Today I’m reviewing HiTask, another great project/task management tool. Watch the video or read the notes below to find out my thoughts!
Great things:
- There’s a lot of awesome functions like recurring tasks, time tracking (with the ability to also estimate how long you think a particular task will take, I can see how this would be useful for comparing real life to estimates), and reminders sent via phone app or email or both. You can give priority tasks a star and see them first, too.
- There’s also lots of room/functionality for scheduling tasks hour by hour if that’s how you roll (it’s not how I roll, but it might be the way you like things).
- COLOR CODING. For the love of chocolate, finally a productivity tool that has color coding and does it right. There’s so many ways you could use this – color coding by project is the obvious one, of course. You could also have “stoplight” color coding for tasks. For example, green tasks are okay to go full steam ahead on, red tasks are paused or on hold for some reason, and yellow are tasks that are waiting on something from someone else. You could also color code your top three priorities to see if how you’re actually spending your time across all of your projects is aligning with the things you view as a priority. (I’m sensing you could probably use the time tracking for that, too.)
Other things:
- It can be a little slow to add tasks using the web app. This is a problem for me as I often want to pop in just to add a quick task without interrupting my flow or stream of thought on another project I’m working on at that moment. (Example: I’m writing a blog post & suddenly think, “Oh shit, I can’t forget to do x!” I need to be able to get in, add it, and get back to working preferably in under 30 seconds.) I couldn’t find any way to ‘quick add’ tasks in HiTask like I’ve seen other places; I might have just missed it though.
- It would be really cool if you could sync the reminders and task scheduling with Google Calendar, but I didn’t see any options for that anywhere.
- There are a lot of options with the tasks – which is great if you need that functionality but can be a little overwhelming if you don’t. It’s actually a little too structured for me because of the additional options.
- It’s not quite as visual/well designed as something like Wunderlist.
Great for you if:
- You want to be able to schedule tasks to a specific hour.
- Color coding is an absolute necessity.
- You don’t need or want to see things on a calendar or week view (as opposed to the drop down menu options of today, tomorrow, next 7 days, etc.).
- Good design is a priority, but you don’t have nigh-impossibly-high standards (like, uh, me).
Closing Notes
A lot of these things are going to come down to sheer preference. I know that my quibbles/quirks will not necessarily be everyone’s, and if someone doesn’t have my quirks, I feel like HiTask is a really, really great project & task management tool with a lot of functionality that you don’t usually see, especially in free versions of things. I’m not sure if I’m beating a dead horse by reiterating the fact that I’m really effing picky and have very specific wants/needs, I just want to make it clear that just because I don’t end up using a tool doesn’t mean that it’s not your productivity soul mate.
Any questions? Anything else you want to see reviewed? Let me know in the comments!