Five Features I wish Producteev had

I’ve been a Producteev user for several months now.  While it has some quirks, it really is a great tool.  I’ve been on their Uservoice forum commenting on the different requests that come in and some of them are great, others you wonder what planet they are from, and the rest you wonder why they weren’t included a long time ago.

What is Producteev?

For those of you wanting to find a cheap and easy way to keep track of tasks and Google Tasks isn’t cutting it for you, check out Producteev.  Appstorm has a good review of it also

1. Ability to extend labels across multiple tabs – The concept behind workspaces is each workspace is almost like it’s own project and nothing within one project should ever need to go to another project.  This is very Anti GTD unfortunately.  So initially you have an inbox workspace where it gets tagged then moved into a context workspace.  The issue is once you add tags, they get removed once they are moved into a new workspace.  This is a big issue.  Stripping tags when moved from one workspace to another seems like a major oversight.
2. Option to Keep list of Workspaces Unfolded – There was a design change a few months back that made this an issue.  In the previous iteration, your workspaces would all be visible.  In the Producteev/GTD world, you use different workspaces as your context areas (@Home, @Computer, Errands, Someday/Maybe etc…) So these workspace tabs would all be at the top of the screen and it was easy to switch between them.  They changed the design so workspaces are now in a vertical expanding drop down list instead of an always open horizontal list.  When you want to switch contexts you could easily click on the other context.  You now have to click the drop down, then select the context.  Then the page refreshes and the new page content shows up.  Aside from switching to AJAX or something that would allow them to have faster page refreshes, an easier win for them is to allow the workspace list to always remain open.  It’s simply a lot of clicks to switch between projects.
3. Improved Filtering – Currently you have basic filter functionality for dates.  So you can filter by Overdue, Today, Tomorrow, Day after Tomorrow, Next Week, and Next Month.  You also can filter by tag/label, stars, completed tasks by timing, as well as assignments.  What would really put Producteev ahead of everybody else would be Boolean logic for filter criteria.  One example of this is you want to see all tasks due this week except for tasks with specific tags.
4. Time Tracking and % Complete fields – These would completely solidify Producteev as a productivity app.  Being able to use it to track time spent on a task for billing as well as status reporting is extremely important to not only me but a lot of people.
5. Bulk Import tasks from CSV – This will allow users to create bulk tasks with assignments and labels very quickly.  For example, if you have a set of tasks for a project you can take them directly from MS Project or Excel you could import them in bulk with everything already set up.

Producteev should make getting tasks into itself a top priority.  This will allow users to work outside of the tool and quickly add tasks.  They have a Mail2Task feature that allows you to email tasks to the system with labels, dates, and assignments however this is for individual tasks.  What if I want to add 50 tasks or even 100 tasks.  I wouldn’t be able to do that with the existing tool set.

Overal Producteev is a great product but they have some areas of improvement.

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