A while back during MacHeist 2 last year I acquired a copy of the GTD application for OS X called TaskPaper. At the time I didn’t think much of it, I saw it as a simple app for making to-do lists rather than anything else and I didn’t really have a need for it. It has been sitting in my Applications folder almost completely unused for almost a year now until I started looking into GTD methods to get some hint of organisation around all the stuff I’m doing.

I played around with the Things demo for a while and I have to say I was quite impressed with it. Things provides a really nice interface which made it easy to use, which was a big plus. Things also sports an iPhone app which synced perfectly with the Desktop version. The one thing (no pun intended) that put me off was the price. Buying the pair of applications for both the phone and the desktop would cost just over €50 which is quite a bit, considering the times we’re in. I also found that while Things sported a lot of nice features, that I wouldn’t necessarily use all of them, so it wasn’t really worth it.

Then I re-discovered TaskPaper sitting in my Applications folder. After firing it up and looking at it properly for the first time I realised it was much much more than a simple application for making to-do lists.

TaskPaper is a GTD application similar to Things in terms of the way it manages things. When adding new tasks to your list you add them to the Inbox for sorting later into other projects. It even provides a quick entry keyboard shortcut that brings up a nice little interface for adding tasks on the go. It selects to add things to the Inbox by default but you can also add them to projects straight away and bypass the necessary organising later. TaskPaper, like things also supports tagging. Tags are added to tasks at the end with the @ prefix. You can add as many tags as you want and TaskPaper provides functionality for searching by tags, which shows all the tasks across all projects that share the tag your looking for. Once you have completed a task you mark it complete by adding the @done tag. You can move it to the Archive project yourself if you want or you can have TaskPaper do them all for you using the cmd + shift + D shortcut.

One of the main reasons I like TaskPaper is that your list is contained in a single plain-text file. The only thing that TaskPaper uses is the formatting with tab indentation and @ prefix for tags. What this means is that even if your not in front of your own computer you can sync it across numerous computers as a simple text file and still be able to understand it without the application. For example if I want to see what I had down in the web development project away from home I can look at the file over ssh and see what I want to see, without the need for any unnecessary software installs. What I guess I am trying to say is that TaskPaper excels in doing a great job while still keeping it simple.

If your looking for a simple, effective way to organise yourself on the Mac, I recommend you try it. You can download a free trial over at Hog Bay Software and if you like it enough, you can buy it for only $29.95, a good price for software this useful.

Enjoy

Patrick