Task and Note Management – and a glance at Zoho Planner

Long-winded Intro
What do you use to keep track of Tasks and notes? I have to confess that I’ve been all over the place this year and I’m still pondering the best approach. I’m also getting tired of re-transcribing my task lists and notes every time I get the urge to try something different so I need to make up my mind soon!

For years, I used a composition notebook and just scribbled tasks and notes intermingled (even drawing little [ ] signs in the margins in front of the actual tasks). From time to time, I’d dabble with a PDA and Outlook tasks. I’ve bounced in an out of the OneNote fanatics club. I switched back to paper at one point earlier this year and then moved it all over to Wallnote [wallnote posts]. I was very impressed with the Wallnote way of doing things.

Earlier this week I moved all my tasks and notes over to Netvibes after reading SimpleRich’s comment at his blog. I figured I’d do the same, including tasks. I have no real complaints about this method. I think WallNote was more capable at tracking these, but since I tend to have Netvibes open all the time anyways… it gets the job done and saves a tab in the browser.

With all this hopping around, I’ve definitely decided that tracking tasks without a way to track notes is completely useless to me. Fortunately, that seems to be how most offerings do it too.

The Actual Glance at Zoho Planner
This evening, I took a few minutes and checked out Zoho Planner. If I wasn’t so weary of moving my task lists and notes around I’ve probably be immediately migrating over to this one. Zoho Planner is currently free and is very flexible. You can define multiple “pages” (perhaps for different purposes or projects) and on each page you can multiple task lists, notes, attachments and appointments — all optional, of course. There are overviews to help track down what’s due when and even a nifty email submission feature (with each page having a different email address). Add some formatting options with the wiki-like text formatting to help the notes section out a bit. And the best part? Painfully easy to figure out and use with some small dollops of Ajax spread throughout.

Of course there are social aspects too. Tagging (natch, gotta get “web 2.0″ in there somehow!). Pages, and their contents, can be shared and/or made public. Comments can be left by others, which is an interesting twist. Sharing is a neat idea, but the folks you share with must have Zoho accounts to actually see the page. A read-only “look” or share option would be nice (without a mandatory account) — think managers, for instance. That being said, folks you’ve shared with can contribute to the page, so there’s some interesting team aspects here too.

Box.net integration would be pretty interesting to see here. As it is, attachments must be under 10 MB. Not terribly small, to be sure, but think what we could do for projects if we could link a page to a box.net (or similar service) account. But really, I think that’s the only nit I’d pick thus far. I’ll be seriously pondering migrating to this one -and- looking over all the other Zoho offerings (and they have a ton of stuff!).

Possibly Related posts:

1. Task Management – Part IV
2. Zoho Planner – another wish list item
3. Zoho Planner and Google Notebook Announcements – And FF Beta2 RC1
4. Another run at Task Management – Wallnote
5. More Task Management