I Need Advice…
… about software, and it just occurred to me that this might be a great place to ask for it. Do any of you use a task-management software that you might recommend (or caution me against trying)?
I have multiple projects I’m working on these days, and I’m always having ideas for new ones that I’d like to start. Some of these projects are relatively complicated in that they have multiple tasks, each of which has a very specific deadline. Others are simply a thing I need to get done. Others are projects that occur to me to start at some point when I have a bit of extra time. One of the negative aspects of retirement is that it’s easy to find yourself saying at 10:00 in the morning, “I don’t have anything to do today,” and then remembering at 10:00 at night that there was this great idea you had that you wanted to get started on and today would have been a perfect time to do something about it had it been on your radar. I used to have an amazing staff person who helped me keep track of all the balls I had in the air as well as all the balls I wanted to add to the mix, but it turns out when you retire they don’t let you take those people home and keep them. (It’s a real flaw in the whole system.)
So I could really use some help.
Here is my wish list for a task-management system:
- It should be electronic (not a paper Franklin-Covey-like calendar), and it needs to be available on Mac.
- It would be nice if it had apps for iPhone and iPad as well, and be able to sync to them.
- It should be able to keep track of projects as well as individual tasks.
- It should have some kind of calendar system with alerts.
- It would be extra awesome if I could in someway attach links to documents or files on my computer (or pages from the web), so if for example I am supposed to follow up on a writing project I don’t have to go hunting for everything I’ve already starting to use on that project.
- It would be nice if there was some way to prioritize both the tasks and the projects, so that if I had just an hour of time I could tell at a glance if I had anything urgent coming up rather than review everything I’ve entered on my to-do list.
- Because I am me, it would be best if it was fairly intuitive and easy, and not something I needed to devote a day or more learning how to use (like Daylite).
Any suggestions? What do you folks use?
Take a look at Trello. It’s web-based, but there’s an iOS app too. I’m using it to manage my dissertation research.Report
Well, that attempt to add a link didn;t work. The URL is http://www.trello.com.Report
https://www.droptask.com/featuresReport
WunderlistReport
I think with finding an organizer it’s about balancing simplicity with flexibility. I don’t need a lot of functionality, so I just use the Reminders app that comes with OSX just fine. If you want something more flexible than the very good options already mentioned, then check out Omnifocus or AwesomeNote.Report
Evernote seems to have all the things the other ones people mentioned have. Took me a little while to get used to moving from paper, but it doesn’t have a calendar per se. It has reminders to let you know something is happening, or you can make a calendar. Some guy on YouTube has a video about this, but it seems pretty complicated.Report
This is an area of obsession for me because I really love organization when it comes to work and writing on the side (which is almost another full-time job). A few things come to mind:
Evernote – this is great for uploading quick notes, saving articles, making lists, etc. Syncs perfectly between desktop, phone and tablet. I use it daily.
Google tasks – I use this for most of my to-do lists. It has unlimited size so I usually have something like 10 lists going at any one time. I keep lists for the house, errands, things to do for my mom, movies I want to see, etc. There is a third party app called Gtasks that will make it easier to manage on your phone but for the desktop I just log in through Gmail and it is right there.
Todoist – I played around with this for about 6 months and then decided it wasn’t a good fit but I have talked to some coworkers and they said a lot of the buggy stuff I didn’t like have been fixed.
Microsoft Outlook – This is what I use for work. My company depends heavily on Outlook to function as we are a big, global organization and email is our primary communication tool to deal with time zones, etc. The task function in Outlook is pretty solid and you can make it more robust by taking advantage of all the available fields in a task or project.
Nozbe – Michael Hyatt recommends this for project management. I believe it is intended for Mac and I haven’t tried it but I trust his judgement on these kinds of things. If you are just working solo it may be more robust than you need.
http://michaelhyatt.com/nozbe.html
Basecamp – We played around with this one at work for a while and it is great for group projects but we ultimately went with an internal system that we built from scratch. I liked Basecamp better but my company generally doesn’t like to use third party software anymore than they have to. It just costs us way too much in licensing and they don’t really trust external cloud computing yet.
Excel – For basic list creation I sometimes still default to Excel. It’s clunky for this purpose but if you are good with it the ability to customize the format is only limited by your imagination (that sounded like a bad commercial but it is true)Report
And it should cook dinner too 😉Report