After reading David Allen’s books on “Getting Things Done” I was motivated to spend a ton of time trying to find a tool or tools that were a perfect fit for the process. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the magic combination that worked for me.
I found a few tools that did a great job with their limited scope but nothing that handled all of my requirements. So I thought I’d start building my own suite of tools that did the trick for me. There are thousands of task tools out there but this is going to be mine.
It has to support the following:
- Microsoft Outlook – MS/Outlook has really nice support for tasks, has great support for contexts, but no support for projects. I found a plug-in that added support for projects which I used for awhile, but because I still couldn’t get outlook to share project info with my iPhone I lost interest in maintaining the info.
- Android – I had an iPhone and I still want to provide a version of Task Laser for the iPhone, but I am now using a Samsung Infusion smart phone, so my current goal is to provide a Task Laser app for Android.
- Web App – Google tasks is a great tool for simple task management and I’ve been using it for awhile. However, with the introduction of IE 7.0 I’ve had nothing but problems with Google Tasks. It obviously behaves better in Chrome, but my office insists that the primary browser by IE. So I’ll need to develop something for the Web so that I can still find out what my next task is when I’m on the road and I don’t have my Android with me (fat chance).
- I only have me and I want to be able to work with my tasks no matter where I am and no matter what device I have available to me. I also want to be able to work “off-line”. When back on-line all of the repositories should resync with each other.
- Task Laser should update all of my Calenders including my personal Outlook, my office Outlook Calendar, my Google Calendar, and my smart phone calendar. So no matter what device I’m staring at or carrying, when it is time to work on a deferred task I will be notified immediately.
This should keep me busy for awhile. I’ll be documenting the design as I work on this project (in my spare time).