Tools I use: HiveMinder

I have been searching for decent task management software for a long time. I used to use Outlook, but because Outlook doesn’t think the way I do, I had to come up with some convoluted system of managing tasks that probably took me more time to maintain than it did to actually do my work. Yet another nail in the Microsoft coffin, as far as I’m concerned.

It was actually my boss who turned me on to HiveMinder. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and while it does have some minor issues, it is turning out to be a great task management tool, and it’s very GTD-friendly. Here are some of the things I like about it:

• It makes it really easy to brain dump to-do items in multiple ways: from the webpage, the Firefox search box, iGoogle, etc. I’m not very mobile, so I haven’t tested this, but it has cell phone, email and IM integration as well.
• In addition to setting a due date, it lets you hide tasks until the day you want to deal with them, so they don’t clutter up your task list until then.
• You can set up strings of dependent tasks very easily by scheduling “but first” and “and then” tasks off an existing task or by linking existing tasks.
• It uses tags for on-the-fly categorization.
• It has a task review feature that enables you to quickly review all your tasks in one go, a great habit before starting work in the morning.
• It has an iGoogle gadget so I can view and manage tasks from my Google home page.

I haven’t really used the Groups feature yet, but I will be, as my boss intends to use it to manage our project tasks. Groups seems to be a way to enable a team, even working in different locations, to enter project tasks, assign them and report on progress.

Here are the few things I don’t like:

• Hidden tasks are hard to find once they’ve been hidden, in case you change your mind.
• There are many ways to slice the to-do list, but I would like a calendar access, so I can quickly see what tasks are due on a specific day.
• There are many different options for editing a task, not all of them intuitive, so it took me a little experimenting to figure out what all the features were and the most efficient ways of accessing them.
• When you do the task review and mark a task as one you are going to do today, it doesn’t show up in your to-do list for today, which is what I would expect it to do.

All of these are minor complaints. So far, I’m digging HiveMinder a lot more than Outlook or other web-based task managers I’ve tried. And in the great tradition of web-based services, it promises to be free forever.