I'm looking for software to run on a desktop Mac that will enable me to plan my life better. It doesn't need to be free, but I'm retired, so the price needs to not be exorbitant either.
In a nutshell, this software will give me the list of what I need to do "today" (i.e. any given day).
For more than a decade I've lived with a cobbled-together 'system' to do this, made up of several applications:
• a calendar program (not iCal), for things like appointments, birthdays, holidays, and simple one-off tasks
• Excel spreadsheets, to keep track of simple repeating tasks, e.g. house cleaning and maintenance
• a Gantt program, to organise/plan more complex tasks
• a Word file, where I hold the 'events' for the coming week in templated tables
This last is created by hand each week, with the data from the other three apps, thus giving me the list for "today".
As a retired software engineer, I've intended for years to build my own replacement, but, well, there always seems to be something else that has a higher priority in my life and I'm sick of my Heath Robinson setup.
I can expand on the below if necessary, but am trying here to keep the verbiage to a minimum.
Must-haves:
1. Be able to work completely offline. This program will be the repository of my entire life, so will contain some pretty personal information. It must be able to work entirely without any sort of "phone home" activity, and I will be using Radio Silence to ensure this.
2. Works on Monterey. I prefer the old known bugs to new exciting ones, so tend to update my OS pretty infrequently.
3. Gantt-ing. Finish-to-start links must be available, and I need some way of achieving start-to-start functionality ("all these tasks start on the same date as this task", and moving it moves them all); I can live without the other two link types. Lags between linked tasks to be both positive and negative values ("this task starts 3 days before that task").
4. Arbitrary nesting and grouping of tasks. Gantt links must be possible between tasks which do not belong to the same 'tree'.
5. Export capability. Nothing too fancy needed here; just the selection of columns/fields and output to CSV will be fine.
Seriously like-to-haves:
A. One-time licence fee. I'm fine with this being restricted to just a single major version of the software. (I'm not likely to update it, anyway.)
B. Gantt tasks can also repeat, so complex tasks which I do annually can copy/move themselves to the following year once done.
C. Archive and prune, with some way of accessing the archive files.
D. Progress measures to be more than just Not-done and Done. Percentages would be fine, as would a simple Not-done / In-progress / Done model.
Systems I have looked at:
• OmniFocus -- does not have Gantt-ing and although OmniPlan does, in order to get them to work together (in a pretty limited way, it seems) I'd have to pay US$550 to get the Pro version of each
• Monday.com -- seems to be 100% online
• Asana -- ditto
• Things -- does not have Gantt-ing
• Todoist -- subscription model and seems to be 100% online
• Clickup -- seems to be 100% online
Any help in locating such a system will be very much appreciated!
In a nutshell, this software will give me the list of what I need to do "today" (i.e. any given day).
For more than a decade I've lived with a cobbled-together 'system' to do this, made up of several applications:
• a calendar program (not iCal), for things like appointments, birthdays, holidays, and simple one-off tasks
• Excel spreadsheets, to keep track of simple repeating tasks, e.g. house cleaning and maintenance
• a Gantt program, to organise/plan more complex tasks
• a Word file, where I hold the 'events' for the coming week in templated tables
This last is created by hand each week, with the data from the other three apps, thus giving me the list for "today".
As a retired software engineer, I've intended for years to build my own replacement, but, well, there always seems to be something else that has a higher priority in my life and I'm sick of my Heath Robinson setup.
I can expand on the below if necessary, but am trying here to keep the verbiage to a minimum.
Must-haves:
1. Be able to work completely offline. This program will be the repository of my entire life, so will contain some pretty personal information. It must be able to work entirely without any sort of "phone home" activity, and I will be using Radio Silence to ensure this.
2. Works on Monterey. I prefer the old known bugs to new exciting ones, so tend to update my OS pretty infrequently.
3. Gantt-ing. Finish-to-start links must be available, and I need some way of achieving start-to-start functionality ("all these tasks start on the same date as this task", and moving it moves them all); I can live without the other two link types. Lags between linked tasks to be both positive and negative values ("this task starts 3 days before that task").
4. Arbitrary nesting and grouping of tasks. Gantt links must be possible between tasks which do not belong to the same 'tree'.
5. Export capability. Nothing too fancy needed here; just the selection of columns/fields and output to CSV will be fine.
Seriously like-to-haves:
A. One-time licence fee. I'm fine with this being restricted to just a single major version of the software. (I'm not likely to update it, anyway.)
B. Gantt tasks can also repeat, so complex tasks which I do annually can copy/move themselves to the following year once done.
C. Archive and prune, with some way of accessing the archive files.
D. Progress measures to be more than just Not-done and Done. Percentages would be fine, as would a simple Not-done / In-progress / Done model.
Systems I have looked at:
• OmniFocus -- does not have Gantt-ing and although OmniPlan does, in order to get them to work together (in a pretty limited way, it seems) I'd have to pay US$550 to get the Pro version of each
• Monday.com -- seems to be 100% online
• Asana -- ditto
• Things -- does not have Gantt-ing
• Todoist -- subscription model and seems to be 100% online
• Clickup -- seems to be 100% online
Any help in locating such a system will be very much appreciated!
