A brain dump of functions for my ideal task/goal management app

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 28, 2021 at 02:03 PM

This may not be of any interest to anyone but me, but I recently did a brain dump of what my ideal task/project/goal management app would look like. This list isn’t in any particular order.

- Availability across platforms. I need to be able to use it on my Windows PC at work, but also on my MacBook and—ideally—on my iPad. (I’m less concerned about my iPhone, only because I find that a very weak productivity device.)

- Allows for associating notes with tasks and goals. These notes should be fully formattable.

- Linking of notes, link references and back links are not required, but would be nice to have.

- Tasks should be able to repeat.

- Organization into my life’s areas of responsibility.

- A clean, easy to absorb interface is helpful (the cluttered screen of Amplenote is why I don’t use that app any more… although I am going to consider going back to it).

- Affordable. I don’t know what that means exactly. If I could find the one perfect app and abandon the others, that might be worth $200 a year.

- Ease of sharing information. I want to be able to print notes to share with colleagues. I want to be able to email notes. Publishing notes is a nice feature, but isn’t as crucial.

- Data export to useable formats. This is important for sharing information with other apps, and for ensuring that I can archive my information should I decide to move on to another app or if I am forced to.

- The ability to include supporting files. That is, I can import files of various kinds to enrich my work: PDFs, Word documents, images are the most important of these.

- It needs to make sense to me. This is obviously very subjective. But I need to be able to know what I’m looking at and how to do what I want to do without a lot of fuss and bother. I guess intuitive is the best word for this.

- Goals are separate from tasks, while tasks are associated with the goals they support. That is, I can break down goals into tasks that get me to achieve the goal. Ditto with projects and tasks.

- Tasks need all the regular meta data, including due date, priority, status. Starting date would be nice. I don’t care about associating a length of time I expect the task to take. I don’t need GTD meta data. And I don’t need to track if I’ve assigned a task to someone else.

That’s a long list. And probably far from complete.

Offered for idea stirring only.

Steve