Software : Task Managers

Reviews February 10, 2008

You might wonder what a task manager has to do with design. I can understand that frown on your face, but the sub-title of this blog is “design and BEYOND” - next to that, tasks and getting things done is something we all are constantly faced with.

Who doesn’t have some sort of TODO list: either on a piece of scrap paper crumbled away in the back-pocket of the jeans, or on the fridge, or spread all over the house in different places or even worse, in the head, each task fighting for attention… usually especially loud when you try to take a nap from the day and get a good nights sleep.

At some point I began testing every (Mac) to-do application I could find on Versiontracker or anyplace else on the internet. Some were quite neat but not one was really PRACTICAL, most of them got into their own way with the result that jotting down the task and finding it again at a later time became more of a hassle than help. The more tasks you jotted down, the less helpful the application became.

The other barrier came in the form of PDA’s. My first ones were Apple NEWTONS which I adored for the big screen and it was quite remarkable what I could all do with them; but synchronization with the desktop at the time was hair graying painful and spotty at most.

A few years later better integration between desktop and the PDA’s developed but the to-do applications still lacked and did not fit how I think or work. But I did find then something which was an evolution of some sorts and I began using LifeBalance which brought the GTD approach to my life. LifeBalance has some well implemented ideas - but once again, synchronizing between iCal and/or my PDA remained a nightmare. The big, big advantage of LifeBalance over other task managers is when it comes to recurring task or tasks you know will only come up in a week or a month. You can set them to that date in the future and give them a ‘buffer’ of when they begin showing up in your to-do list, like some sort of pre-warning. You also have a sliding importance setting which is way cooler than the usual 3 - 5 fixed levels you find in other to-do applications. But development of LifeBalance and the Mac support on it has been too slow for me over the past few years, so I moved on.

I was able to do extensive alpha/beta testing for OmniFocus from it’s early stage on and saw the application develop. While this was an exiting time and OmniFocus by far the best GDT application I’ve seen so far, at some point during the development the application became too overloaded, and the more features where added the less user friendly it became for me and I finally abandoned it past December.

Mid December I stumbled over THINGS - in development by CulturedCode, the same people who brought you Xyle Scope (great tool to study CSS of websites).

Even though we don’t have recurring tasks yet, THINGS is finally a task application that combines the usual, linear approach of common to-do applications and the advanced GTD options into an application which stays SIMPLE with a lot of power under it’s belt. Big difference is that it allows you to create Projects (containing a clear goal with steps to get there) and Areas (with possible repeating tasks and no clear set end goal). Next to that it uses TAGS which are great for organization. Just last week the developers of THINGS showed a preview teaser of the repeating task dialog box, and once again they proved that simplicity is their main goal with this application.

At this point I’m using THINGS as my main task manager and even though it is still not feature complete, it is the first task manager that feels RIGHT. If you’re on a Mac, give it a spin!