I’ve reached that age where some form of aide-memoire is a virtual necessity. My favoured electronic implementation is OmniFocus, but I’m finding myself increasingly impressed with the freeform approach of Jesse Grosjean’s TaskPaper. The latest development version (very stable) can be found here:
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/wiki/TaskPaperDevelopmentVersions
Of course it won’t suit everybody, but I very much doubt you’ll be disappointed should you decide to take a look.
I dumped OmniFocus in favor of TaskPaper. I don’t know why, but OF just wasn’t … the GTD experience I was looking for. I am a big fan of TaskPaper, however, and recommend it highly. No fluff, just simple, easy project list management.
Very interesting. I remember looking at v1, but wasn’t impressed by it. This functionality might be exactly what I was looking for - a flexible equivalent to a paper list. So, off to another evaluation period, after already spending way too much time fiddling with Things, Hit List, Curio, Notebook, BusyCal, Process …
An even simpler task manager is Google Tasks, which I use as a straight list maker. There isn’t a mac desktop client for it, although I can access it through the excellent Mailplane which I use for Google mail. There is an app for the iphone however (GeeTasks), which syncs with Google. I use Things for all my writing projects.
BusyCal is a great task manager, easy to update and it syncs with a partner’s calendar, plus iCal, Google Calendar, and a widget like Get Organized. Whatever you add to BusyCal will show up on your iPhone calendar. You may also store links to files and/or web sites, a great way of keeping data and deadlines together. I also agree with Tripper that Things makes an excellent project manager; just adapt its Projects and Areas to represent characters, places, story lines, and other elements of fiction or nonfiction.
BusyCal: busymac.com/
Things: culturedcode.com/things/
Come on now …
Just as the best camera is the one that’s with you (thebestcamera.com/) the best task manager is the one you’ve already got, if you’d jus use it rather then tinkering …