Task managers - what should they be able to do?

Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 30, 2008 at 06:55 PM

With the release of another personal task manager (a term I personally prefer over “to-do list” or otherwise), I thought it might be useful to take a look at what these task managers should be able to do. The number of programs I’ve looked at for task management must be approaching three figures, and I still haven’t found one I would happily use. Many task managers start off with great plans but a good many never reach maturity (and I could name names), so I think we need to look at what the software currently does rather than the plans the developer has for it.

I don’t think my needs are particularly individual to me - I’m an empiricist and try to let the nature of tasks themselves define what the software should be able to do. Many claim to support Getting Things Done principles though, having ploughed through that book, I can contest that many don’t. Many aim for usability but confuse it with lack of sophistication - a program can be powerful and also simple to use. Also, for me, the software can be embedded in PIM software or be standalone - as long as it fulfils basic requirements.

To my mind personal task management should fulfil these criteria:

Critical:

- Full support for recurrence (which universe do developers live in where tasks don’t recur?); automatic recreation of a recurring task upon completion/deletion
- Date and time due
- Alarms and snoozing
- (Definable) priority indications
- (Definable) categorisation/tagging
- (Definable) status indication (waiting, complete, pending etc.)
- Full featured notes editor (RTF/HTML, tables and graphics enabled)

Important:

- Unlimited sub-tasking (i.e. a tree-like structure)
- (Definable) colour coding (font and background)
- Import/Export/Synchronisation (with Outlook, Palm etc.)
- User-defined views by any aspect (dates, tags, categories, text etc.)
- Undo
- Easy entry of tasks into the program using drag and drop and/or key combination

Nice to have

- (Definable) icons per task
- Date started/date ended
- Time planned for task/time actually taken
- Reporting

I did find one personal task manager that did almost all of this but had a problem with database corruption. I am therefore currently having to use a blend of Outlook, Zoot and Sciral Consistency.

What does everybody think? Will the grail be obtained? Is there a program out there I’ve missed? What other features have I forgotten?

Graham