VINTOM – Salem Oregon Web Design by Vin Thomas

Great Task Management Tools

Posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009

I have been on the hunt for over a year for the perfect task management tool. I have tried almost every online task management service out there and many standalone apps for Mac. I have only found a few to be truly useful, so I will skip the fluff and get to the best of the best.

1. Toodledo

The first task management tool that I ever used was Remember The Milk. But it turned out to be less than adequate. The straw that broke the camel’s back was their total lack of communication with their customers. Many of the RTM users wrote in their forums about how they switched to Toodledo, so I followed suit and gave it a try.

I will be the first to admit that Toodledo isn’t the prettiest task management system out there, but it blows any other online task manager out of the water as far as functionality and customization.

Here are some of my favorite Toodledo features:

• Sorting (by whatever field you want)
• Sub-Tasks (a crucial feature missing from Remember the Milk)
• SMS/Email Reminders
• Google Calendar Integration
• iPhone App
• AMAZING forum support

If you are looking for a fully featured GTD capable task manager in the cloud, Toodledo is for you.

Toodledo has a free option, or you can go Pro for only $15/year.

2. The Hit List

The Hit List from Potion Factory is the one desktop app that I tried and really liked. I tried Things as well, but it didn’t really float my boat. It is Mac only and is still in beta. I found THL to be a very intuitive tool and I love the abundance of keyboard shortcuts.

Ultimately I wanted an online app, so I didn’t stick with The Hit List. But here are some of my favorite Hit List features:

• Ability to sync the Hit List with several computers using Dropbox
• Tons and tons of keyboard shortcuts
• In contrast to Toodledo, The Hit List is very pretty

The Hit List has a free trial, but costs $50 to buy.

3. Checkvist

If you are looking for a dead simple task manager with minimum clutter, Checkvist is a great option. Checkvist has an amazingly minimal UI, utilizes keyboard shortcuts, and is totally free. If you have hundreds of tasks dozens of projects, this may not be for you. I find Checkvist to be more useful as an outlining tool than a full-blown task manager.

Here’s why I like Checkvist:

• Minimal UI. It’s simple, but pretty
• Ability to add, edit, and arrange tasks quickly from the keyboard
• Promising development in the future

Checkvist is really just the side-project of a couple of developers. But I see tons of potential here. According to the uservoice forum, they plan to add due dates, reminders, tagging, and an iPhone version. In my opinion Checkvist could go from good to great with a few tweaks.

Conclusion

Of the dozens of apps I have tried, I stuck with Toodledo. I have tried others for short periods of time, but I keep coming back to Toodledo. I love to have control, and Toodledo give me that. They offer advanced functionality, but also allows me to hide features I don’t use. To get around the prettiness issue, I created a userscript that matches my GMail theme. In this fight, functionality beat out beauty.