New Time Management Software Helps You Get Things Done (press release)

Sunday, August 28, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: time management, health news, Natural News

https://www.naturalnews.com/011307.html

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Achieve Planner was designed to help busy people take control of their schedule, organize projects and tasks, and get things done using sound time management principles. By combining project management functionality with a weekly schedule and hierarchical to-do lists, Achieve Planner goes a step beyond what traditional PIMs can offer. Its clean and intuitive interface helps you easily capture everything that you need to do in one central place.

Achieve Planner works by separating projects from their tasks. Instead of having a single to-do list full of unrelated activities, Achieve Planner provides a project list that gives you an overview of the various projects you are working on. Each project then gets its own hierarchical task list to store the individual action steps for that project. You can break up big items into smaller steps using as many levels as you need, and easily hide unwanted details.

The resulting project list is much smaller and easier to manage than a traditional to-do list because all the details are stored separately. Achieve Planner allows you to concentrate on your major outcomes, and only look at the low-level details when you actually need them. You can then use the color-coded ABCD system to prioritize your projects and tasks and focus on what is most important.

After you have organized your projects and tasks, you can use Achieve Planner's calendar to schedule meetings and appointments, and to perform weekly planning. In general, it is more effective to work on related tasks for a block of time, rather than jumping from one unrelated task to another. The reason is that it takes a certain amount of time to "switch gears" when you work on several unrelated tasks.

Achieve Planner uses "project blocks," which represent blocks of time that you have committed to a particular project, to help you focus on project specific tasks. You can think of project blocks as appointments with yourself to get your important work done. Achieve Planner even provides a weekly planning wizard that allows you to choose how much time you want to commit to different projects during the upcoming week, and then schedule corresponding time blocks in the calendar. During the week, you can easily rearrange your schedule in case your priorities shift, or something unexpected comes up.

Use Achieve Planner to keep track of effort estimates, and record how much time you actually spent on each task. Achieve Planner computes the expected start and end dates of your projects and tasks based on your effort estimates, your priorities, and your schedule, which will give you a much better sense of when you can expect to complete your work. If you have deadlines for some of your tasks, Achieve Planner will warn you if they are running behind schedule so you can take corrective action early by increasing their priority or allocating more time to them.

It's easy to learn to use Achieve Planner. The Getting Started wizard gives you an overview of all the main features, and there is extensive documentation in the help file. You can start by using the basics and work your way up to some of the more advanced features.

Whether you are a busy professional who needs to make better use of his/her time, a practitioner of David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology who wants a software solution, or a student trying to keep track of classes and assignments, Achieve Planner has all the tools that you need to work more effectively and take control of your time.

Achieve Planner runs under Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003, costs $69(US) for the Pro edition and $49(US) for the standard edition, and may be purchased securely online at http://www.effexis.com/. You can download a free 30-day trial version of Achieve Planner at the same web address.