An Intro to Notebooks’ Task Management

When you start using Notebooks’ task management after using apps that are exclusively focused on getting things done, you may be surprised by Notebooks’ flexibility:

• You can turn regular books into a task lists, and all items you add to that book – short notes, multi page documents, photos, PDF documents – turn into tasks.
• Notebooks does not force you to add details or attributes to your tasks, but you can assign due dates and alert times if you want.
• Notebooks may even automatically populate task lists for, if you choose.
• Regular books and task lists can exist anywhere within Notebooks, and you can even keep regular documents in task lists.

Because of the flexibility you may miss the corset of a clear separation into Today, Next, Scheduled etc., but Notebooks covers most of it. When Notebooks contains at least one due task, or if you set Notebooks to look ahead for due tasks, you will find a smart book Due Tasks at Notebooks’ top level, which functions like a dashboard:

• At the top level of the Due Tasks book you find your due and overdue tasks. This is very much like the Today section in other apps. In Notebooks, you don’t explicitly assign a task to the today section, tasks show up automatically when they reach their set due date.
• You can set Notebooks to look a couple of days ahead and also show tasks that are about to become due. In a way this is like a Scheduled section, because you see tasks with a due date within the next up to seven days.
• Tasks without a due date are obviously set to be done someday, but we don’t think they need an extra section.
• The dashboard also provides a Calendar view highlighting the days on which tasks become due. Select a date from the calendar to view the tasks that need to be done on that day. – This can also be compared to the Scheduled section you may know from other apps.
• You can directly access All Task Lists from the dashboard, no matter where in Notebooks the lists are actually stored. Each list shows a badge indicating the number of open and due tasks, you can open the list, view and work on the tasks, change their states etc. This is a convenient shortcut if you want to focus in on your tasks.
• What you may miss is a dedicated Next section, listing the upcoming tasks for various projects. We deliberately skipped that, because we feel that it is more efficient to concentrate on a specific project and decide what to do next, instead of looking at a set of more or less unrelated tasks. But maybe this is just the way we work 😉
• To complement the dashboard view you can also use Notebooks’ Context Tags. So if you want a specific group Someday, for example, you create a context and assign that to selected tasks.

We hope that this brief overview can help you get familiar with Notebooks’ way of task management. Read more…