Solo Technology

[continuing from "More Task Management" of earlier this week]

After my testing and experimenting earlier this week, I thought that Zoho Planner was going to be just the ticket for my task management needs. Flexible, easy to use and it allowed me to lay out tasks in an outline form — my way of indicating task dependencies or sub-tasks. I eagerly spent an hour the other morning moving everything over from my wiki and started off on the project’s tasks.

When I completed the first task I realized I may have made a mistake. By the time I checked off the third task, I knew this was going to be a disaster.

You see, each time you check off a task in Zoho Planner, the task moves out of the main list down to a bottom area. Thus, I quickly had a pile of oddly indented and unrelated tasks down there just mucking up the joint. No real way to relate them back to the “section” from whence they came. Nuts.

The wiki was the closest to what I wanted, but faking the checkboxes (”[ ]“) is tedious and editing through the wiki markup is tedious on a big list. The other task management programs just didn’t really do what I want for the outline format and some also automatically shuffle closed tasks to the bottom of the list.

I should take a moment and point out that normally I’d be all about that sort of behavior. In fact, the fact that Netvibe’s task list doesn’t send completed tasks to the bottom is a bit of an annoyance! Marvel at the irony of this paragraph in the context of the rest of this article for a moment…

Where was I? Oh yeah — the latest solution. Back to Microsoft OneNote! It easily does outlines. It easily can convert lines in the outline to proper “checkable” checkboxes. The checkboxes don’t go anywhere when checked.

See the picture to the right. See the indentation. See how not everything has to be a checkbox? I love that. Plus easy “wysiwyg” formatting and simple to use. For the moment, I’ve solved my multiple machine concerns via the wonders of the VPN between home and office. We’ll see how it works out.

Feels a bit odd to go back to a desktop based solution, but so far I just can’t seem to find what I’m after in the online world.  And to be fair, this is commercial software that I’m comparing to free online stuff…

2 Responses to “Task Management - Part III”

1. » pingback » Task Management - Part IV » Solo Technology on September 13th, 2006 8:50 pm
   
   
2. » pingback » Getting / Staying Organized » Solo Technology on June 4th, 2007 10:00 pm
   
   

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