After talking to some of the people using Viira as the GTD system on their BlackBerry, a few ideas and potential enhancements came up in our conversations. And what better way to make those ideas and enhancements available to everyone out there than a point release!

So here is what’s new in Viira 1.1:

• Notes field for Tasks. Several people mentioned the usefulness of being able to write a few extra words about a task, and we promptly added this to the Viira feature set.
• Enhanced BlackBerry Bold Day View.The BlackBerry Bold has a unique and very beautiful theme going, which Viira now embraces.
• Viira imports BlackBerry tasks. We heard from many people who are migrating away from using the BlackBerry Tasks application for GTD. With them in mind we added the ability to import all those tasks that they have already typed in the first time Viira gets launched.

And here are some screenshots from Viira 1.1:

Viira 1.1 comes as a free upgrade to everyone who has purchased the full version. Just sign-in and you will see a link to download the 1.1 version on the left.

In addition to being able to categorize tasks by Project and by Context, Viira’s tasks can be organized by day as well. I like the extra flexibility this adds to the way I can organize my to-do data on my BlackBerry, and here is how I leverage it to be more productive.

In the GTD bible Getting Things Done David Allen talks about the importance of including day-specific actions and information in your calendar. Day-specific actions are those “things that you need to do sometime on a certain day, but not necessarily at a specific time”. Day-specific information is things like tips, reminders and generally “information that may be useful on a given day”.

Viira’s day tasks are perfectly suited for both. But I also like to use Viira’s day tasks for another purpose - to plan the next day ahead the night before.

Every night before I go to bed I like to sit down with my BlackBerry and plan out the day to come. I do this by going through the projects that are on top of my priority list, pick the next actions from them and assign them as a day task for tomorrow. Assigning an existing task for a day is easy with Viira - you just check of the checkbox that says “Day Task”, set the date and you are done.

I find that this process of staking out tomorrow’s objectives adds a strengthened sense of focus when I start the new day. If I have planned out my day tasks and visualized the day’s goals in advance I find myself less likely to be thrown off course by the distractions and interruptions that will inevitably occur during the course of that day. And if I can’t get to everything that I was planning to accomplish on that day, I can review it during those nightly mini-reviews and either defer it for tomorrow or leave it off for another day.

A Someday/Maybe list is an important but often times overlooked feature of any solid GTD system. The list consists of all those actionable items that we want to get to at some later point but that cannot be acted upon now.

The idea is to record all the Someday/Maybe items and, while getting them out of our busy minds now, to review the list later and decide if the time to act on a particular task or idea has come or not.

The way I handle Someday/Maybe items with Viira is by using contexts. I have two contexts - a ‘Someday’ and a ‘Maybe’ - largely to keep a clean separator between things that I know I will have to get to eventually (”get going on tax return”) versus wish-list items (e.g. “learn French”).

Once I have assigned a task to the Someday or Maybe context I do not assign a project or date to that task. This effectively keeps the Someday/Maybe items cleanly separated from the other tasks in Viira. This makes intuitive sense: if a task has a due-date associated with it or is part of a larger work-in-progress project then it probably isn’t a Someday/Maybe item any more.

Once captured, the key is to do a scan of the Someday and Maybe contexts on a periodic basis - perhaps during the Weekly review. Here is a shared email to David Allen from a person who successfully leveraged his Someday/Maybe list in his GTD system and got things rolling at the right time - and was very happy that he did.

The topic of Someday/Maybe lists is a big and open-ended one and there are many tips on how to make the most of it while avoiding some of the pitfalls (like turning it into a procrastination list). Andre from Tools for Thought has posted a great article on dealing with some of the challenges and how to overcome them - an excellent read!