Look at the tag cloud to the left, and you can see why I need to stay across new ideas and information. But as I blogged here it can be a heady ride. I’m looking at doing a mix of freelance and other projects, and need to find ways of managing the flow of information and a bunch of freelance and other projects.
WorkFlowy has been useful. It’s an online list app that lets you nest tasks, potentially infinitely. I love how visual it is, and I like being able to update a list continually, dipping into particular areas when I need to. But I need something that helps me manage projects in more detail, working in timelines and schedules, and specific tasks.
I’m after something with a phone app, in the cloud, and works offline too. Is that too much to ask?
I put the problem out to Twitter and got a great response. The next step is weeding out what will work.
Several people recommended Things, which seems like it’s evolved. It has a deep online project management base and a simpler phone app. And by syncing with Google Calendar, I could have deadlines appearing dynamically. It’s reasonably expensive at $70 (yes, I know this is nothing for good software, but I’ll need to take advantage of the free trial before I get to that).
Atlassian’s JIRA popped up too, but I think it’s overspeced and not a great fit with what I need (not being a software developer, start up or large organisation).
A lot of people use Evernote. It was one of the apps a lot of people were using instead of Delicious. But it also has potential for note taking, lists and searchable archiving of online finds and image captures. It actually seems so huge that it’s hard for me to really visualise how it would work. Seems like a very modern take on the journal, complete with deep searchable collections of images, contacts and lists. Maybe I need to experiment?
Springpad is a similar app, though perhaps not quite so powerful as Evernote. It lets you take notes, make tasks, and search, and sets alerts.
So I’m going to start playing with some of these. But I’d love to hear how you manage your load. Do you make lists? Something older, like Microsoft Project? Use some online tool? Keep it all in your head? More importantly, how do you use these things?
UPDATE: I’ve been toying with a few of these. Things looks great, but for me the lack of a cloud presence is a real problem. I need to spend a bit of time with Evernote. I’ve also signed up to Springpad. And I’ve linked Manymoon up with my Google Apps account. Maybe I should even go plain text, like the Lifehacker peeps.
