One of the primary driving forces behind the development of OneThingToday was my own dissatisfaction with the available task management programs. Which is not to say that many of them aren’t wonderful – they are – they just aren’t wonderful for me. So when I happened across Tasks today, I felt a sort of kinship.
The Tasks Interface
Tasks (for Windows and soon for Linux) is a very simple task management program – you generate a list of tasks, and then Tasks presents you with only the first item on the list. Why is this useful? The author of Tasks (Uri Fridman) takes the words right out of my mouth:
I found that if I have a list in front of me it would be very easy for me to pick the tasks that were most appealing to me and not the one that needed to be done right now.
He precedes this with a good assessment of most task management systems:
…all these systems made my already busy brain even busier. You have to co-ordinate lists, set due dates, separate by project, etc.
And so Tasks was born. OneThingToday also displays a single task at a time (though you can force it not to), but organizes tasks by day rather than in a list. This is better for me because I tend to operate in terms of projects, and these are tasks that will take days, weeks or months to complete. A flat list would mean I would never make any progress in anything except the one on the very top of the list.
Two programs with the same goal: Increased productivity by focusing on just one thing at a time.
I’d be remiss now in not mentioning NowDoThis, which is essentially a web-based implementation of Tasks (they’ve got an iPhone version too). It’s also a good time to mention TeuxDeux, which eschews some of the simplicity of a program like Tasks, but adopts the day-oriented approach of OneThingToday (well, TeuxDeux came first so it’s probably more fair to say that OneThingToday adopts the day-oriented approach of TeuxDeux!)
If you’ve made it this far, you might as well check out Mnmal (by the Uri Fridman, author of Tasks) and MinimalMac (by Patrick Rhone), because chances are you will find something there to tickle your fancy.
