Checkvist is my Task List #
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Like most geeks, over the years I’ve gone through a lot of a lot of task management tools (most successfully, OmniOutliner and TVO), only to go back to using text files (which unfortunately, tended to accumulate on multiple computers at multiple locations, I still have a few megs of files tucked all over the place). Lately I’ve been using a lot of Evernote, and as one of the few things that synced flawlessly (although Dropbox has really changed the game there), I used that for about a year or so as my main task “manager”, and used FogBugz for development-related stuff.
After the latest round being really unhappy w/ my setup, I took another look around what kind of online/shared options were available and stumbled onto Checkvist early last year. Although there are others that do more (Toodledo, and of course, Remember the Milk), Checkvist was the one that stuck the best, mostly because of its simplicity and speed. Also, probably the biggest factor (and a big contributing factor to the speed aspect) is that it can be almost entirely keyboard driven. It’s a moded editor with tons of chained shortcut keys. You can see the appeal to a longtime vim user. It also has decent multi-user sharing baked in from the start, which is nice for small teams (although there are a few things missing that have been stumbling blocks for adoption by my co-workers).
That being said, despite a few things that originally seemed like dealbreakers (lack of mobile app, for one), over the past few months, Checkvist has managed to take over as my primarily task manager. I attribute it primarily to the parts that it gets right: keyboard driven UI, search, list switching, expansion among them, that are just unmatched in anything else I’ve tried.
Here, BTW is my ongoing Checkvist Evaluation/Improvement List:
Checkvist’s closest peers are probably Todoist, which has a few nice touches, but seems to be inferior to Checkvist in just about every way, and Workflowy, which is conceptually very interesting (dynamic scoping/zooming, keyboard everything, and while slicker, is too limited to be really useful for me (even less metadata, no sharing). Also, I suspect that the lack of modalness actually makes the keyboard nav a lot more complex than it otherwise would need to be…
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 6:33 pm and is filed under MakeItBetter, Personal, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I absolutely love dropbox (use it everyday), FogBugz is also a great tool, but I would be curious to hear what you thought about OnTime.. You should give it a try and let me know what you think. (1 user license keys are free) ..
Cheers,
Zachary
Axosoft.com
Correct task list and its proper organization is important to customize workflow process in a proper way. Most task managers have no clear or rather ‘weak’ to-list, task list. In my projects we use comindware task management www.comindware.com/task-management/, where each item has discussion section and all the tasks can be assigned to any team member bu themselves. Team members can exchange comments and the files are attached to the task. So it’s very convenient and beneficial for flexibility in conducting workflows.