Despite switching from Windows to OSX a year and a half ago, I’ve yet to find the perfect task management tool for my Mac. I need something that’ll exist on the web, my desktop environment and a mobile handset.
Sadly, Gmail’s recently introduced Tasks feature doesn’t offer offline or mobile sync, my iPhone’s default Notes app has no desktop or web equivalent and Apple Mail’s To Do capability send my Gmail account’s IMAP sync into a tailspin.
I’ve experimented with OmniFocus (a little complex for my taste) and Things - supremely elegant, but quite expensive with iPhone and desktop editions priced separately. Now, my business partner swears by Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper - a product we covered earlier this year, and has just rolled out a 2.0 update of its software.
As Mike alluded to in his May review of TaskPaper - ’sometimes simple is best’. TaskPaper makes no allusions to competing with its GTD-infused brethren, such as OmniFocus or Things, but reinforces the notion that a plain text document, marked up coherently can be very powerful indeed.
TaskPaper 2.0 adds a search engine, quick entry window, keyboard shortcuts, themes, a projects sidebar, AppleScript support and some UI tweaks. Despite all these additions, the product still feels elegantly simple, powerful and lightweight, retaining its orientation around a text document. Indeed, despite the lack of web or phone editions, the plain text core is actually the foundation for a powerful ecosystem of third-party solutions, one of which - Taskphone - is looking to bring Taskpaper support to the iPhone.
Personally, I’m not fully won over by any solution yet - holding out for a good Google+Apple linkup - like the interoperability of Gmail+Apple Mail or Google Calendar + iCal. However, right now its a toss up between the versatile, but plain girlfriend (TaskPaper) or the glamourous and expensive mistress (Things).
It may be a terrible pun, but it is a useful micro-site from the people at Google. The site (and the pun) is “Appy Holidays,” and the aim is to help you manage your hectic holiday schedule.
In the tradition of Fashion Your Firefox, and iPhone Your Life, Appy Holidays collects a selection of Google Apps under a consolidated theme, in this case “manag[ing] the holiday hustle and bustle”.
The Google services featured on the web site include Calendar, Docs, Picasa, and the recently released Gmail-integrated video chat. In fact, the services listed and their suggested uses does present a nice way of getting all of your holiday ducks in a row. Most useful are probably Calendar and Docs, especially if you’re already using these services professionally.
I’m awful at keeping track of deadlines without a planner or calendar, and I already use Google Calendar to keep track of appointments, so it makes sense to add a new calendar devoted exclusively to making sure I don’t miss any of those holiday parties I’ve committed to, or, at the micro-management level, reminding me that the turkey needs to go in by 10:00 if it’s going to be ready when company comes.
Appy Holidays also suggests using Docs for shopping list management, and for labelling and writing holiday letters. They’ve even prepared a special selection of templates so that most of the work is already done for you. If you’re like me, you might also want to keep tabs on your holiday budget using a Docs spreadsheet, since otherwise January might be a very long, scant month indeed. Leftover turkey can only feed you for so long.
When I saw the headline on TechCrunch, “Google Launching ToDo List Product?” my heart skipped a happy beat. Finally! But no. It’s likely that TechCrunch only exposed a Google employee who hit the wrong button and accidentally posted a private blog entry or email containing his personal weekend task list. False alarm.
Google attempts to compete almost point-for-point against major Microsoft Office features on nearly every note except for task and project management. What are they waiting for? It’s wonderful that we have so many on and offline ways of managing personal and group tasks whether they are directly tied to projects or not. Yet we’re still sorely missing tight integration between email, documents and tasks for those of us who use Google tools in our businesses. The inability to assign and track simple tasks and lists through Google Apps is a glaring omission that may very well be the reason some small businesses and groups are hesitant to give up their Outlook-based workflows with its handy task pane.
Clearly, we’re ready for Google to make some sort of announcement in this area, aren’t we? Should Google take the GrandCentral/Jot route and acquire a company like Remember the Milk, which already does an outstanding job of integrating tasks with Gmail, or should they develop something from scratch once and for all?
How do you think Google should respond to those of us who are clammoring for to-do/task management baked into their products?
Like Mike, I’ve been using the alpha releases of OmniFocus for a while now and I was thisclose to taking advantage of their pre-sale deal to buy the application for $40. But wait. CulturedCode has thrown their hat into the ring with Things. Yet another stand-alone and pretty GTD app for Mac OS X? Maybe.
A preview version is trickling out to newsletter subscribers. For those who can’t wait, the developers are promoting a screencast of the application’s main features. Looks promising. Much of the same functionality as OmniFocus, including a quick entry window for doing a brain dump of tasks to process later. But Things doesn’t force a project/context/task structure the way OmniFocus and other GTD-focused apps do.
So now I’ll wait to get my preview invite before deciding which application I’ll end up paying for. As with email, I’ve found that I prefer using a stand-alone application for task management instead of a browser-based one.
Are you already overloaded on to-do apps or are you giving these newbies a try?
