As a lot of you may have noticed, I haven’t written a post in about a month. This is because I’ve been so busy! I apologize and will try to stay on top of things, if I can! (One way to help me out would be if you have a suggestion for a topic, please contact me and let me know.)

I was recently notified about FruitfulTime TaskManager at a perfect time and decided to give it a try because of how many tasks I needed to get done (on time). I figured this would be a great way to share my experience and opinions of this software with all of you and get a new post out at the same time!

FruitfulTime TaskManager actually looks better than a lot of other task management applications and allows you to easily see what your progress is for any tasks. It’s also small in size and performs very quickly. Another feature that has been tempting me to buy a new thumb drive is that it is portable as well. This means it can be installed on a thumb drive so you can take it wherever!

Being that I work on projects that also involve other people, it’s helpful to see who is assigned to what, so if you have a task that is dependent on another task which is assigned to someone else, you’ll know by viewing who it is assigned to and be able to contact that person regarding the status because of the Contact Manager built-in.

I do have a few annoyances/suggestions that I want to point out, that I hope could be considered in a future version:

1. Subtasks not grouped with tasks. Instead of separating the subtasks below the task listing, I would rather see a tree listing with the subtasks below each task, so I don’t have to click on a task just to see the subtask. This would save me time.
2. Deleting subtasks. Several times I have made the mistake of clicking on a subtask to delete, only to end up clicking on ‘Delete Task’, which shouldn’t appear when a subtask is selected. If the parent task was selected, then ‘Delete Task’ should appear. I just become confused when I’m so busy and not paying attention.
3. Setting task options, like Priority, Status, Progress, etc. When changing them, I have to triple-click! I wish I only had to single-click like I do for editing the name of the task, but would even settle for double-click. But triple-clicking is going a little too far and wastes time.
4. Setting the progress of a subtask does not automatically update its task. For example, if I set a subtask to 50% (say there is only one subtask), shouldn’t the task’s progress become 50%? I don’t really want to manually set it to 50%, because again, it takes time.

Features I really like:

• Adding notes to tasks.
• Adding references to any relevant websites or files. Very useful option for me especially since the company I work for has MANY websites that I need to be able to login for QA. A lot of the time, I also need to be able to review a document, so this can save me time from having to go back through lots of files to find the document I need.
• Adding reminders. Reminders can be set to go off before the Start Date or the Due Date. For me, setting reminders before a Start Date is helpful, because sometimes I like to start projects early, rather than waiting until I actually need to start it.

Overall, I do like FruitfulTime TaskManager and will probably continue using it since I’m tired of Outlook 2007 running so slow on Vista because I have a lot of e-mails and tasks to add. I like how Outlook manages tasks, but when I have to wait forever for Outlook to load, it’s not worth my time.

If you would like to see a demo of FruitfulTime TaskManager in action, there is video on the website. Interested in trying out this wonderful (very affordable) application? Go download it!

I would really like to hear if anyone else has given FruitfulTime TaskManager a try, and what you think of it. Please leave a comment below.