Aspire is initially surprising or puzzling to many people. It doesn't look or work like "productivity applications" are supposed to.
Everyone knows that productivity means tracking things you need to get done, usually with lists, outlines, charts and schedules. It means itemizing the tasks to complete, breaking them down into subtasks, and estimating times for each of those.
We know there are lots of great tools for doing that, ranging from paper-and-pencil, to methodologies like Getting Things Done, to group or individual wiki tools, to calendars, or to dedicated task management applications. We're lucky to have so many well-designed and effective tools on the Mac to help us be productive.
So if that's how productivity is done, and everyone seems to more or less agree, why did Aspire get it so wrong?
Well, if you think of Aspire as a replacement for traditional task management tools, I think that would be getting it wrong.
Think instead of Aspire as a way to add value and complement your existing day-to-day task management. It offers a different perspective, not only conceptually but visually, that I think is a very important and useful one. It helps you to see the work you're doing from another side, to "think differently"... now where have we heard that before?
So why might this other perspective be important?
Traditional productivity and task management approaches focus on time as the variable to be optimized. Getting more things done in a given time makes us more productive.
Many people are familiar with Stephen Covey and his seven (or eight) habits. His categorization of activities into four quadrants based on importance and urgency is also well known.
This matrix underscores that we should be spending more time in the "important" half, and that in particular important but "not urgent" activities are all too easily neglected in the rush to get our ever-growing daily tasks done in what seems like ever shrinking time.
Ahhh....
So while task-based tools often provide some notion of task priority or sorting, their primary focus is helping you get what you need to do done in a finite time. Importance is a consideration, but secondary to time.
In Aspire, importance is right up there front and centre as the dominant organizing principle, while tasks, sub-tasks and time are secondary.
Because screen space varies with importance, Aspire very graphically puts importance right in your face. Look at your existing work from that perspective. Is all of your time spent in a small area of the screen (small importance)? Are you completely ignoring things taking up the bulk of the screen (large importance)? Does the overall gestalt presented by Aspire jive with how you're spending your time?
Both ways are "right", but they help you look at things from different perspectives. Both of those perspectives are important, and valuable. Ultimately, you don't want to just get things done, you want to get the important things done.
So did Aspire get it wrong?
If the goal was to unseat existing productivity applications, make a boatload of money, or appeal to the widest possible audience, the approach taken by Aspire would be wrong. But those weren't goals.
I think some people — not all, and not even a majority — will be motivated enough and would benefit from taking a fresh look at their long-term productivity through the lens of importance. Not giving up task-based and time-based perspectives, but augmenting them. I also think that particularly applies to the creatives, free thinkers and innovators who tend to gravitate towards Macs in the first place.
If even looking at Aspire motivates you to revisit and widen your perspective on productivity, in my mind that's a success. Not that I mind if you actually buy the software of course.
