I have been on a mission for the best FREE task management application. I am a big fan of pen and pad but seeing as how I’m on my computer most of the day/night I had been in the market for a good application to cure this organizational to do list type need. Now, granted with the new Mail application in Leopard, I can achieve notes and to do’s, it just wasn’t what I was looking for. I came across Things, a task management application for Mac’s created by CulturedCode.

I’ve been using Things for about a month now and I still have mixed feelings about it. It’s extremely clean and simple which is a huge plus in my book. The user interface is very Mac looking. It reminds me of Mail, actually. all of your to do’s are visible in a preview pane. The number of tasks are visible in the sidebar under Focus. It’s broken down into items that are due Today, Next, Someday or Postponed.

If you have specific projects you can utilize the Projects section by dragging to do’s into that area. Any to do’s that have pre defined time frame end up in your Inbox until a deadline is applied to them. If you open up a specific to do item you’ll see you can input tags add notes and add reminders. One thing I’ve noticed is that I have yet to see any of the reminders that I’ve scheduled. I haven’t figured out why yet but that is my biggest complaint.

Anyway, you can quickly create to do’s with the Quick Entry button which is pretty useful. By clicking Quick Entry, you’re presented with a “pop up” window in which you can enter all the pertinent information pertaining to your task as well as define what location it should be filed in.

I haven’t given up completely on this application as I do find myself coming back to use it every so often. Just not as often as I thought I would when on my hunt for such an application. Maybe my memory is better than I thought. So, after using this for a while, the benefits are by far its simple user interface. Anyone looking for a light task management app, I think you’ll be pretty pleased. Things offers just that! As for Improvements? I think it would be beneficial to incorporate and sync to your calendar whether its iCal or Entourage.

I think the most beneficial improvement (which could potentially get annoying as I have yet to experience it) would be implementing a remainder/notification piece to this application that can send an SMS message to your phone reminding you of the tasks at hand based on the timing you had previously set. I mean, if you’re not on your computer to see a reminder, how are you supposed to remember? You’re probably using this app because you can’t remember in the first place. This message would obviously have to be delivered for free as per message fees would not be appropriate. Possibly an SMS message sent via SMTP built into the user interface.

I think an update like that would be an affective addition making this app much more powerful. What do you think? How do you manage all your tasks on a daily/weekly basis?

If you’re interested in trying out Things for yourself just click here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Apple, Online, Technology, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.