De-feature List
Here are some features that we built and that just did not work - so we got rid of them again. And these weren't just little prototype implementations. We're talking fully-fledged release-ready features here. Below are some of the major features that were cut after construction, along with some of the rationale behind their removal.
Notifications
What's Next exists only to answer a simple question: what do I need to do next? You will still need to use a calendaring application to keep track of your meetings, deadlines and opera visits. And most notifications are annoying. Be honest - how many times do you click the "Snooze" button when your calendar reminds you of something you should be doing? Unless the notification reminds you of something that you absolutely need to do at a particular point in time, it is simply an interruption. If it is an action you need to do, you should have seen that action when you did your daily review in the morning.
Assigning actions to projects and contexts via drag-and-drop
Assigning an action to a project or a context normally only happens once in the action's lifetime - when the action is created. And while sometimes we make a mistake and assign an action to the wrong project, this can easily be changed from the action details page.
Detailed project descriptions
Use the project wiki!
Detailed context descriptions
If you can't immediately work out what a context means from its name, you don't need that context. Explaining what "Home" or "Phone" means in a great amount of detail is a waste of resources.
Importance and Urgency
We had some really cool sliders that could be used to adjust an action's importance and urgency. The idea was that you should be selecting your next action based on how important it is, not necessarily how urgent. Unfortunately, urgency seems to override importance in a lot of cases - mostly since if something is urgent, there is normally someone chasing us for the completion of the action. We then tend to prioritise an urgent - but otherwise unimportant - action, just to get that person off our back. We then had multiple requests for drag-and-drop reordering of actions which made the importanct/urgency concept obsolete, and the code had to go.
