Task managers

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 1, 2007 at 06:02 PM

Graham Rhind wrote:

>I continue to waver, but at the moment the options look like having to
>have recurring tasks in Outlook; long term and customer-based tasks in UR; and short
>term, spur of the moment bits and pieces in ITSD, because I can so easily drag bits of
>text to its collector.

My 2c:

My own experience with task management is similar to Jack’s, i.e. I’ve realised that it’s more to do with my own overall attitude and self-discipline than software tools. As such, there’s a couple of books that I would suggest (I think they’ve been mentioned here in the past): Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit and Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play and, more recently, Do It Tomorrow. David Allen’s Getting Things Done is of course another must read, but I’m sure most will be already familiar with it.

I mention these books because there’s a couple of principles that they all abide to, more or less, and one might want to consider before selecting a tool to implement task management. These are, rather simplified:
- Only put into your calendar previously committed time, i.e. meetings, deadlines etc. Do not schedule tasks.
- Do not use to do lists, i.e. collections of irrelevant tasks. Use check lists that group related tasks together so that you maintain the context.
- Separate planning time from action time; when in planning time, organise tasks by priority and context; when in action time, just follow your checklists as context permits (time, place, tasks before/after)

The good thing, in software terms, of such approaches, is that one can indeed use a variety of tools depending on their strengths, because integration isn’t so important.

My own set up includes:
- Outlook’s calendar; actually, its only advantage for me over a paper version is that it can act as a platform for exchanging information among various programs and show various time views (I also suggest installing the freeware Datelens plug-in)
- UltraRecall: for all my project information (but nothing time-related) so that I have instant in-context access to it when I’m working.
- ListPro ( http://www.iliumsoft.com/ ): it has been mentioned here in the past; it’s a Pocket PC / Palm program with a desktop version it can sync to. It’s a very powerful outliner with a strong column capability.

alx