Jeroen Ritmeijer

Ground breaking task management tool

In this exciting world of AJAX, WEB 2.0, Web services, RSS etc you must wonder, what is next?

Today I want to discuss an interesting service offered by Microsoft. Although it doesn't natively support any of the before mentioned internet technologies it has the added advantage of being supported by all modern operating systems using third party clients. It even integrates with Windows Desktop Search as well as offline files.

What amazing technology am I talking about? Windows Notepad, that is what I am talking about.

This sounds all very witty, but lets be serious. Notepad is a pretty weak excuse for a plain text editor, but it is available on every Windows machine and it launches fairly quickly.

The main purpose I use Notepad for is task management. Sure, the Outlook / Exchange combination can track tasks, so can Microsoft Project and I am sure there are plenty of web based services that offer this functionality as well.

But, to be honest, the majority of these applications are complete overkill for day-to-day use as most task lists are just plain, one dimensional, lists of text based items.

I am always amazed how poorly people manage their own tasks, specifically ad-hoc tasks that don't belong to a specific larger project or task. I was struggling with this as well in the past, especially when I needed to manage myself during development when I had to remember many little tasks and ideas. So what I started doing was maintaining this list in a plain text file and when I was done with a task I put a 'V' in front of it, stared with satisfaction at the screen at another job well done AND finished and moved it to the top of the document just in case I wondered what the heck I have been doing the last couple of days.

An abstract from my current list looks as follows:

v - Accept all changes in the documentation

v - List other iPAQ models in Google

v - Quote to Lamonaca

- Infosheet 2.1
  Waiting for feedback Mike

- Whitepapers

- Road map

Net result? When you ask me something, it WILL get done. Nothing is conveniently forgotten. The problem however is that I expect the same from others, which is an extreme source of frustration to me. For this reason I started tracking dependencies on other people in the same document as well, fantastic!

Common sense? Yes! Common practice?..... Not to my knowledge. I feel like a complete idiot for writing this article, but apparently proper task management is a well kept secret.

BTW, I also list the tasks for my iPAQ & GPS Bargain website in this tool. Pfew, I was wondering how to plug that in this article.