In the productivity department, having a task organizer is a good idea because it helps you keep track of all your stuff.

On the mobile side of things, even the simplest featurephone has a “memo” feature that can be used for very basic task management. On advanced smartphones, I don’t know of any that doesn’t have a task management app, and you also have the option of third party apps.

On the PC side of things, there is of course Microsoft Outlook, but there’s also Lightning for Mozilla Thunderbird that has a task management feature. And then there’s the plethora of web-based task managers. With webmail, Hotmail has a to-do feature (Calendar > New > To-do) as does AOL Mail (sidebar app) as does Gmail with Google Tasks. With third party web sites (some of which have apps of their own) there’s Remember The Milk, Simplenote, Toodledo and many others.

But what about a workstation-style task manager? Does one exist that’s free, ultra-powerful, ultra-fast and meant to be used on the workstation?

Yes, and it’s called ToDoList.

ToDoList, simply put, is incredible. Everything you ever wanted in a workstation-style task manager is here. The first thing you’ll notice is that sub-tasks are stupidly easy to create (and why other task managers don’t have this feature by default I’ll never know). Setting priority of tasks couldn’t be simpler, and yes they are color-coded.

Can you time-track with this thing? Yes, you can. Can you multi-sort tasks as if you were working in an Excel spreadsheet? Again, yes you can. What else can you do with it? Just look at the columns you have available to get an idea:

It’s unlikely you’ll ever need all the features offered by ToDoList, but it’s nice that a true workstation-style task manager exists that does not require any internet connectivity whatsoever. ToDoList can be run completely as a standalone app, and is small enough to run off a USB stick easily.

Want a quick calendar? ToDoList does that:

Want to encrypt the task list or maybe use FTP sync? ToDoList does that:

I also seriously like the fact that this was programmed not to get in your way. How do you minimize ToDoList quickly? Esc key. That’s it. Can ToDoList be sent down as a taskbar icon? Yes. Can you set up a hotkey combination of your choosing to bring it back? Yes. Yes, yes and more yes with ToDoList.

ToDoList does everything a workstation task manager should do, and does it all right.

Link: ToDoList 

(Note: The download is labeled as ‘Executable and all plugins’ and is nothing but a ZIP file. Extract to a folder or your USB stick and just run the executable ToDoList to start the program. Make sure to use the sample tutorial tasks to get yourself familiarized.)

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