STARTUP WATCH: Taskk

Of all of the sites and services I’ve seen and tested through BetaPunch, Taskk is by far and away my favourite. After a few months of being in private beta, the site announced today that it has launched, so I thought that I’d share my thoughts with you.

While most other digital task apps don’t do much more than try to translate what can be done quite simply and effectively with a pen and piece of paper, maybe with some syncing abilities thrown in, Taskk is a lot more useful for actually organising your time and getting accurate time frames on your projects.

The premise: to begin with, it’s simple – you make lists (you can have several) and you populate those lists with individual tasks. For each of those tasks you insert an estimate of how long it should take, from 5 minutes to 8 hours. Once you’ve set out what you need to do, you need to tell Taskk when you can do it, so you move to the planner interface, where you input the number of hours you have each day in which to do your work for the next few weeks. For example, if you work an 8-hour day but have two hours of meetings and take another hour for lunch, you would say that you have 5 hours in which to do your work. If you have a pretty standard template of how your week will play out, you can set default estimates of available hours for each day of the week, which takes a lot of the headache out of planning your time.

Click ‘update’ and, hey presto, your planner fills up and shows you what you have to do each day. For someone like me, who often finds distraction between tasks, knowing exactly what you have to do next is really helpful.

Taskk’s planner interface (click for full size)

If certain tasks have deadlines, you can add that information and the planner will make sure that you fit it in before that date. Lists or individual tasks can have deadlines, and if the time that you estimate a project will take is longer than the hours seemingly available, Taskk will let you know about it.

If getting one thing done is dependent upon something else being done first, you can also set dependencies. You can set task recurrences, force a date on which a certain task is to be carried out or give a task an attachment. Basically, if there’s a feature you need to keep yourself organised, they’ve got it. If they don’t, they’ll probably build it if you ask nicely. There aren’t currently any native mobile apps, but the website adapts nicely to work in your phone’s browser if you need it on the go.

There are a few things I’ve missed out, but I’ve covered all the essentials and, if you think that Taskk could help you, I strongly recommend that you go, have a dig around, and give it a try.

Using Taskk is free, so long as you only have up to 20 tasks on the go at any one time. If you want to go above that, then it will set you back $12/month. I think it’s worth every penny.

www.taskk.it