Task Management Work Flow for Mac Users

Over the past year or so I've tried about every task management solution I can get my hands on. GTD (Getting Things Done) has been a major focus for me, to a distracting extent actually. The applications I've tried include:

  • Omni Focus - Mac based tasks with iPhone app.
  • TaskFreak - Great web app that you control, multi-user and open source.
  • Things - Another Mac and iPhone pairing, very simple and effective.
  • Redmine - RoR web app more for projects and version control, but has some task tracking tools.
  • Tracks - RoR web app that is very slick, just never got it installed properly, has iPhone web app as well.
  • Klok - Adobe Air app great for time tracking and basic tasks.
  • Anxiety - A lightweight To Do App that uses iCal
  • This represents the ones I forgot I ever tried.

My GTD Work Flow

GTD Work Flow

Tasks In

I input my tasks two ways, my iPhone  or my Mac both using Things.  I will admit, Things is missing any real multi-user collaborative syncing technology for mutiple macs. Syncing does work great on the mac to iPhone via WiFi network. Things will also publish to iCal To Do items, makes for easy data portability later on.

Things for Mac and iPhone pictured below.

Things for MacThings for iPhone

Task View and Completion

Things does a great job of keeping your To Dos organized by only showing what you have due today, or if you specify to have it shown multiple days prior to the due date.At first I kept using the Things application for  knowing when I had new tasks each day, this ended up being a annoying because it took up so much screen real estate.

Enter Anxiety

Anxiety for the Mac

This little guy is great, it does one thing, and does it very well.  It displays tasks that you have in iCal's To Do's, and will sync up instantly to changes pushed from iCal.  In short Anxiety ends up being  my front end to Things because Anxiety will read / write to iCal and Things will also read / write to iCal. What's better is anxiety is small, semi transparent and always on top of other windows.

Conclusion

Well there it is, I stumbled onto this solution, I hope it helps a few others as well.  I have been using this system for about two months now and I still love it!

Shawn Himmelberger

 


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