I am no stranger to Personal Information Managers. In fact, for several years now, I’ve been using a Notes Organizer, a Journal software and MS Outlook to organize my appointments, schedules and notes and to catalogue the documents I create. I am a pastor and I work with people who help me in different tasks: run a formation program, publish a monthly newsletter and initiate projects for the ministry. Apart from that I am also part-time teacher at a nearby college and a web master. To keep my mind focused on the different tasks in hand and to keep a record of the projects I engage in, I use information managers. I discovered LeaderTask two weeks ago, during one of my busiest periods this year, and it helped me through this period of time.

Features I Like

Friendly Interface. LeaderTask has a friendly interface. I am given to graphic interfaces and LeaderTask is an eye candy. I like the fact that it fills up my screen and even allows me to change its colors. The interface is very different from that of Outlook, but is similar to some other freeware PIMs I have tried in the past. And so it took me only a few minutes to figure out — without the support of a Help manual — what the buttons are for and how to make the software do what it should.

Integration of Components. Another feature I like about LeaderTask is the integration of its components. It has a Project, Categories, Contacts and Calendar panels which are programmed so that that they can also show particular perspectives of the data I type into the database. I may type in my data through the Projects panel and my contacts through the Contacts panel, but when I click on a date in the Calendar panel, all tasks, events, assignments for people and notes associated with that date are shown to me in the Calendar Day-view. I don’t have to worry about losing my data; I just make sure that I associate them with the proper date, category, project or contact and I can find them with the click of a button.

Hierarchical Tree. I like the hierarchical tree feature for tasks. That way I can enumerate several smaller tasks under one big task. I mentioned above that I am in charge of publishing a monthly newsletter for our community. The creation of a monthly issue itself involves several steps. LeaderTask allows me to enumerate these tasks and to associate each with an assigned contact. The feature really helps the monitoring of such multiple tasks.

Contacts. One of the better features I like about LeaderTask is the Contacts panel. One can associate pictures with each contact and some notes. There are all sorts of possible data that one can associate with each contact. If you are an employer and also would like to write your observations about a particular employee, LeaderTask’s contacts panel can provide the necessary functionality for an Employees’ database.

Notes. The feature I really like about LeaderTask is its Note editor. It is an RTF editor that supports the pasting of Images and file attachment. I had tasks during the past weeks that had me writing different kinds of documents. What I did was simply to attach them to the notes of a particular tasks and I found it easy to retrieve them without the use of my Windows Explorer which is quite slow on folders with a lot of content. The File-attachment feature works on any kind of document it seems, even those of MSOffice and PDFs. Clicking them opens them up in the associated application (e.g. HTML in a browser) so I don’t need to make an extra click whenever I need to edit or read a document I have stored into LeaderTask.

Autosave. Finally, I like the auto-save feature. LeaderTask just allows me to work and not worry about whether I have saved my work or not.

Features I’d Like To See

The version of LeaderTask I am using is 6.6.01. From the looks of it, it has been frequently updated and still, the makers of LeaderTask encourage their users to suggest features. This emboldens me to make the following observations.

Flexible Tabs. Right now, LeaderTask’s tabbed interface is dependent on the kind of panel one opens. When one opens up the Projects panel, for example, only the contents of that panel appears. I would like to open the tabs I choose from the panels. That way I could have tabs from Projects and Categories, for example, combined.

More Buttons for the Notes Editors. As it is now, the Notes editor of LeaderTask is quite advanced, but I would like to see a feature that would allow me to insert an image — not just paste — into the document. I also would like to see a button that says “Insert Content from a File.”

I like the Note Editor of LeaderTask so much that I have been using it for typing articles and documents these past few weeks. I really would appreciate an Export/Import feature for the Note Editor.

The Notes of LeaderTask can be associated not only with a task but also with a date. This latter gives LeaderTask its diary feature. What I’d like to see is a Notes-view that will allow me to see the notes I’ve typed for a date appearing like a continuous page of diary entries with their particular dates and/or tasks.

Repeated Tasks. I do not know whether this is a bug but each time I edit a task to indicate that it is repeated, LeaderTask automatically creates a copy of the edited task as a sub-task.

Conclusion

LeaderTask is an excellent Personal Information Manager. It not only reminds one of the tasks one has to perform but also allows one the opportunity of reviewing one’s tasks and evaluating the people who work on them. No wonder it is called "LeaderTask" — it helps one work and think like a Leader. Whatever "imperfections" it may have right now is not due to bad programming but to the limitations of time and resources that unfortunately impose itself on any excellent work in the making.

LeaderTask is available at this website.