This free, open-source app is my task manager, cheerleader, Kanban board, and calendar

Free and open-source (FOSS) apps are sometimes seen as much less succesful, hobbyist options to paid skilled apps—in spite of everything, they’re free. Nonetheless, Tremendous Productiveness utterly adjustments that narrative by providing a feature-complete productiveness app that may go toe to toe with most paid alternatives. Here is a fast take a look at every thing you get with Tremendous Productiveness and the way I exploit it as my principal productiveness app.

Utilizing Tremendous Productiveness as a activity supervisor

It’s every thing a activity supervisor ought to be—after which some

At its core, Tremendous Productiveness is a private activity supervisor that packs nearly each function you might fairly count on. You may create as many duties as you need, add subtasks, set up them into initiatives, assign tags, set due dates, and even add an estimated completion time. I discover the final function significantly helpful as a result of it lets me observe how lengthy a activity truly takes to finish and evaluate that towards my authentic estimate—a good way to check the accuracy of my estimates and plan my days extra realistically.

Coming to its activity seize capabilities, I actually love its assist for global keyboard shortcuts. For instance, for example I am shopping the net or answering emails once I abruptly understand I have to create a brand new activity. I can merely press Ctrl+Shift+A, and Tremendous Productiveness opens on to the Add New Process subject, eradicating a lot of the friction from conventional activity seize.

Creating new duties can be superfast and handy. After getting into the duty title, you need to use particular arguments so as to add metadata just like the venture it belongs to, any tags you need to assign, a due date, and even an estimated completion time. Here is the fundamental syntax:

activity title #tag +venture @due_date t{estimatedminutestocomplete}m

A sensible instance can be:

Write Tremendous Productiveness article #Apps +HTG @in the present day t180m

After all, you do not have to recollect this syntax to create a activity. You may merely write the duty title after which use the right-click context menu so as to add all this info manually by means of the app’s interface.

The true benefit of studying the syntax, nonetheless, is that it helps you to rapidly bulk-add a lot of duties directly. There is a plugin referred to as Mind Dump that offers you a textual content subject the place you possibly can paste probably a whole bunch of duties utilizing this syntax. It’s going to create all of these duties in a single go, full with their metadata and subtasks. It is simply the quickest activity seize system I’ve utilized in all my years of testing productiveness apps.

Utilizing Tremendous Productiveness as a cheerleader

Somewhat encouragement goes additional than one other checkbox

Aside from Mind Dump, one other superior plugin included with Tremendous Productiveness is Voice Reminder. As soon as enabled, it helps you to set a customized message together with a time interval—say, each quarter-hour. On the chosen interval, Tremendous Productiveness makes use of text-to-speech (TTS) to learn the message aloud.

As you possibly can think about, there are many artistic methods to make use of it. I personally use it as a private cheerleader. I’ve bought it saying issues like, “You are able to do it,” or, “You are midway by means of”—simply easy phrases of encouragement. I’ve discovered it particularly useful for staying motivated and on observe whereas engaged on one thing significantly boring.

That stated, you possibly can simply as simply change the message and use it for one thing utterly totally different, like a productiveness coach. For instance, you might have it say issues like, “Get again to work,” or, “Are you working proper now?”—no matter form of immediate will get you transferring. General, in the event you’re somebody who will get distracted simply or tends to lose motivation midway by means of a activity, this plugin may be surprisingly efficient.

Utilizing Tremendous Productiveness as a Kanban board

Visualizing your workload adjustments the way you deal with it

You do not all the time begin one activity, end it, after which transfer on to the subsequent. Most of the time, you are juggling a number of duties on the similar time, and that is the place Kanban boards really shine. Tremendous Productiveness comes with a built-in Kanban board that makes it simple to visualise the progress of all of your duties, whether or not they’re nonetheless to do, in progress, or already accomplished.

That stated, the Kanban board is not the one board view obtainable. There’s additionally an Eisenhower Matrix in the identical part, which focuses extra on activity prioritization than progress monitoring. It kinds your duties into 4 quadrants primarily based on urgency and significance, making it simple to determine what truly deserves your consideration proper now.

This issues as a result of Tremendous Productiveness makes activity seize so frictionless that just about each passing thought can flip right into a activity. That is nice for ensuring you do not lose concepts, however not every thing you seize must get carried out—not to mention instantly. The Eisenhower Matrix helps you separate the sign from the noise.

I must also point out that you just’re not restricted to simply these two views. You may construct your personal customized boards with no matter row and column format you need, then use tags to regulate which duties seem in every cell.

Utilizing Tremendous Productiveness as a calendar

As a result of planning forward should not require switching instruments

Each activity you create in Tremendous Productiveness may be assigned a due date, and the app offers you a few totally different views to assist visualize when these duties are arising. The one I personally use is the Planner board, which reveals all of your overdue duties alongside the upcoming days. You may drag duties from one date to a different, and Tremendous Productiveness robotically updates their due dates. It additionally offers you a greater sense of your workload by displaying what number of duties are scheduled for any given day.

If you’d like extra granularity, although, there’s additionally the Schedule board, which incorporates each Week and Month views. Within the Month view, you get a full calendar with all of your duties displayed inside their respective date cells. You may as well drag and drop duties between dates to immediately replace their due dates.

The Week view goes a step additional by letting you schedule duties at particular occasions throughout the day, not simply on a selected date. That is helpful in the event you’re somebody who prefers timeboxing your day as an alternative of merely working from a each day activity checklist. I do not personally use the Week view fairly often, but when timeboxing is your factor, it is a stable possibility.

On high of all that, Tremendous Productiveness additionally syncs with Google Calendar, so if you’d like your schedule to remain in sync throughout each apps, you possibly can join your account and import your calendar occasions instantly into Tremendous Productiveness.

FOSS apps don’t get higher than this

What impresses me most about Tremendous Productiveness is not any of the options I discussed above—it is the truth that a free, open-source venture managed to outbuild most proprietary apps that folks pay for. That is not one thing you see fairly often on this area. It is a testomony to how far FOSS software program has come through the years. The outdated stereotypes of free software program being “barebones” or “unpolished” merely do not apply anymore.