If you use your computer quite frequently having a task list can not only be a friendly reminder for those of us who forget things, they can also be a way to increase productivity– having to check things off the list before moving onto to those other time suckers such as your blog reader, digg or those ever so addicting games that we catch ourselves playing all to often.
Choosing a task manager in many ways comes down to personal preference. Remember the Milk is a popular Free online task manager solution. You have to create an account and then you can log in and begin adding tasks, colour coding them, setting due dates as well as adding tasks that repeat on a regular basis. You can also make task lists under different categories such as work, home etc. and the great feature of it being online means you can access it from anywhere, your iPhone, work computer, home computer etc. The downfall for someone like myself is that I forget to sign into the program. There is a seperate application called Remember the Task that you can download from Adobe Air which will let you have a task list that sits on your computer and you can add and remove tasks. This is helpful for those of us who don’t want to have to log into yet another application. Many people find Remember the Milk quite handy.
I use a Free (donations accepted) downloadable program called Mini-task. I find it extremely easy to use and for those of us who take satisfaction in seeing a bunch of check marks at the end of the day it turns your “done” tasks green. In Remember The Task you can only delete the task. You can easily add/remove headings (the ones in the image are just the ones that work for me) so you can customize your list into your own sections. All you have to do is right click and you can add/remove headings, add/remove tasks and you can also remove all completed tasks at the same time. You can easily print off your tasks or even copy & paste them into an email if you want to look it up on your mobile device while your at the grocery store etc. One handy feature I’ve appreciated is the ability to drag & drop tasks between categories and re-organize them as needed.
I appreciate the simplicity of MiniTask and by using it during the past few months it kept me organized with school, our newly started business (Triple I Web Solutions) and household needs including preparing for Christmas.
However, there are always new applications being developed and I have just heard that in the last two weeks Google has added a task manager to gmail so I will be trying that out shortly… I am a big fan of Gmail and it’s Calendar system so I am eager to try the task manager out.
If you have any questions related to the above post feel free to send them to questions@theuntechblog.com We’ll try to reply to all emails received or write a blog post if there are many of the same questions popping up.
