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Although the latest iteration of the Blackberry software does support categories, it’s not perfect – particularly if you’re trying to follow the GTD processes. Here’s a quick hack that works around the limitiations to an extent.

The problem arises because the default task view on the Blackberry is alphabetical – there’s no way to group tasks into contexts as you would be able to in Outlook etc. If you’ve got a huge list of tasks – and if you’re GTD-ing you will have – it means that you’ll get a screenfull of tasks beginning with a to c, and everything else is scrolled off the bottom.

It is possible to filter the display by category, but that takes a minimum of four clicks and a lot of scrolling, which offends against the whole hair-trigger nature of GTD (or at least it offends against my hair-trigger nature when it comes to using devices like a Blackberry. It’s supposed to be simple, dammit.)

The hack is to prefix each task name with the initial letter of the category – ‘A’ for agenda tasks, ‘C’ for calls & emails and so on. It does assume that you’ve only got 26 categories and they each start with a different letter of the alphabet, but hey, I did say that this was a hack, didn’t I?

Then hitting a letter key in the main tasks display will filter the list down to those categories that start with that letter – in other words, hitting ‘C’ should filter everything in the ‘Calls’ category.

Unfortunately, it’s not absolutely foolproof – other tasks containing that letter will be picked up too, but the point is that they’ll be alphabetically sorted by the category letter, so at least it’s relatively easy to spot the tasks in the category that you’re concerned about.

Another quick tip is that you can mark a task complete by selecting it and hitting the space key – obvious if you know it, I suppose, but it was news to me when I discovered it…

Having given my Blackberry a thorough roadtesting over the last couple of weeks, here’s a few thoughts, particularly as far as GTD is concerned.

Overall, it’s nice to have a device where fast data entry is possible. The form factor isn’t perfect, but it’s an acceptable compromise and a big improvement on a pen-based system – thumbs might not be as accurate as all eight fingers, but they’re far more accurate than the alternative Graffitti-style character entry.

The main advantages as far as GTD are concerned are:

• you’re able to use the device in situations where pen and paper would be difficult
• the content is synched back to your corporate server, so changes to diaries etc are immediately updated
• the synching also acts as a backup, so this is instantaneous and seamless – you just forget that it’s happening, which is about as good as it can get as far as backup is concerned.

There are some downsides, however.

• the support for categories within the tasks application is pretty rudimentary – although there is a category field, you can’t sort the display, only filter. That displays a list of the tasks in a specified category, but it’s several clicks away from the main screen. However, there’s a hack for this, more of which later.
• similarly, the options for using categories in the other apps is fairly basic. This isn’t quite so problematic as it is with tasks, but if you make a lot of use of categories it might be a bit of a bind.
• the support for non-Windows ‘partner systems’ is pretty ropey – there’s a third-party sync app, but it’s very clear that this is a device aimed at Wintel-based corporates.

Overall

In general, I’m fairly impressed with the device, and I’ll probably be able to live with the limitations. It helps that for a proportion of the time I’m sat in front of a Windows laptop, so working in Outlook make things slightly easier (or at least as much as anything is easy with Outlook). I’m not sure that a Blackberry would be a complete replacement for a laptop, but it goes a long way towards being that perfect combination of PIM and device.