After some time without news about us, we are here again. In last months we have been working very hard on the version 1.5.0 of Needian – Organize in 1,2,3. Our effort has been worthwhile and we are very happy with the outcome.
The most significant features of this release are the drastic reduction in the amount of memory used by the application (almost half required in previous versions) and, as a result, the memory crashes has been solved. This had been the main source of problems and therefore, we focused our efforts to fix it. Now Needian is much more robust and stable.
We hope that with this drastic improvement, and the following enhancements and new features, you can fully enjoy Needian. Get yours as soon as possible and enjoy it during the Christmas holidays. Happy Needian! 
Rember that, as we promise long time ago, we will maintain the 50% discount on the price until the next January 2 cnd.
List of improvements and new features of Needian v1.5.0
- Improvement of the activation process. Many users complained about the registering process of the previous version. As a result, we have changed the activation process to make it as easy as clicking a button. This means that when you install Needian 1.5.0 FULL, you must re-activate the application if you have a previous version installed.
- Copy & Paste buttons for manual activation. This allows the user to insert easily their license numbers.
- Solved the bug when deleting emails using POP/IMAP accounts. The previous version did not remove the emails on the server properly.
- New mechanism for answering emails. Previous version only allows replying to the sender of the email. We have replaced the button “Reply” by “Reply All” so that all the people in the email are added in the reply. Then, you can delete some of them if you want to mail only to a subgroup.
- Improved downloading of emails from an email account. Needian now only displays the waiting cursor while the emails are coming. Previously had unstable behavior in this regard.
- Icons of emails with attachments in the mailing list of an email account. Now you can see if an email has attachments without entering the details panel.
- Visualization of recursive appointments. The previous version didn’t support recursive appointments. As many users have asked this feature in our forum, we have decided to add the possibility of viewing all recursive appointments, but without supporting editing them. For doing so, you have to use MS Outlook. It has still some limitations, but we hope to release a fully functional solution to this in the next release.
- Automatic detection of calls to add potential task/appointments. Dynamic panel appears each time you finish a call and the caller is a contact imported in Needian. This feature improves the introduction of pending tasks after talking by phone.
- Synchronization of folders and projects (ClearContext). If you use ClearContext to maintain your mails under control, you can synchronize the projects created in Clearcontext that do not appear in Needian (those that do not have any task assigned yet) using this option in the configuration menu of Needian.
- Automatic update of the number of read/unread emails in all your email accounts.
- Status panel while starting the application that displays the number of items that have been loaded by the application.
- Czech language support. The high demand for Needian in the Czech Republic has led us to make an effort and we have adapted the application to their native language. Thanks all for your love; we hope the translation is good.
Remember that you can get the application in the download section of our website and also download an evaluation version fully functional for 15 days for free.
In the post, “3 simple rules for planning your daily work” we show how reviewing our pending actions and choose which tasks are we going to do today. Once done, it’s time to take action.
As @elcanasto says, it is essential that we concentrate on completing our daily tasks. The objective of the task list that Needian provides is to allow you free your mind from distractions and, therefore, concentrate on the job that you really have to do today. Needian will help you to check complete tasks when you finished the planned work and uncheck some tasks if you feel overloaded.
Let’s give you a tip: Once your daily task list is sorted, you should start with the most difficult task, eat the biggest frog first. When you get to overcome the most difficult tasks of the day, it will be a success and everything usually goes smoothly. If on the other hand, you let the toads to the end of the day, more often than not you will end up getting the excuse of “not having time to address” and you will put it off for “tomorrow”. Also, think about it, if you have to eat a “frog”, two things are certain:
- You’ll have to eat the frog anyway and the more time passes without doing so, the more time you’ll lose mulling over the issue.
- Early in the morning is when more power you have, so you will probably eat it easier than if you postpone.
- Tasks for today using Needian – Organize in 1,2,3
In addition to the tasks, Needian also shows you a list of all pending appointments that you have for a particular day. Thus, at a glance, you see all your appointments and you will have no excuse to forget or be late to meetings.
You’re probably thinking that one day not only consists of tasks and appointments. And you are right: What about interruptions?
To manage the daily interruptions, Needian shows you:
- The incoming and outgoing calls
- The work associated with these calls
- The work that you must to do in those places in where you go.
Thus, Needian try to put order in the interruptions that make us lose our focus. But what we do after an interruption? There are 2 options:
- If you are able, and the urgency/importance of the task allows it, you must collect the task/appointment and agree with yourself and the person asking it to defer it to a future day.
- If you can not postpone and we have to get down to work, the first step should be to review the “list of tasks for today” to uncheck enough tasks to accommodate the new one. If you accept the task, it is very important to check if you are going to break an engagement, and if so, you must contact with the people involved to renegotiate dates.
- Tasks associated with a phone call using Needian – Organize in 1,2,3
We have seen how to take action, managing our daily work and interruptions. In next posts we will see how to integrate Needian with other time management tools like, for example, ClearContex.
These are our recommendations. Which are yours?
Needian Team is pleased to inform you that a new and improved version of the Needian – Organize in 1,2,3 application for Windows Mobile is available.
This new version 1.1.0.30 fixes some bugs detected in the previous version, and contains the following improvements:
- Added functionality for creating tasks and appointments while reviewing actions by date.
- Removed evaluation alert about trial left time when starting the Needian full version.
- Needian evaluation version does not require license activation anymore.
- Optimized email management speed.
- Removed auto-synchronization (send/receive) when processing and downloading emails. Synchronization is set to manually.
- Improved email list pagination.
- Added functionality about notify task participants when tasks are marked as completed (or uncompleted)
- Added functionality for, optionally, selecting participant emails when delegating tasks for future notifications.
- If Needian finds an unexpected problem, an error notification is sent when starting Needian next time.
- Now the original email body is included in email replies.
- Fixed error occurred when user has no email account configured in its mobile device.
- Modified some email formating about delegating tasks or notifying appointments.
- Modified message shown when email is partially downloaded.
- Fixed error about some emails shown empty.
- Fixed some other minor issues.
If you are interested in Needian, don’t hesitate to go to the Download section, where you can buy the application or download an evaluation version fully functional for 15 days for free.
I'm thinking of... , by Gutter
In the post “How to achieve Inbox Zero with GTD and Windows Mobile” we have recently shown how to collect our work effectively, emptying our inbox by applying four simple steps. The next step is reviewing our pending actions, and choosing which tasks are we going to do today. We recommend being optimist, that is to say, select more tasks than we can do, to later, uncheck those that we think that can be postponed.
At first, we must choose the urgent tasks. For doing that, we will need a view that allows us to review our tasks ordered by end date, such as the view that provides Needian – Get Organized in 1,2,3. In this view we will check for today those actions whose deadline is today or next to today (see this post for recommendations from GTD creator, David Allen, for managing deadlines).
Chossing urgent tasks (By Date) with Needian - Organize in 1,2,3
Secondly, we must choose the important tasks. The important tasks are those that will push forward our projects. Using Needian – Organize in 1,2,3, we will review our projects and their associated tasks, and we will mark for today those tasks where we are late or in those we feel we must prioritize. The Zen To Done methodology (ZTD) recommends choosing the 3 projects, called ‘big rocks’ that matter most this week and work exclusively on them. If we have selected three ‘big rocks’, we should focus only those. If you think that working in just three projects is not good for you, we recommend you to read the post of Zenhabits titled “Big Rocks First: Double your productivity this week“
Chossing important tasks (By Project) using Needian - Organize in 1,2,3
Next, we must review the pending work with:
- The contacts that we are going to interact with, for planning our phone calls or meetings.
- Review our tasks by place, for choosing those tasks associated with the places that we are visiting.
- Review our work by tool, for doing those tasks related with the tools that we will have at hand.
Take your time, and try to be distraction-free while reviewing what are you going to work on, because a wrong decision can delay an important project. If we invest our time in evaluating what to do with our money, why not doing the same with our time?
With this we have prepared a list of tasks for today. In a next post we’ll see how confronting it.
Which are your tricks and tips for planning your day?
Vodafone
We just signed an agreement with Vodafone Spain for the distribution of Needian – Organize in 1,2,3.
Vodafone is one of the biggest mobile communications network provider of the world, with interest in mobile networks everywhere and with more than 147 million of customers.
With this partnership, Vodafone will distribute Needian – Organize in 1,2,3 through its marketplace, that is, Vodafone Business Place. We are very proud of this alliance, so we want to share our happiness with you.
The contest is over, and we have contacted the four winners. Congratulation to all the winners, and thanks everybody for your participation.
Luck is... (explored), by kaibara
For celebrating our launch, we announced in our website that by registering you have the possibility of winning one of four licenses for Windows Mobile that we are giving away.
The time is almost over, so be quick! We will be announcing the winners on next Monday July 5th in this blog, and only those registered by Friday July 2nd, at 23:59 GMT will take part.
Good luck to all the participants!
Sorry for this post, not related to productivity, but we wanted to talk about it 
We have signed an agreement with Microsoft, inside their BizSpark Startups Program, which let us benefit from Microsoft development tools and a lot of resources that they give us, along another kind of benefits.
We are very happy with this alliance that will help us to give more features to our users in an agile way.
Nowadays, managing email is a difficult mission. Every day, we receive dozens or hundreds of emails. Managing this amount of information requires a lot of discipline if we do not want to invest more time than the necessary. We must be prepared for “ignoring” some of this information since it is not possible to control everything and, for sure, part of this information is not really a must-read for our daily work.
Being productive does not mean reading all your email, but achieving success in the projects that matters.
However, it is a good idea to set the goal “maintaining the inbox with zero mails“. This is a good thing because it helps us to reduce the anxiety caused by seeing how many unprocessed elements we have. The task of emptying our mail inbox must be done as quickly and effectively as possible and sometimes we do not have enough time if we just use our PC.
The advantage of doing this using a Windows Mobile device and Needian – Organize in 1,2,3 is that we can process our email at any time: at the bus, at the metro, or having breakfast. In this way, we can take advantage of downtime.
For collecting our work from email with Needian – Organize in 1,2,3, we can follow this simple four steps:
- Make a general review of the inbox. Reading the subjects we can see quickly which of them are urgent, which are reference materials, which to delegate, and which we should delete.
- Delete anything that is not clearly needed: Needian – Organize in 1,2,3 lets you move the mail list with your finger tapping in those you want to delete. Later, you just need to confirm with the delete button and all the trash will disappear from your inbox.
- Process those emails which require a quick and simple response. Notice that in Needian – Organize in 1,2,3 just teplying them means that they will be archived in the “processed” folder. In this way, you will be closer to Inbox Zero! This rule represents a adaptation to mobile devices of the “less than 2 minutes” rule of GTD.
- Process those emails which require a time-consuming response. We must convert them into tasks or appointments. You can also classify these actions in a project or just assign them to person, tool or place. This will decrease the number of mails in your inbox since Needian – Organize in 1,2,3 moves processed emails to the selected project folder or to the “processed” folder if no project has been assigned. You can also delegate tasks when needed, or, if you receive documentation related to a project, you can assign it to the project as reference, so that you can check it later from the desktop.
Following these simples rules, you can achieve Inbox Zero easier. Next step, review pending work and select tasks for today (see our next posts).
How do you manage your email from your Windows Mobile Device?
Tell us your tips and tricks.
Welcome to the blog of Needian. Needian is a new kind of mail and time manager designed for everybody, a tool that will help you improving your productivity.
Productivity doesn’t mean doing more things at the same time, but learning to choose what things deserve our attention. Not all our job tasks give the same value to our company, nor all of our personal activities return us the same level of satisfaction for our life.
We are obsessed with productivity from years ago. Knowing where to focus your time will made you feel more useful, improve your career and, and being more satisfied with yourself. In one word, it will made you happier.
Our intention with this blog is helping you to manage your time better and telling you tricks for being more efficient, whether you decide to use Needian or not.
Be welcome.