When your to-do list becomes a monster, and an item next to a checkbox will actually take a long time and multiple people to complete, you need more than a checklist to keep track of it. What you really have is a project, and you need a tool designed to manage them. This week, we’re going to look at five of the best personal project management tools, based on your nominations.
What are the best personal project management tools to keep track of all of the moving parts in your home renovation, family reunion, birthday party, vacation plan, or other pet project you need to keep track of.
The available tools for businesses are really robust and packed with features, but when you need to organize something on your own or for a small time, sometimes lighter and more specific is better (not to mention more affordable). We picked out three good ones:
Asana is a hybrid task and project manager which launched in 2011 and since then it’s updated several times, spawned iOS and Android apps, and boosted its collaboration features for both individuals and organizations. Adding multiple projects is simple, and you can keep track of them from the left sidebar. You can structure your individual project goals and milestones as a simple checklist from start to finish, order them by date or when they need to be done, or make them dependencies so one thing can’t be complete until its sub-tasks are finished. You can add more detail to any task or item, like notes, links, tags, and comments, and if you’re working with others, you can see changes they’ve made as well. Upload attachments, set due dates—it’s all there. Plus, Asana packs tons of keyboard shortcuts that make using it fast.
If you’re a fan of Personal Kanban , or you like to use cards or post-it notes arranged in categories to organize your thoughts and your tasks, Trello will appeal to you. Trello is fast, flexible, and even fun to use, and in minutes you’ll organize all of the components for your projects into columns and cards that are easy to drag around, add supporting details to, comment on, and assign from person to person on your team. You can create different boards for different projects, set due dates or times for each card or set of cards, and more. Trello is even available on iOS and Android , and its drag-and-drop interface (usually) works well on mobile devices.
OneNote is more than just a great note-taking tool (although it definitely excels at that). It can also be an excellent personal planner, and depending on how you use it, it can be a pretty solid personal project manager. Among more than a few project management-focused designs to help you organize complex projects with lots of to-dos and moving parts. Using OneNote as a project management tool can be tricky, since it’s not especially good at giving you a quick, top-down view of everything that’s going on at once, but there’s no reason you can’t build that yourself using the tools available. Plus, once you power up OneNote with plugins like OneTastic , or keep your files in SkyDrive (where you can get to them and your projects using the OneNote apps for iPhone , iPad , and Android ), you’ll find OneNote can be a remarkably powerful tool.
