Input from a User.
We recently received the following e-mail from a curious user about how we, and other people use Paprika:
“I’ve been a staction user for a while now, and I started to “get” the flow of using staction after a few days.
With paprika, I got one of the free accounts, but I haven’t really been spending any time in it. For me, the mark of a good productivity app is whether I willingly jump into using it in the course of a normal day.I find myself reaching for staction to put post-it notes, todos, and it’s a pretty smooth experience.
I would like to get to know paprika better, but the thought of having to retype or copy and paste over my notes from staction makes it a bit of a chore.
Now that the product has been out there for a bit now, what kind of workflow feedback are you seeing from your users? Any suggestions or tips?”
A legitimate question, and one we were happy to answer!
“To be honest, – we’re not too sure about everyone’s workflow so far. We’re trying to gather info via support, but we haven’t done any surveys, or customer interviews yet.But here’s how we use Staction and Paprika. 80% of everything we do still gets recorded into Staction. But those occasional projects that have buttloads of todos, or lots and lots of notes have never fit well inside of Staction. It’s an admitted weakness. Staction is for short bursts, and quick communication check-ins. But it’s not great at the long-form. So when we don’t want to cloud the stream with long posts, or too many posts at once, we create a Paprika project, and share it in the stream via a link.
I think of it like a folder inside the project. Share a link, mark it as a todo. Visit the Paprika page, and mark all the todos complete, then hop to Staction, and mark that whole link complete.
But Paprika is much more a personal-use tool right now. I use it tons for my non-work-related tasks, and notes. I use it for my “do this today” stuff that the group really doesn’t need to know about. I share little lists with my wife. I hope with some upcoming updates, we’ll make Paprika even more friendly for quick notes, and better sharing. It’s a small app, and not everyone needs it now, but we have some really exciting plans to grow it over time.
Thanks for writing. You have no idea what it means to us when people care enough to write to us about our apps.”
Do you have any additional tips you’ve picked up while using Paprika?
Hello,
I’m really happy to see you continue to expand your range of helpful little apps.
My favourite thing about your approach is that you don’t force people to make a decision up-front about what type of content they’re adding – they’re just adding content and they can shape it later, via tags, to-do’s, linking, and the rest. For me, the problem with something like Basecamp is that everything is only a whiteboard, or a milestone, a to-do… people don’t work like that, you need flexibility to multi-purpose content and decide, after you’ve started typing, what it is you’re really creating.
Now, on the question at hand – I can see the confusion about what exactly Paprika and Staction are for when used together. My opinion is that you should release another product, one that uses a single store of data, and has different views depending on what you’re trying to achieve – one view looks like Staction, another view looks like Paprika. There’s no need to keep the apps separate when they’re doing such similar things.
I use TiddlyWiki (tiddlywiki.com) a lot, which lets you create microcontent (tiddlers) and then do whatever you want with them via macros (written in JavaScript). The way I use it is already a bit like Paprika, with special bits of wiki-syntax having a certain function; and it’s a bit like Staction, in that I track my time via tiddlers, where the analysis is performed automatically.
J.
Jonathan, we had a simliar thought to this at an early point. We may get there at some point. But there’s a tough problem to solve first. In Staction, the stream is the record… It is an archive of chronology. In Paprika, anything can change at any time.
We think it would be great if Staction project summaries were Paprika projects in essence. But imagine how damaging it could be to the workflow if things got overwritten.
Anyway, – thank you for the input. We hope to solve problems like this someday, – and we appreciate having thoughtful users like you add to the dialog. It keeps us sharp. -Joe