Keep your life organised with Task Coach

Choosing a todo list manager can be a tricky business. After all, you're going to trust it to keep you up to date with all the jobs that need doing. Task Coach is capable of handling large numbers of tasks so they don't get missed.

Installation is simple and it stores tasks in a file so you can keep different records if you want to. One change I would recommend is to turn autosave on as this prevents changes from being lost. Task Coach keeps undo information anyway so there is no reason not to. Click on the Edit menu and then on Preferences. Click on the Files tab, select 'Auto save after every change' and click on OK.

Tasks are easy to create with the Insert key and subtasks can be created using the Ctrl and Insert shortcut.

There is space to enter a long description for a task, which is handy for including extra information that might be needed. The other tabs are optional but can be used to include lots of other information.

Tasks can be given start, due and completion dates. The start date is very useful because you can hide tasks that haven't started yet. This means tasks can be set to appear automatically when required. Tasks can also be set to happen on a regular basis from daily and weekly to monthly and yearly.

Finally you can set a progress bar for tasks and set a budget if any money is involved.

One useful feature is the ability to track the amount of time spent on a particular task. It's called Effort, which could be a little clearer, but it's an essential time management tool. It is possible to show a window with all the time entries for a day.

There are some synchronisation tools for SyncML and iPhone. There is a dedicated app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The other method of synchronisation requires a Funambol service account. The website links to tehe my.funambol.com website. Registration does involve giving your mobile number and mobile model. That might be a little much for some people but it does look like a useful service.

TaskCoach can now work with files from Todo.txt, an open source todo list manager that works with plain text files. It is possible to sync tasks with Android devices using Dropbox, click here for more details.

It is now possible to edit subtasks in task templates and times can be imported from CSV files.

Task Coach 1.3.2 fixes some bugs and now rounds the time displayed in the effort viewers.