Task Management Interfaces: Outlines, "Contexts", Tags, and Areas

Posted by Ike Washington
Jan 24, 2009 at 12:13 AM

Steve

I think you give a good description of some of Natara Bonsai’s features. Yep, it’s an outliner with columns in which the data can be shown either in a flat or hierarchical view and then sorted as required.

What I particularly like, find useful for GTD, is that filters can be saved and then accessed directly from the keyboard. In my day-to-day work file, I can see with a click what’s due this week, next week, my next actions, completed projects, what I’ve done this week, last week, what I’ve tagged (“keyworded”) with “To Research"or whatever and so on. The columns can stay the same or change according to the filter. And each filter can show either a flat or hierarchical view. I can set the sort when I define the filter. I can then sort using different criteria when I’m looking at the data.

It’s really a great personal task/project application. No Gantt charts or collaborative features, but fine for managing day-to-day work. I bought it because I wanted to plan my projects both on my desktop and on my palm pda. But I’d use it even without the sync to the pda. The desktop version is polished. And I think the pda version is far better than ListPro - as I’ve said earlier: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/3091.

Ike

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>... an outliner with columns, which can
>have a “flat view”—that is, the hierarchy revmoved—and then be able to sort and sub
>sort on the various columns. So, for instance, you can build your task list in the
>outline, with the headers being higher level projects, then you can assign due dates
>in one column, priority in another, and—if you’re into GTD—context in another.
>Then you can flatten the list, and sort on context and priority. ...
> >Steve Z.