• fixed connection problems with iOS 5.1
• minor fixes and improvements

taskmind Android requires Android 2.1 or higher.

taskmind for your Android phone or tablet is now available in the Android Market. So far only iPhone and iPad users could enjoy taskmind. Now Android users can also access their to-do lists and share them with their colleagues, wherever they are.

Beth Bakely wrote about Mark Scureman and the ways how to create trust and respect in a team on TechRepublic.

One thing, she mentioned besides others, is ‘good communication’. Scureman said, that the only way to solve this would be to keep a constant open dialogue.

Especially for distributed teams it is difficult to keep the dialogue open. Team members are often spread over countries or even continents. And phone or e-mail can’t always bridge the physical distance between team members to ask and answer questions, whenever it is possible.

Keeping the dialogue open does also mean, that people can talk to each other in a team, when they have the desire to. So you need communication tools to bridge local and temporal differences, which allow asynchronous communication.

Today we had to review our product folders, which are done by an agency. Instead of writing 36 “answer-to-all” e-mails to and fro, the agency assigned us a task for reviewing the product folder via taskmind. “Us” means the writer, the people of management and the marketing, altogether 5 people. We discussed the folders at the tasks in real-time and the agency could rework the folders immediately. So we reduced 36×4 (144) e-mails to 1 task with 36 comments.

But sometimes we still have to write e-mails, because people expect an answer to their e-mail request. These people we request to contact us via taskmind by adding a simple sentence to our signature:

I’d like to reduce my email traffic. Please help me and contact me in taskmind. Thanks! www.taskmind.net

How can you help reducing e-mail traffic?

Add this sentence above to your e-mail signature as well and request the recipients to contact you via taskmind.

Thanks and having fewer e-mails in your mailbox!

Delegating means communicating tasks sufficiently and in time to your subordinates, so they can finish such tasks adequately.

How does delegation get trustful?

1. Define a reachable target.
2. List all tasks need to be done to reach that target.
3. Split these tasks in elementary tasks.
4. Describe the elementary tasks as detailed as possible to provide all necessary information to your workers.
5. Handover the elementary tasks to your workers and request their handshake.

Find some more reasons for IT burnout on TechRepublic.

More …

• Hyperlinks are detected and can be opened in the details view of a task or appointment
• Urgencies can be defined for tasks
• Simplified adding new tasks and appointments

… attention has become a scarce resource, not information, which would be scarce in former days. Organisations need to re-invent working methods and tools … face-to-face communication and phoning correlate with low productivity, because both people have to be present at the same time. Therefore enterprises have to change not only the tools, but their structures. They have to empower people to make decisions and provide the information for that decisions.

Don’t interrupt people, when they are working in a flow, e.g. by avoid phone calls, and providing information at the right time, are two essential features for working more effcient. Erik Brynjolfsson also spoke about “using the right tools”, which means don’t use email for team communication. There exit more useful systems – like taskmind .

• Voice Tasks: Now speech input can be finished via a “Done” button
• Fixed bug when creating group tasks: “for each” setting was ignored