Another run at Task Management - Wallnote

Posted on June 29, 2006 3 Comments

It was all that long ago that I boldly announced I was going back to paper. And I did. And… I’m over it. Paper sucks for a number of reasons. Manually carrying tasks forward from page to page is tedious (or prone to loss). The binder I was using works great for carrying around a PDA, but is a bit awkward to write in. The PDA completely discharged last weekend and needs to be reloaded — right now I don’t want to even look at it, yet I have this binder with paper in it. Blah.

I realized, this week, it was time for a Plan B. Plan B must involve technology in some way. I’m a technologist. As such, I feel weird carrying paper around! First I pondered going back to Outlook’s task management. But no, same old issues there: I either need to be at the machine with Outlook or have the Pocket PC nearby. PPC is nice to look at things but tedious for data entry. I then began to consider web based alternatives and recalled having recently read an article at Solution Watch on To Do List managers. Glanced at his top 5 and spotted one I’d never heard of: Wallnote.

Wallnote.com Logo I’ve been using it for almost a week now and find it can handle pretty 90% of what I want and even has some bonuses that I wasn’t looking for. And it has the best logo ever! Number one nifty factor is how well it runs (assuming you’re at a windows machine) directly on the desktop via the miracle of Active Desktop. (detailed instructions) But of course, that’s not the only way to access your stuff. It’s all there via the web interface as well. In my case, I have my work laptop running Wallnote on the desktop directly. But if I’m not at the machine, I just surf over to the site and manage my lists there instead.

The task list interface is clean and simple. You can use “ajaxy” goodness to drag and re-order tasks. You can check a task off as being High Priority. You can add some notes to a task. And that’s about it. Fortunately, that seems to be all I need too. As a bonus, there’s a pane for Notes as well. At the moment, the Notes section is replacing sabifoo as a place that I jot down links or thoughts for future blog posts. Works quite well for that.

What would I like to see? I’d sure love to be able to tweak colors a bit. I’d like to see the ability to re-arrange Notes like I can Tasks. And finally, I think it’d be useful if I could give others a “read-only” view of my Task list (thinking of coworkers, bosses, etc…). The author seems pretty approachable and even responded to my email, so I’ve passed some of these thoughts along. In turn, he’s shared some of his future plans (which I’ve promised not to leak) and he’s got some good ideas for the future.

Slick product, works well and I feel much more in charge of my tasks. I think I’ll stick with this one for a bit.

Tags: lifehack, wallnote