Monday, August 8, 2005

Keeping it together

To-do lists have been very much on my mind recently and, in my continual quest to tweak and refine my own personal organization system, I've been on a quest to find the perfect task management system for me.

Notice I said "for me", for this sort of thing is a very personal endeavor. No one tool or system works for everyone and, as in my case, often no single tool completely does the job for anyone.

For a long time, I was very happy with Now Up-to-Date for the combination of calendaring and task management, but somewhere along the way to building a version that would run under OS X, they critically crippled some of the very features upon which I had relied. Still, it'd remain a pivotal part of my worklife if not for one damning flaw: For some reason, "alerts" just don't. I can't get the computer to make a sound, pop up a window, anything, no matter how forcefully I click the mouse when setting the alarm in the first place. I've re-installed, deleted preferences, checked my audio settings seven ways from Sunday...nothing, and no joy from the support department either. They're just as baffled as I.

Meanwhile, I've migrated to Apple's iCal for my calendaring. It's another flawed (but free!) program and has the added benefit of .Mac synchronization, which manages to keep the files on my home and work desktops, my iBook and my Palm singing from the same page.

For to-dos, though, iCal just doesn't have to oomph. There are a lot of things I like about Microsoft Entourage, but it's too much application, really. I don't need it for e-mail or contacts, and the real deal-breaker is that there's no simple way to synchronize across computers.

I'm test-driving three web-based applications, all by the same company: Tadalist, Backpack, and Basecamp. The last is a project management application, aimed at whole companies and departments; the former two are more personally aimed, Tadalist just does lists, while Backpack puts lists, notes and some modest file management, along with e-mail reminders into the bargain.

Each has its strengths and drawbacks, some of which I can already see after just a few days with them. And it's a bit frustrating that identical tasks (making and maintaining a to-do list, for example) are accomplished in three subtly different ways among the three applications. I'd expect more consistency from apps that came from the same place. (That said, they're also all three fairly young applications, so perhaps their feature sets and implementations will grow together.)

None of them will serve me perfectly, nor will I expect it to. Right now, I'm just looking for something to add to the mix, serve the need that's going unserved. But I'm slowly developing my idea of what the Grand Unified Personal Information Management Software for Brad is and when I have some extra time (ha!), I'll promulgate it and challenge someone to build it.