Blog Yellek

I’ve been using HiTask for a couple of months now on my quest to find the perfect Getting Things Done (GTD) application. Given that I have yet to really implement GTD in my life you might take my comments with a grain of salt but hopefully I can give you enough information to help you decide if you want to give it a go.

If you are familiar with GTD you will recall that for day to day operation GTD uses the concepts of projects, next actions and contexts. HiTask supports next actions (called tasks) and projects directly, allowing you to group tasks into projects. Contexts are supported through allowing items to be tagged, each tag being a context. In order to view items in a single context you can filter items into those belonging to a single tag. GTD also addresses the concept of next actions due on a given date by introducing the concept of a tickler file with folders for each day of the month. HiTask supports start and end dates and times for each item.

HiTask also has extra features which extend the basic GTD functionality. In addition to tasks you can also add meetings, reminders, notes and birthdays as items, all of these items being taggable as well as having dates assigned. Meetings can be created as recurring. On the left of the page there is a calendar view of all tasks and items due that day. Items can be assigned to different color groups.

HiTask supports collaboration by by allowing items to be assigned to other people. People can be invited to join as teammates but in order to see all tasks in a workgroup (as opposed to just your items) at least one premium account is required. Workgroup size is limited to 3 users in the free edition. Other limitations of the free edition include a maximum of 100 items and 25 proijects. Premium accounts are USD15 per year.

One of the areas where HiTask really shines is in its support for open standards and integration. I use the iCal integration to mirror my HiTask items and recurring meetings onto my Google Calendar. I still haven’t managed to crack the ultimate calendar synchronization by getting my Outlook calendar synched into Google (Plaxo promises but is not delivering at present) but having a view of HiTask on Google calendar is nice. You can also get an RSS view of your items which lets you see your own or other items in a feed reader such as Google Reader.

One of the big issues with services like this is obtaining your data back if you want to move it somewhere else. HiTask offers a CSV export facility which at least allows you to get a copy but it might be difficult to import somewhere else. I don’t know if there is an open standard for task data to use so I suppose that CSV is a good default.
Those are the features but what about the user interface? I find the HiTask user interface easy to use and well thought through. There are a number of nice AJAX touches like being able to drag and drop items into projects and onto the calendar to set their due dates and times. Items can be grouped by project, color, date and user with categories being able to be expanded to show the items in each one.

What don’t I like? Well I sometimes want the ability to view items that have two or more specific tags and HiTask only allows me one tag filtering. I also want some sort of ability to view only those items that I have to do next and not those items that are waiting on a next action. This would reduce the clutter when I am trying to decide what to do next. I also find that I have both work and personal projects going and that sometimes I want to only see the work projects but I can’t tag or filter projects.

My concusion: HiTask is a solid performer which offers enough to implement GTD online although there are still some things for the development team to work on.