Task managers

Posted by Graham Rhind
Apr 20, 2007 at 08:27 AM

Jan Rifkinson wrote:
>Can’t comment about footprint or sluggishness but, if you
>feel like it, could you be a bit more specific about not being able to quickly add, edit &
>list tasks.
>Do you think it might be a matter of use, i.e. familiarity w UR? It does have a rather
>steep learning curve & is awkward is some areas for sure.

I can try. Familiarity is certainly an issue, but I did try hard to get UR to work as a task manager, but it just isn’t slick enough for me.

I want a task manager to allow me to add a task with a single click/keystroke, show me at a glance what has to be done, and remove the task with a single click.

With UR, to set up a task I need to highlight the task folder, Insert and then add the task. Not a problem as such. But to see what has to be done at a glance, I have to open favourites and choose a pre-saved search (which can be done with a keystroke), but then I have to correct the date in the search to be for today, run the search and then check the results. When a task is done, I have to change a property in the task (e.g. completed -> 100%) and then re-run the search to remove the completed task from the overview.

Perhaps I’m not doing it right, but UR’s flexibility just makes it too cumbersome for something that should be simple. Incidentally, though I know the focus is different, Priorganizer also works as an interface on a database, like UR, and it does it so much better - UR could learn a thing from them in terms of ease of use.

>I also have a feeling Kinook
>is working on some of these things including a better way to input data along the lines
>of ADM or Zoot. Although they don’t make a habit of commenting on these things, they did
>mention that while I was testing v3 beta, now v3.06

Yes, their lack of feedback is bloody annoying, frankly. I was surprised as people mentioned how good their support was before I bought the software. For me support is not just solving technical problems but also communicating with their customers, and they don’t do that well in my view.

>Likewise I’m a little confused by
>what you mean about its poor handling of recurring tasks. After setting it up, it’s one
>click to re-set the recurrence.

You may have found a way of doing it that I’ve missed, but recurring tasks is one of those very simple things which about half of all PIMs and task managers miss the point of. There are limited numbers of options and it’s easy to program, so I don’t know why this is. I mentioned my feelings about not working with reminders in the Kinook forum, but apart from that, the recurring option in the task template allows daily, weekday, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. So if I want a task to repeat every Monday and Wednesday? Or every 3rd Tuesday of the month? Priorganizer fails in this too.

Graham