5. Hiveminder

Hiveminder

Hiveminder is an online service that starts the way all GTD applications should start, namely with a brain dump. Instead of the blank openness of Basecamp or the structure of Tracks, Hiveminder asks you to dump everything you have on your to-do plate into the brain dump screen.

Hiveminder’s Braindump

Instead of using the term “Contexts” to help describe Task attributes, Hiveminder uses the concept of “Tags.” In practical usage, I’m not entirely sure there is a difference though religious GTD practitioners are likely to disagree. Beyond just having the Braindump interface online, Hiveminder goes a step further, enabling users to add tasks by sending and email or an instant message.

For email, all you need to do is send a message to the specified address for your Hiveminder site for the task to be included. With Instant Messaging (for AIM and Jabber), you add a new buddy (HM Tasks). The HM Tasks buddy is essentially a bot that lets you interact with the Hiveminder system over IM. In addition to adding tasks, you can also search for them, get an updated to-do list and mark tasks that have been completed

A key part of GTD is the process of reviewing your tasks regularly. In addition to detailed views showing tasks listed by due date or tag, Hiveminder does something that is very useful: it forces you to review everything. With the review option, the user must go through every item on their task list and make a determination about what to do with it.

Hiveminder Review

Hiveminder is also set up for sharing so you can share tasks across a group of users. In a bit of a twist, Hiveminder also provides the ability to delegate tasks to users that are not Hiveminder members. What happens in those cases is an email is sent to the non-Hiveminder member; when they click they get the chance to accept or refuse the task. While this is a good idea in many respects, in practical usage the difficulty lies in having the non-Hiveminder member actually update the task they’ve been assigned.

As is the case with Tracks, Hiveminder has a robust set of RSS and iCal options to get your tasks into other formats that you can manipulate.

The free version of Hiveminder lacks the SSL login protection of the paid version as well as the ability to include file attachments with tasks.