Task managers - what should they be able to do?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 5, 2008 at 11:13 AM

Jack Crawford wrote:
>Just to get back to Graham’s original post and comprehensive list.
>My only refinement would be to move email syncing from important to critical.

I would personally choose more general terms for a task manager’s essential interconnection, including e-mail, like supporting drag-n-drop and/or copy/pasting of links from other programs. Nowadays, many of the programs we discuss here provide URLs (links) to their contents. Programs such as Zoot, Surfulater, Evernote, Outlook etc.

This means that one can easily link to all the content related to a specific task, wherever that content may be. Syncing IMHO would add quite a lot of redundancy to a program that obviously isn’t conceived to handle e-mail (or whatever). On the other hand, one may want to have an all-round solution, though I personally prefer the specialised software approach.

I do understand that sometimes it’s good to have all the information locally (a related e-mail after all may just be a small note) so, ideally, the task manager should provide an option to link to or to copy the required information (as long as the original program supports both options as well).

On a different theme, my own personal highlight would be hierarchical task management, i.e. not just one level of categorisation/tagging but many. This is one of my issues with the program I currently work with, Tasktop.

Last but not least, I would require filtering (by whatever column value) and some kind of hoisting in order to maintain focus.

alx