FruitfulTime task management application and E-book [Hack Your Day]
I received an interesting letter the other day, letting me know about a productivity software. I noticed it because although it was product promotion email, it was at least addressed to me, and it very specifically said “productivity” tool. I answered and got an email back the same day from the founder, so I decided that this customer care alone was worth me taking the time to check out the product.
FruitfulTime is a task management application for Windows, which can be downloaded with a free E-book on procrastination. I don’t really want to go into detail on the book, I had a quick read of the near 40 pages and it seems solid material. It won’t revolutionize how we think about procrastination, but it may open some eyes, and has some useful tips on productivity and organization everyone can use. Compared to the price (free) it isn’t a bad book at all, so I can safely recommend it.
Now on to the software itself. This is the type of software I think some people will swear upon, but others will hate. Simple GTD can be shown as an example here, it’s a perfectly solid
GTD application, but is very bare bones. Some people hate it because you can’t upload files, geotag and send your list via hyperspace to the nearest quadrant, but hen again, some people like it exactly because of this. Fruitful time is just like this, it offers simple task management in a simple interface, allowing you to actually concentrate on stuff
Handling and initial thoughts
The application is under 1 Megs, very lightweight, easy on disk space, and memory usage. It looks very simple to use, and indeed is, with minimal graphics, but what is in there looks good, at least appeals to my taste. I found the tips appearing when I clicked on something new very annoying, but there are only 3-4 of these so you’ll be over it quickly. Everything is pretty self explanatory, if you have any questions, the tooltips will surely answer them for you.
Tasks Management
The default view enables you to create a main task in the top pane, and create subtasks of it in the bottom. You can set priority, status, start/due dates, completion for all tasks, but notes can only be created for the main task, since this is on a separate tab.
Two great features I love are the references and contacts. References allow you to attach either reference files, or reference links to a tasks, although again, you can only tie these to main tasks, not sub tasks. I like the contacts section because contrary to about 98% of the software out there, you do not need to send an invitation or an email to assigned contacts. This finally enables me to assign people to tasks without actually inviting the into the program.
One thing that might help you in productivity is the actually quite “inflexible” nature of FruitfulTime. Since it doesn’t allow you to assign subtasks to subtasks to subtasks, and contacts to subtasks of subtasks and so on, it will actually get you focusing on completing them as opposed to organizing them. I know I have this problem for example, I enjoy new organizational methods so much I spend way too much of my energy on it, instead of completing my tasks.
Searching and filtering
Searching and filtering is a really important factor in productivity applications, and FruitfulTasks gives you sort of enough options. You can filter by tasks by tag and by date, and this is enough for most people, unless you have millions of tasks. A huge shortcoming is that it doesn’t have a proper text search option.
What’s missing
So far I have said many positive things, but there are many, if not more, negative ones, and features missing. While I regard simplicity highly, I can only go so far. People who want serious control over their tasks will be disappointed, if you’re looking for Gmail type search power you will find the program comes short, and if you are trying to batch handle tasks you will find that it’s just not possible properly. There are many other smaller things missing, I really hope they get these in soon.
Overview
In its current state I would actually not recommend this to everyone. If you need a simple desktop application it works, but there are many free alternatives that offer many, many more features. I would recommend this product for about $5 but it is currently priced at “29.99 only until the end of March”. I seriously hope that after March it will either cost less, or have more features because if it continues like this, the future is grim for FruitfulTime.
Original post here: Daniel
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