Besides, it takes minimum time to add a task to the necessary context. Examples: Suppose you need to add such tasks as «Buy a cellular phone payment card», «Give the disk with documents to Ivanov», «Write a report about what was done in March». To add each task, you should select the necessary section and add the task by pressing Insert. The task «Buy a cellular phone payment card» will be added to the Places->Shop subsection of the Categories section, the task «Give the disk with documents to Ivanov» will be added to the Ivan Ivanovitch Ivanov subsection of the Contacts section and the task «White a report about what was done in March» will be correspondingly added to the Building subsection of the Projects section.

 

To make adding tasks faster, tasks have only one property in this example (project, category, contact). In real life, each task can be added to several contexts at once. For example, the task «Write a report about what was done in March» can be added to such contexts as Project = Building the house, Category = Activities->Reports, Contact = Me (your name), Calendar = March. That is, if necessary, you can specify the following details for each task: What project? What category? Who does it? When is it due? And now when the task has properties specified for it, you can find it by any property: it will be in the general list of this project in Projects, in the list of this category in Categories, the same with Calendar and Contacts.

 

So, you can specify the following properties for a task:

• Project
• Category
• Contact
• Time (a period is specified in the calendar)

It is convenient to create a list (tree) of your activities in categories: it is comfortable to group tasks this way. Each task belongs to its type of activity and you can easily see the entire list of tasks in a certain category. This feature is very useful to complete tasks of one category together within one time interval. First, complete tasks in the Writing texts category, then in Calling customers, then in Controlling assigned tasks and at last in Reading. You can do them in any order, the important thing is that tasks from one category are completed within one time interval, without alternating, i.e. without switching your attention. A simple, but very effective technique!

 

The Contacts section is used not only to sort tasks by particular people, but also it stores all the necessary contact information. Besides, a contact is not necessarily a person, it can be a company, an organization or just a site. That is, an object you communicate with in one way or another. It has a very useful feature – storing additional data, in particular you can use it to store usernames and passwords to the private sections on sites. Also, you can store the description of services a contact offers or other private data here. It is convenient because you can quickly add/view/use information related to a contact.

The calendar consists of predefined time intervals. Thus, you can predefine the intervals that are important for you, that you want to monitor all the time. For example, you can create the following intervals:

• Today
• Tomorrow
• Current week
• Current month
• Months (January, February, …)

You can easily see that intervals can be of different types. LeaderTask singles out these interval types:

Strict type: this time interval has constant time borders that do not change. For example:

The period from January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2007 will always show the entire year 2007.

Sliding type: this time interval has a start date, while the end date is defined by the period, i.e. the number of days that should be shown. For example: the interval Next 7 days covers today and 7 more days.

Mixed type: this time interval has period borders and the period it covers slides inside it. For example: the interval This week covers today and all days from the beginning of the current week and to the end of it.

Having these periods of time, you can easily define your period that will be convenient for you (for example, you can define decades, quarters… whatever you like)

You can use the calendar to see what is planned for today. You should select the corresponding period in the calendar and all tasks that should be completed today will be displayed. If tasks for today are assigned to various places (contexts), it will be convenient to print the schedule for today and carry it with you.

Projects in LeaderTask can be both actual business projects and personal projects. It is convenient to group all projects by some property: Business, Separate orders, Personal development, Hobby, Family…

Another important detail: a convenient way to add tasks. The task tree in LeaderTask is designed so that you could add tasks as quickly as possible. That is, the task tree uses hotkeys typical of tree elements.

To add tasks without distracting your attention from what you are doing, i.e. from your current activity, you can use the hotkeys for adding tasks: Ctrl+Alt+A opens the window of the program, then you just press Insert and type the task, press Ctrl+Alt+A once again and continue working! Very convenient.

So, we have gone through how to organize your activities in LeaderTask 4.1, but the program is under constant development, so it is quite possible that when you download the latest version , you will find new features and sections in the program.