«
»

TaskPaper: Getting Things Done without distraction

TaskpaperA new Getting Things Done (GTD) app from Hog Bay Software brings an extreme and focussed minimalism to task management.

It doesn’t transfer data to your iPod or iPhone, or sync information with facebook, or grab an audio soundbite from iTunes for each project, or have fifteen user-customisable icons for each context. It just does lists, projects, tasks and contexts. And it does them very well.

The interface is simple:

Taskpapermain

Simple keyboard shortcuts start a new project or task. Contexts (or what the app calls ‘tags’) with @ prepended are stored and can be set to autocomplete on future tasks.

Tasks for each context across a variety of projects are easily and cleanly displayed by selecting the context from a drop down list:

Taskpapercontexts

Completed tasks can be archived, which shifts them down to the bottom of the document and removes from the project and context-specific display.

If I had time to maintain a GTD life outside Mail.app, I would use something like this. There is no opportunity to waste time tweaking endless options which are peripheral to achieving the task management that these apps are designed to provide. Although there are plenty of other GTD apps for Mac users (see an earlier Hawk Wings post or Ed Eubanks’ round-up at Low End Mac), none of them offers the forocious “Productivity Boot Camp” discipline of TaskPaper. I find that helpful.

You can get a copy of TaskPaper from the Hog Bay web site. It costs USD 18.95 although the free 14-day demo period gives you a chance to discover if this the approach that works for you.

Disclaimer: Jesse Grosjean kindly gave me free registration so that I could try this out.GTD, getting things done, productivity, not mail.app, not apple mail, task management, lists

Similar Posts:

Tags: , , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Sunday, 4th November, 2007 at 2:10 am and is filed under Not Apple Mail, Productivity. 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.

One Response to “TaskPaper: Getting Things Done without distraction”

  1. Mike says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 8:23 pm

    I really like this app for GTD and the iphone. When I go mobile I simply copy the entire TaskPaper task list to a new email addressed to myself. This shows up as perfectly formatted text, easy to read on the iphone. I also make a second paste of only the “hot” items at the top of the email giving me a quick reference on what I have to do that day.

    I then use the notepad application on the iphone as my “inbox” during the day for gathering random tasks and thoughts, then email that note to myself when I get back to the computer. It only takes me a couple of minutes to update my list in TaskPaper. I keep any dated tasks in my Leopard Mail To Do list, which also show up as To Do Items under Ical.

    I have struggled since day one of the iphone trying to find a way to make a GTD task list work effectively. All of the web based systems are too slow when I’m stuck with the AT&T EDGE connection. This system is very simple and no syncing required. For me Hog Bay’s TaskPaper is well worth the $18.

Leave a Reply