Best PIM for project management?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 22, 2012 at 08:04 AM

Dr Andus, I will second LM7’s support for Achieve Planner, even though I do not use it myself (the reason being that nowadays I work with teams, so I need collaborative tools; see http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/3328).

There are plenty of tutorials to get you through the required steps. Roger, the developer, practices what he preaches and offers productivity courses as well http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/get-focused-multimedia-course/ though you won’t need these to work with the Planner. If you do like the program, make sure to enter your email at its Bits du Jour page http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/achieve-planner-productivity-suite/ You may be lucky and save a good deal if the discount appears within your trial period.

As a broader reference, I would say that a PPM (Personal Project Management tool) essentially needs to have the following:

- Ability to break down work into structured individual tasks; any outliner can do this
- Ability to set date / time information for each task and show this on a timeline and/or calendar (possibly via syncing with Outlook or Google Calendar)
- Support for follow-up of the individual tasks, i.e. setting completion either as Done/Pending or percentage (I personally have never managed to do the latter)

Achieve Planner does all of the above. InfoQube too (and much more, but the learning curve is significant) as well as other tools mentioned here in the past, like Watership Planner.

I will also second LM7’s comment that the project’s information management is something different and better suited for PIMs like UltraRecall or MyInfo.

Last but not least, as one acquires more tools, it is good to find ways to simplify the actual workflow; I have found Leo Babauta’s books and blog http://zenhabits.net/books/ helpful in that respect.