Software for organizing and scheduling your life

Many years ago I tried a neat shareware program, which I can’t remember the name of. It was a scheduling program for organizing your personal tasks: you input a list of tasks with priority, deadline, estimated number of hours needed, etc. and it built up a schedule. You check off the completed tasks, otherwise it would it would dynamically reschedule the task for you.

Is there a currently available program like that? I would prefer a Palm software, but now that I have a small laptop I think I can live with a Windows version. (It wasn’t very useful on a desktop which is why I didn’t register the software.)

Or if you have any other way of fighting procrastination I’d welcome it too.

Microsoft Project. Or were you looking for a shareware product?

Actually I used to use MS Project to make project schedule charts. But it seemed more of a “the schedule is now set in stone, so follow it or else” approach. I’d prefer a more dynamic rescheduling, i.e. a program that tells me “you haven’t told me you finished this today, so you’d better do it tomorrow morinig and let me know.” Does MS Project lend itself to this type of approach?

MS Project is business-oriented; its designed to manage projects in a business context. If you’re looking for a “personal information manager” made by Microsoft, you want MS Outlook, which everyone and their grandmother uses. Outlook is the full-scale version of Outlook Express, and includes a good email client, calendar, scheduler, to-do lists, contact management, and on and on.

It’s not free, though; I know there are decent free/share ones, but I can’t think of any offhand. If anyone has any suggestions, please share, as I’m currently looking for an alternative to Outlook (too many bugs in my copy, plus its got years worth of old emails and crap – I want to start fresh).

It’ll do it, but it’s not a real user-friendly approach. Have you looked at any of the software by FranklinCovey? (of paper planner fame) I’ve never tried it myself, but there might be a demo version available that you could check out.

Palm Desktop’s scheduling features may not be quite as robust as you’d like, but it is free and can be used with or without a PDA.

Could Chore Genie be the program you are looking for? If so, it’s available for download here Chore Genie.

Hope this helps!

Mmm, I’ve tried ChoreGenie and it was a complete mess since the installation. Once installed, the program reported a lot of errors. It isn’t even appealing. I uninstalled it the same night.

Sorry, but it must exist something better.