History:
Can probably list the time tracking software used as well: TogglTime, TogglPlan, Rescuetime, blah...
| Tool | Start date | End date | Remark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Calendar | 10 April 2016 (commissioning day) | end October 2018 (start NUS Y2) | notably through NS |
| Todoist | 1 May 2018 (end NUS Y1) | end February 2019 (start NUS Y2S2) | notably through LIME |
| Evernote | 1 October 2018 | start January 2019 (start NUS Y2S2) | |
| TickTick | 1 April 2019 (start NUS Y2S2) | July 2021 (end NUS) | notably through exchange + FYP |
| Google Sheets | 1 January 2021 (start NUS Y4S2) | May 2021 (end NUS) | only for final semester |
| Google Calendar | 13 July 2021 | present | notably through traineeship |
Todoist: First introduction into task management and prioritization. Did the prioritization wrong initially. Biggest gripe with the software was the lack of calendar view to properly deconflict plans. Interface is really clean though, but also the single software I've seen most resistant to change and feature requests.
Evernote: Idea was to use the notetaking app as single source of truth: easy to archive since should be relatively easy to serialize (notes are effectively plaintext). Difficult to manage on a weekly basis, and hard to tell when the next important due date is. Good to have list of accomplishments. Archiving is manual (though made easier with the use of shards, i.e. inter-note links).
Excel / Google Sheets: Raphael briefly mentioned using a single Excel to manage tasks, unsorted list (at end of NUS Y2S2). Not particularly portable -> tried to use Google Sheets instead. Worked for task management + schedule management. Same issue, cannot forecast important events. Importance of tasks become scaled by the number of tasks per project, i.e. CS2103 was disproportionately more important since it had more tasks laid out.
Asana: Good tool, but expensive. Can't remember which missing feature in Asana back then dissuaded me from using it. Back then was also minimum of 5 seats, which was an exorbitant amount of money. Also today the amount of premium features that take up real estate in the app is annoying (though it makes sense for their marketing) - can be partially fixed with site-scripting, e.g. Tampermonkey.
TickTick: Fantastic tool that fit many needs - calendar view available alongside prioritization, etc. Wrote an entire list of benefits somewhere in Evernote... Backup was tedious since it involved manually printing tasks in PDF format (this was before csv backups became a thing). Todo lists became ridiculously long, because tasks were not being assigned a date. Project management across different lists made it difficult to monitor the entire list of tasks.
Google Calendar: (Re-)introduced by Waikin on our co-birthday meetup, along with other useful tips on using GCal. Past experiences with GCal + other software made it easier to optimize use of software: in particular, (1) managing events in blocks of 30 mins, (2) use single calendar for tasks, and optional one for non-committed reminders. Good to have immediate feedback on tasks completed, though does not work for large projects.
Why:
- Project management
- Important deadlines / milestones should be separately marked
Requirements:
- Needs to integrate with Google Calendar
- Tasks created with a potential deadline should be reflected in the calendar as well
Actually it was as simple as this ^
TickTick is relatively cheap (about S$40/year), and has increasingly large number of features. Integration with Google Calendar is not too impressive: only GCal -> TickTick. Todoist and Asana supported writing to GCal, but the other way from GCal can potentially make it difficult to deconflict tasks on the todolist.
Discovered Google Tasks was available, simple enough to use (only to fill with tasks, not important events, and tasks with deadlines are different from actual time committed to working on them, which is handled by GCal), and supports task nesting.