Doist has released version 800 of the team task management solution, Todoist, effectively moving the tool into the work management category. In particular, Todoist now supports activity ‘logs’ (or ‘streams’), project notes, improved microsyntax for quickly creating tasks, and a reworked notification system user experience.
Work management is a term that has emerged in recent years as team task management tools were enhanced with various social communication capabilities, principally derived from design motifs that originated in work media (or enterprise social network) tools (like Yammer, IBM Connections, and Jive).
The new activity stream includes recent comments and project notes (although they are named ‘comments’ in the activity stream.
The new project notes is basically a reuse of the existing model for task comments. This has the benefit of being familiar, but falls short of what I’d like to see since task comments and, now, project notes, are not visible until the icon is clicked, and then they appear in a hover box, covering the task list in the project.
It would be much better if display of project and task comments was more like the new activity stream. Imagine that I click the comment icon in either case, and instead of the hover window instead the comments would be displayed below the title in a scrollable list. Here’s a mock-up:
And I would like to see explicit replies, too. A flat series of notes or comments creates all sorts of headaches.
Bottom Line
The most important takeaway is that Todoist has now moved from team task management to being a true work management tool. While there’s a lot still to do with the new features, Todoist’s traditional strengths — ease of use, flexibility in ordering and nesting of tasks and projects, and smart integration with Gmail — are still in place. But now Todoist is gaining important features for workgroup cooperation and coordination.
