John Wood

To Do List Manager with SubTasks: Priorganizer v1.0.8

Click here to download a free trial of Priorganizer! (it's less than 1Mb)

A month ago it went into beta; today it's released: My To-Do List Manager / Task Manager application with an Outlook-like interface that supports unlimited hierarchical subtasks and a knowledge base. Very easy to learn with an extremely convenient and fluid interface! There's no learning curve - once you download you'll be up and running in seconds.

Thanks to the enormous amount of feedback I received I was able to put out 11 updates, add more great features, fix bugs and make it stable and rich enough to release to market.

The goal of Priorganizer is flexibility and convenience. We all have different ways of organizing and managing our time and our task lists, with a flexible hierarchical space for entering your tasks you can even use Priorganizer as a brain-dump or mind-mapping application. There are places to enter tasks, and places to enter ideas, thoughts and even time management values. Use it the way you work.

Priorganizer sports a clean, contemporary user-interface, with its major features separated into independent views, each of which is accessed through an icon down the side. The main view is the task list, which shows your hierarchical to-do list.

Every list window in Priorganizer has a consistent look and feel, offering an easy to navigate hierarchy, preview text against each item (similar to Outlook), a Quick-Entry line for quickly creating either top level items or subtasks, and drag and drop support for repositioning or re-parenting items with a simple drag of the mouse (click here to see a flash demo of this!). All lists can be customized to show columns you choose, change the sort order and a variety of other options.

The Task List view shows both a main task list and a subtasks window. This is a familiar paradigm that is consistent with Windows Explorer. In Explorer you select folders and see files to the right. In Priorganizer you select tasks on the left and see that task's subtasks on the right. If having two windows is too much for you, then you can simply close the subtasks window and navigate the entire hierarchy in the main task window only.

Because of its flexibility in creating a hierarchy, you can group tasks into projects, milestones, context, subjects, people, departments - anything you wish.

What makes Priorganizer more than just a simple task repository is its understanding of the tasks and how they relate to one another. For example when you complete a parent task, all the sub-tasks and their sub-tasks will be completed automatically. Likewise, when all subtasks are complete the parent will automatically be marked as complete, triggering a cascade of events up the task tree. There are many more business rules that control the behavior and how you interact with your tasks, and in the future I hope to allow users to extend this behavior with the use of workflow add-ins.

While Priorganizer does try its best to apply some intelligence to the tasks, most of the behavior can be customized via the options dialog. For example you may not want a parent task to automatically be set to "started" just because one of its subtasks was started -- everything like this can be configured.

Another configurable aspect of Priorganizer is the window layout manager. Every window in Priorganizer can be relocated by dragging the caption bar of the window to an edge of the screen or in-between existing windows. Hold the mouse during the drag and you will see it cycle through the different layout options, letting go of the mouse selects that configuration. You can also drag one window onto another's caption bar to create a tabbed window. Also windows can be floated or hidden using the buttons in the caption bar and made visible once again using the icon in the toolbar. The possibilities are endless.

To see a flash demo of the layout manager in action, click here!

The Quick-Entry line allows you to quickly add either tasks or subtasks, and is also available in all other list windows. You simply click on the Quick-Entry line and enter the title of the task. Once you press enter the task will appear and will be selected, ready for you to edit in-place. Of course you can also just right-click and select 'New Item', from which a task form will pop-up.

Another useful feature is 'one-click complete'. Every task line is displayed with a checkbox that can be clicked in-place. Clicking the checkbox sets the task to complete, moving it to the end of the list and striking it out. To see a flash demo of one-click-complete, click here.

Most people dislike pop-up windows, web or desktop it makes little difference. Priorganizer allows you the choice of either editing your data in a pop-up editor, or in-place as a window docked in the main screen. As you edit the item in-place, the changes are automatically saved as you type, making updating your tasks a fluid and convenient process.

Of course, like all editors in Priorganizer, the in-place editing window is also a rich editor, providing you with a variety of formatting options: font size, color and style, paragraph options, indentation and bulleting just to name a few.

Priorganizer also provides an icon that sits in the system tray. When clicked a miniature version of Priorganizer, optimized for quick-access, pops up and provides you a simpler 'What's Next' todo list and a scratch pad for making quick notes.

The What's Next List (WNL) is a significant feature. While the main task list provides you with amazing flexibility in creating a rich, highly organized and deeply hierarchical task list, the WNL is intended to let you maintain a smaller, focused list of tasks you will be tackling in the immediate future. What's different about the WNL is that it lets you drag tasks from anywhere in your main task list right into the WNL and then synchronizes the two. If you update the task in the WNL, it will update in the main task list and vice-versa.

What makes this incredibly useful is that, at the start of the day you can find the tasks you plan on tackling, drag them in to your WNL and for the rest of the day you can work solely from the WNL - a simple, focused to-do list. Get interrupted with a phone call or other ad-hoc task? No problem as the WNL has a Quick-Entry line for entering miscellaneous tasks. Once entered they go straight to the top of the WNL list. Complete that task and you'll be back working on the tasks you dragged in. I find this style of working fits in well with the 'Getting Things Done' methodology that is becoming so popular.

The bottom line is that the What's Next List gives you the convenience of a simple to-do list integrated into the power of a hierarchical task manager.

While the in-place editor in the main task list provides some task editing capability, only a select number of fields are available in-place. To access fields such as the due date, completed date, category etc. you will find the more comprehensive task pop-up editor more suitable.

The pop-up editor is activated by double clicking a task, or when creating a new task. It's modeless and resizable, allowing you to open several tasks simultaneously, and to minimize the main application letting you work on tasks independently. All changes are made in a copy of the task, only committing if you save those changes.

In this day and age we have more information available to us than ever before. Information collation and aggregation is a part of everyone's life, more so since the Internet has enabled us to so easily research subjects. I, for one, am constantly learning new things and taking notes. Priorganizer has been of substantial value to me as I can now organize my thoughts hierarchically, have all my thoughts in one (organized) location, and search through everything I've written in a split second.

Priorganizer offers a special place to store your thoughts, things you learn, and tidbits of information you want to remember: The Knowledge Base. With a familiar tree structure in which you can organize your thoughts, and a rich editor for constructing formatted documents, Priorganizer gives you a powerful tool for building a valuable repository for your thoughts. My wife, for example, loves to use the Knowledge Base to store her favorite recipes!

Every day I spend hours working on tasks, sometimes completing several but often interrupted while working, a distraction that costs me a lot of time in simply regaining focus on the tasks at hand. What's worse is when I come back the next morning and try to remember what it was I was doing the previous evening.

That's why I keep a log. The Log and Archived Tasks feature in Priorganizer is a central journal of what I've been doing and an automatic record of tasks that I've completed. This lets me look back to see what I was doing the past month (useful for time tracking for timesheets, for example), or just to see what I was doing the day before. Keeping a log helps considerably in maintaining a sense of continuum while I work on several projects simultaneously, and makes for a nice narrative on my life at work.

No matter how hard you try to avoid deadlines and schedules, in many cases they're inevitable. When you have tasks scheduled in the future, either once-off or recurring tasks, you will need to create a scheduled task in the Scheduled Tasks view in Priorganizer.

The purpose of the Scheduled Tasks view is to keep all your future-scheduled tasks out of the way of your main task list, avoiding the clutter that you get in other traditional task managers. It allows you to organize your scheduled tasks in a hierarchy that's independent of the main task structure, and schedule not only single tasks but hierarchical tasks with subtasks - all of which can be activated on a single date.

Priorganizer does offer recurring task options, but its real power is in the flexibility it allows you by grouping together and dictating the activation date of each individual task instance. For example, one user has a task and set of subtasks that are activated at different times throughout the month. Priorganizer lets her group those tasks under one parent task which helps her be organized. She then sets unique dates for each subtask, each set to recur every month. This allows for some very complex  task scheduling - it's a powerful feature.

The Scheduled Tasks window is also where you can manage your task templates. Task templates are tasks (or task trees) that are not scheduled, but can be activated manually through a right-click menu option. Each time they are activated they are copied into the task list - parent and all its subtasks, providing you a great way to create templates for common tasks that are perhaps tied to a specific incident or action and not a date.

There wouldn't be much use in keeping so much useful information through the task, log, knowledge base and schedules if you couldn't find items quickly. When you're creating a hierarchical task repository, one thing that quickly becomes apparent as the task list grows is that you will need a way to easily find tasks. This is where you will use the Search view.

The Search view provides you with a way to search across all types of entries that Priorganizer supports, for any word that appears in any of the fields. For each result found, it shows the item (along with an abstract) and lets you open it up, read or make changes. It also saves recent search terms in the drop down list, and separates the results into pages to make searching faster.

If you're away from your desk, out of the office, or need to talk about tasks in a meeting with others, you will certainly need a hard copy of your task list.

Priorganizer provides you with the ability to print (and print-preview) all the major lists it supports. It prints the list exactly as you see it, subtasks and all, but in its entirety spanning as many pages as needed.

Not only can you print your tasks, log, knowledge base and scheduled tasks list, you can also print your What's Next list. This is a great feature if you have a set number of tasks to complete that day but you won't be at a computer. What's more: it prints out the checkboxes against each item, letting you ink-in the checkmark as you complete each task.

Priorganizer is designed to be intuitive, consistent and very easy to use - with very little learning. However, in case anything is unclear Priorganizer comes with an integrated help system. The dynamic help is integrated into the application and shows along side the main screen at all times, unless closed by the user.

As you select different windows, even pop-up windows, the help changes dynamically explaining the window that has focus in clear, simple terms and giving you links to learn more about each related section.

Also to get you started, Priorganizer comes with a sample data file consisting of some fictitious tasks and knowledge base entries taken from my blog. Navigate around the tasks in the file and make changes to your heart's content to help you get familiar with how the application works. To load the sample data, simply select File->Open Sample File.

Over the past month there have been 11 releases of Priorganizer: Make no doubt, it's very much in active development. One of the best features of Priorganizer is its ability to keep itself up to date with the latest changes.

Unlike other applications, when an update is available it explains what has changed and gives you the option of upgrading, which it then downloads in the background. Every effort has been made to make the update procedure a straightforward and clear process.

Another unique feature is the ability to configure Priorganizer (via the Options dialog) to download development builds (beta test versions) in addition to the more formal releases. For those of you daring enough to take on the less stable but more frequent releases, this option is for you.

Both during the trial and after you purchase Priorganizer, you will continue receiving updates up until the next version (1.2 for example) free of charge! And at any time you can view the most recent changes available via an option in the Tools menu.

Last, but not least, is the up-and-coming add-in architecture, providing an interface to allow extensions to Priorganizer without adding extra baggage to the base application. Currently you can extend the application to add new options to the Tools menu, which can be configured to spawn other executables that will have access to the task list (which is in XML format) for custom processing.

In the future we're hoping to release a substantial number of addins covering shared, workgroup task lists to Gantt charts and iCal support. Watch this space.

Priorganizer can be used for free for 30 days, after which you will need to purchase a license for just $29.95 (at time of print).

Why not download a trial and give it a go? I honestly think it will change the way you work, for the better. After all, with organization comes peace of mind.

As always if you have any suggestions or find any bugs, please contact me and I'll get back to you right away.