Task Management with the Bonsai Outliner
Everybody has a different approach to keeping track of all of the tasks that they need to accomplish, projects they need to manage and people with whom they need to follow up.
In the old days, the only choices available to us were paper-based. The best systems out there were from Day-Timers and Franklin-Covey, and they helped you to organize yourself by encouraging you to group items into different categories that were separated out into different pages. They worked well, but the planners themselves were somewhat bulky and it was a laborious process to carry forward and reorganize your tasks as you went along.
Today, we have numerous options to electronically manage our tasks. Yet very few people systematically use electronic task management tools. The most widely-used tool is Outlook, which enables you to add tasks to its task management database, then filter and sort those tasks by due date, category (if you assign one) or other criteria. To me, this approach quickly becomes overwhelming as the tasks begin to mount, and re-prioritizing and re-dating the tasks within Outlook is a time-consuming process.
I prefer to use outlines as my motif for managing tasks. I like to categorize and sub-categorize my tasks and, more importantly, to be able to quickly expand and collapse tasks and sub-tasks so that I only see what I want to see. Electronic outliner tools provide this capability, enabling me to switch between the “forest and the trees” as I expand and collapse tasks and sub-tasks with just a click or two.
For outline-based task management that works on both the PC and on Palm-based hand-held devices (such as my Treo) – and that synchronizes seamlessly between the two platforms – Natara’s Bonsai Outliner ($38, http://www.natara.com/Bonsai/index.cfm) is the best I’ve found so far. I prefer to perform most of the work on the PC version of Bonsai; I use my Treo to bring all of my outlines and checklists with me, and to check off items as I complete them when I’m outside of the office.
Setting up an outline or checklist is extremely easy: you simply click on the “New” button and start typing. Sub-items are added by pressing the Enter key, then using the tab key to ident the item underneath the previous item and make it a sub-item of the previous item. To collapse all sub-items underneath an item, click the item’s Expand/Collapse icon once.
You can easily move items by grabbing the “grab handle” for the item and moving it to a new location and, optionally, to a new level within the outline structure. Once you’ve decided to keep an outline, click on File, Save As to save the outline. At that point, Bonsai will ask you if you wish to synchronize the outline with your Palm-based device.
Outline data from the PC is synchronized with your Palm-based device (and vice versa) via the normal one-button synchronization routine. Once in your Palm-based device, you can edit all aspects of an outline, including checking off items as you complete them. Commands and functions on the Palm-based device are accessed via the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, or by pressing the Menu key and tapping on the function that you’d like to use.
You can associate other data with any of the items within an outline – priority, start date, due date, category, keywords – and then set up and use powerful filters to only show what you want to see. For example, you can set up filters to show overdue items only, priority 1 items only, etc. Bonsai can also color-code items by priority, category, level or due date so that you can focus quickly on the items needing your attention.
In addition to being able to easily expand and collapse sub-items under higher level items, Bonsai can also perform calculations based on sub-items. For example, as sub-items of a task are completed, a bar next to the higher-level task graphically shows overall progress. Other numbers such as costs can be calculated based on sub-items as well.
Bonsai is a simple, extremely useful electronic outlining tool. Although it doesn’t have some of the advanced features that other outliners might have, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to learn the tool, the pricing is right and, as a bonus, outline data synchronizes seamlessly between PCs and Palm-based devices.