I’m a pretty organized person. I use iCal and its rather aggressive reminder system to keep track of appointments, assignments, and other items with deadlines. I’ve used it this way for several years, and it’s worked great.
This approach is not good for a couple specific use cases. iCal organizes events and todos by calendars (e.g.: work, school, sports events, etc.) that don’t necessarily interact well together. (For example, there’s no way to create a project that cross-references events and todos in multiple calendars.)
iCal fails more substantially is in making the creation of simple, cross-refenced todo lists simple, easy and fast. Creating a todo in iCal is a multistep process involving several clicks and decisions that, when you just want to put a list together, be it of groceries to buy, or small but important tasks, or whatever, is slow and overbearing and kind of like shooting at a fly with a howitzer: you can do it, but there’s got to be an easier, faster way, and precision might be difficult.
Luckily, there is. The Getting Things Done time management system was created with action management and large projects in mind, and provides the appropriate tools. For most people though, the full system is overkill. One should not need project management software just to manage a task list.
Hog Bay Software’s Taskpaper is designed to make the creation of task lists organized by project and descriptive tags on list entries as simple and painless as writing a text file. From the software’s website:
For Mac users who want a simpler way to stay organized and get things done. TaskPaper is a simple to-do list that’s surprisingly adept. Unlike the competition, TaskPaper’s text based interface is focused on paper-like simplicity.
I’ve fallen in love with this software, but I’ve been sitting here for the last fifteen minutes staring at my cursor trying to figure out a concise way to explain exactly what it does and how it works that also conveys how cool it is. Saying “it creates cross-referenced todo lists” is technically true, but it doesn’t really convey why you’d want that. Indeed, this was the explanation someone gave me, and that was my exact reaction until I saw it in action. So, with no further blabber from me, I present this demo. I tried to embed it into this post, but the embed code they use is painfully bad, and appears broken, at least on Safari.
Watching that should tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the software. If it’s something you might find useful, give it a whirl. The developer is very open and communicates with his users frequently, and recently posted about the upcoming 2.0 release (a free upgrade) here, in the Task Paper forum.
I urge everyone to check this out. I can’t say for certain that it’s made me more productive (though I’m pretty sure it has), but I’ve certainly got a better idea at a glance of what I need to get done (and have actually gotten done) than I did before.
[tags]apple, mac, macintosh, ical, getting things done, gtd, hog bay software, taskpaper, applescript, organization, action management, time management[/tags]