chrispederick.com

Much of the rea­son behind set­ting up the new forums was in an effort to get bet­ter orga­ni­zed and improve some of the pro­ces­ses that I use to manage my work. In addi­tion to com­mu­ni­ca­tion, another area that I wan­ted to improve was trac­king what tasks I am currently wor­king on and any fea­ture requests that I plan on tac­kling in the future.

My pre­vious method was to track all this infor­ma­tion using email and the to-do lists for the User Agent Switcher and Web Deve­lo­per exten­sions. Unsur­pri­singly, this did not scale very well and as the amount of tasks inc­rea­sed so did the amount of time I spent trying to keep track of all of them. I deci­ded to look at pos­si­ble soft­ware solutions.

Tasks

I first star­ted loo­king for a soft­ware appli­ca­tion that would run on my local machine, but found nothing sui­ta­ble for either Mac OS X or Win­dows. Everything I loo­ked at was either too sim­ple — a basic text edi­tor that kept track of unca­te­go­ri­zed notes — or way too com­pli­ca­ted — a full-blown appli­ca­tion desig­ned for large-scale pro­ject mana­ge­ment. Then I noti­ced Tasks, Alex King’s task manager.

Tasks is desc­ri­bed as “a power­ful web-based per­so­nal task mana­ger” and it inc­lu­des fea­tu­res such as a hie­rarchi­cal view, trac­king time spent on a task, email remin­ders, RSS feeds, iCa­len­dar inte­gra­tion, built-in secu­rity and many, many more. Of course it also inc­lu­des all the stan­dard task set­tings that you would expect such as prio­ri­ties, due dates, com­ple­tion per­cen­tage as well as easy ways to sort and search.

At first I was not sure how sui­ta­ble Tasks would be for my needs and although there is a demo, it is not quite the same as using a piece of soft­ware for real. The­re­fore, I ini­tially went with the cut-down, dona­tion­ware ver­sion, but after using it for just a cou­ple of weeks I was sold and hap­pily paid the bar­gain price of $29.95 for the full ver­sion. While I am currently using only a frac­tion of it’s fea­tu­res I expect this to change as my needs pro­gress and I become more fami­liar with the product.

Inter­face

One of the great advan­ta­ges of a web-based solu­tion is that you can access the infor­ma­tion from any machine and this is inc­re­dibly use­ful as I work on both my iBook and my PC. Howe­ver, this can also be a disad­van­tage as the inter­face needs to be very well desig­ned in order to func­tion in the somewhat limi­ted envi­ron­ment that is the web brow­ser. Not only this, but web-based inter­fa­ces are often desig­ned to work best in Inter­net Explo­rer with little atten­tion paid to other brow­sers. The inter­face of Tasks, howe­ver, is exce­llent and is one of it’s grea­test strengths. It is clean and sim­ple with easy to unders­tand icons and everything works per­fectly in Mozi­lla Firefox.

Tasks comes in a num­ber of dif­fe­rent incarnations:

• Tasks is the Basic Per­so­nal Orga­ni­zer version
• Tasks 2.0 is the Advan­ced Per­so­nal Edition
• Tasks Pro adds multi-user functionality
• Use Tasks was launched today and is the hos­ted, monthly subsc­rip­tion ser­vice for Tasks or Tasks Pro

I am using the Advan­ced Per­so­nal Edi­tion, but Use Tasks looks like an inte­res­ting option at $3.95 a month inc­lu­ding free upgrades.

I am extre­mely plea­sed with Tasks — it has saved me time and hel­ped me to get bet­ter orga­ni­zed. If you are loo­king for task mana­ger soft­ware I highly recom­mend it.