I Got a Golden Ticket!
Wow! Those critters over at 37 Signals sure know what they are doing. First with Basecamp, then Tada-lists, and now Backpack. They are trickling out “golden tickets” in anticipation of a Tuesday launch, as a way to get people using it and buzzing about it. I got a golden ticket, so here I am doing my duty.
I’m a fan of backpacks in general, and I even still have my backpack from high school (I’ve patched it). I used it all through college, and I still use it today. It is worn and smelly (smelly because I use it to tote my Frisbee gear to and from games) but it carries everything I need. The shoulder bag I carry to work nowadays is full of pay stubs, notes to myself, my seldom-used-PDA, pens, sketchbook, doodles, etc. Lots of useful stuff all in one place. It’s a decent metaphor for this application.
Backpack is great for me. It synthesises all the randomness of my life (especially these most recent few days, weeks, months), and gives me a way to not lose track of things. For example, I can set a reminder for “tomorrow afternoon” to call and make the car appointment I’ve been meaning to make for the past few weeks. You can even “snooze” a reminder: if I am in the middle of something, I can reset the remider time, and it will get back to me later.
Or, I can create a whole page devoted to EnchantedCeiling, where I can make notes about all the different things I want to do for the site. Pages can have notes, checklists (like Tada Lists), and for paid accounts, files and images. I can see this EnchantedCeiling page being especially helpful because I don’t get time to work on it very often, and there can LONG gaps between when I think of something and when I have time to implement it. Now I just jot it down in my Backpack, and I can work on it when I have the time: eventually.
I can see my use of this tool as being very organic. I’ll make a page about something I am going to do, and keep all the notes in that one place, and then when I am done: poof! I can delete it. Very Zen.
With all my new life changes coming right around the corner, I can use a little more Zen.
