written out.

I can usually then take that stream of consciousness and massage it and organize it into a structured set of projects, tasks or whatever else makes sense. You can do this easily in Attune.

Better, once you create your structure, you can merge it into your existing projects and tasks via drag and drop while leaving them related to their original context: the brainstorming session where you came up with the ideas.

This approach has so many applications because we believe it is part of the process of how people get organized. Personal productivity is about taking the analytical and relational problem solving engine, our brains, and providing it an outlet to bring order out of that chaos.

Attune combines these capabilities with five core features that pull it all together:

Multi-column browsing

Attune’s multi-column browsing means it can handle almost any organization structure you want. Every item in Attune can be related to one or more other items allowing you to browse through complex relationships very quickly.

Lists and Notes

Attune is built around lists and notes. Create lists of items with drag and drop ease. Write your notes and ideas in Attune and relate them to the things you need them for so they are there when you need them.

Focuses

Attune keeps you focused on what you need by keeping items together that have a common purpose or context. Create custom focuses that match your needs and your life.

Projects & Tasks

Attune handles your projects and tasks, tracking your due dates and completion dates. Create individual tasks, or group tasks together under a single project.

Archiving and Filtering

Attune allows you to filter out unwanted items to keep you workspace clean. Archive items that are no longer needed, control which items are shown based on their relationship or search for words that appear anywhere in the text of an item.

We are excited about Attune, and hope that others find it as useful and powerful as we do. We are excited about the march toward Attune 2.0 when we bring items from other products into this organization powerhouse, leveraging the power of tools like Evernote and email to boost productivity even more.

This guest post is by Robert Butler, President at Pancake Technology, LLC