I always find it interesting to see how different people attempt to organize everyday life. Shawn Blanc recently posted a quick thought on To-Do Lists and Schedules, stating that he has “a daily to-do list and a routine schedule. The to-do list is the “what”, the schedule is the “when”.”
I tend to agree with this approach, although the apps I use are different. Shawn uses Fantastical or BusyCal on the Mac for scheduling appointments and uses OmniFocus for tasks. I currently use the iOS Calendar app and I leave all my tasks inside of Things. However, Shawn’s post reminded me of how one app, Calvetica, tries to manage both the “what” and the “when” using just one paradigm: the calendar.
I have always thought that lists were the best way to manage tasks (a.k.a. ye olde to-do list). After all, lists can easily be re-ordered, items can be separated into different lists, and good task apps usually have an “All” and a “Filtered” view to let me view tasks with flexibility. I’ve been using Things consistently since publishing the review of the iPad app, but I’m not opposed to trying out other solutions now and again, and so for the past few days I’ve been giving Calvetica a shot as a daily task manager.
Calvetica’s task manager looks just like its event manager, but for the little checkmarks beside each of the task titles. Switching between tasks and events is as simple as tapping on a button in the menu.
The immediate advantages to this calendar view is that you can tell at a glance what is due and when; I also find it easier to visualize a task when it’s a blot on a 31-day calendar rather than a simple date (July 25). Calvetica tasks are coloured differently based on the lists they’re in (iSource is orange, Personal is blue), but there doesn’t really seem to be any way to tell which tasks are overdue.
If you’ve missed a due date, Calvetica will automatically move overdue tasks to the current date. This makes sense, but it also takes some getting used to, as most other task managers highlight overdue items in red.
If you find it overwhelming to see all of the tasks from your various lists at all times, you have the option of hiding lists just like you can event calendars. However, this solution is more cumbersome than a straight-up filter, since viewing just my iSource tasks requires me to manually hide every other list first.
But I don’t want to seem like I’m not giving Calvetica credit here: I love the way the app allows me to create multiple tasks from one dialogue box, and I also think the “week” view is a very nice touch.
When Do You Sync?
One of the only confusing parts about using Calvetica as a task manager is figuring out how and when it syncs. You’ll have to sign up for a Pocket Lint account from within the app before you can sync anything, and after that, it’s not made terribly obvious when exactly the syncing process happens. It wasn’t until I asked the developers at Mysterious Trousers that I found out that tasks sync on startup and exit. That’s fine by me, but it’s also not completely consistent. Newly created tasks transfer from my iPad to my iPhone quickly enough, but Pocket Lint sometimes has trouble remembering which tasks I’ve completed.
Undated Tasks, Please
As flexible as Calvetica already is, I think it still needs to support longer-term tasks without due dates. This is really where the calendar-based UI falls apart for me. Aside from the set of tasks I have scheduled for the week to come, I also like to keep a larger task list of draft ideas that have no due dates. These tasks are just good ideas that I want to act on once I have more free time. The tasks are still in the same iSource list in Things (alongside the tasks with assigned due dates), but such a distinction is currently impossible in Calvetica. Tasks either have a date, or they don’t exist at all.
I think a re-orderable list of items without due dates would help a lot in this regard. Even Teux Deux, an app that prefers users to think about one week of tasks at a time, has a special section for unordered lists. I realize I could also keep my list of undated tasks in another app or a separate text file, but transferring tasks over one by one would be a lot more difficult than simply tapping on an undated task in Calvetica and assigning it a due date.
Conclusion
If giant lists of things never worked for you, and you already prefer to see things as blips on a calendar, then Calvetica could be a great fit – especially since $3 buys you both the iPhone and iPad versions. The interface that was originally designed for handling calendar events adapts surprisingly well to the managing of tasks – so long as you’re the type to think about every task you create as having a due date. I’ll be keeping an eye on Calvetica, but I think I’ll be heading back to Things for now.
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