IQTELL is a really ambitious project. And when your tag line is “The best productivity app in the history of doing” things are getting pretty serious, especially for an application specifically designed for GTD.
I admit that after applying for an invitation to test IQTELL (it is not quite open yet, but I received mine in less than 24 hours) and logged in for the first time, I thought it would take me ages to write this post. There were pending options to link my google and Evernote account and a full screen interface complete with tutorial videos I had to watch.
After the initial shock, I mean I have never seen an app to integrate two of my favorite tools Gmail and Evernote, I connected both of my accounts. It took a while for the initial sync and everything went OK. So I soon had all my calendars, contacts, my emails and notes ready before I even begin!
Seriously, these features are really strong for a productivity application, but it could easily be its doom because things can get quite complicated for users.
Working in IQTELL
The application is quite well and lightly designed with monochrome icons and a tall sidebar on the left side containing links to all that you can manage within it. You can navigate to your calendar, contacts, projects, tasks, your notes from Evernote and tags which is a mix from the application’s and Evernote tag lists.
Actions and other GTD entities can be easily added via a textbox at the top of the screen just by pressing enter and next actions can be set and unset using a star button, two features I love and use into my own Jello Dashboard application as great time savers.
All screens a user opens, stay as a tabs at the top of the screen, so one can navigate easily between the most frequently used and the dark toolbars help to perform actions in selected items in Outlook like lists, where columns can be sorted, reordered and change width just like any desktop application.
One of the great powers of IQTELL is the management of the email messages. Lots of different providers are supported, and you can literally do everything a mail client can do, plus create actions of your messages and put them away. This is exactly what Inbox Zero is all about. Add up a big number of shortcut keys to the mix, and you got yourself a really fast message processing system.
I also liked the dedicated GTD views for Waiting for items (yes, you can delegate actions to people on your contact lists!) Someday, Ticklers and of course Inbox. A good addition is a weekly review list, where you can create an entry with the classic review checklist for GTD and know when it was the last time you did it.
Tagging is a bit strange, since I got the notion that if I use an Evernote tag for an Action I could see all item types together, and I could not find a list of my contexts anywhere. Projects are a bit hard to manage - I could not find a way to assign actions to projects without being into the project properties – and the subtasks also, a bit different from what I’m used to.
In conclusion
IQTELL has the ability to be the best GTD application ever made, in terms of functionality, and richness of abilities. There are not many applications that can handle your emails, calendars and reference items so you won’t need to use any other tools for your workflow. If we take in consideration the mobile phone applications which are available for iOS and Android, I don’t think there is much left to ask from a GTD application except from some more effort to reduce the complexity of some elements which will probably drive new users away.
Fortunately there is a full help system available, full of tours and tutorials, and a frequent newsletter of the service for user education about the application.