Erwan Macé – Passionate Geek

Smartphones, PDA, Organizers, PIM (Personal Information Managers) have been trying to help you keep your professional and personal lives better organized. If early US Robotics Palm Pilots and Pocket PC shipped with a default task management tool, recent iPhones and Android devices leave it to you to choose the todo or GTD app of your choice. And there are tons for you to choose from. Read more to find out the ones that work best for me.

From all the various tools and methods I have tried, I have identified 4 main categories of products which address 4 vary different approaches in the way you manage your tasks and todo lists:

• Text files to keep unstructured list(s) of free text with a simple note editing sotware;
• Manage simple checkmark lists of todo items with due dates and categories or labels for easy sorting;
• Adopt David Allen’s GTD (Getting-Things-Done) more complex approach by keeping track of your pending tasks by projects, context, priority, etc;
• Adopt a visual mind-mapping approach which consists of representing tasks and todo items into groups and branches in a radial and graphical manner.

Before selecting the right product for you, you may also need to decide how “connected” a platform you need. In general, online cloud-based services are best for team collaboration, syncronization between devices, data backup, etc… Most of the existing online tools however come with a monthly subscription which you can probably avoid if single-device offline task management is what you need.

There are thousands of tools available for your PC, Mac, smartphones and iPad. Here is a short list of my favorite ones from the many more that I have actually tried.

My take:

if you haven’t tried Mind Mapping before, give it a try. Visual radial representation of items gives you both the 30,000 feet global overview as well as the ability to dig into the branches and quickly identify the task you need to get working on. With a recent iPad app, a great web-based map editor as well as real-time map sharing and collaboration, MindMeister is the tool that I have adopted and which I now use every single day to keep track of my growing todo lists as well as to structure my brainstorming sessions.

If Mind Mapping is not your cup of tea and if you feel more comfortable with a linear list of tasks with checkboxes and due dates, I highly recommend Producteev. This web based platform has got one of the most polished UI I have seen, a more than decent iPhone app and great integration with the tools you use everyday such as email, instant messengers or Google Calendar. Producteev truly gives you the power of GTD applications without the inherent complexity of such tools. The guys at Producteev have also recently published their API and one should expect many more 3rd party clients to be released in the near future.