In the productivity and planning context, a task manager is a software that helps to manage tasks, where managing means – at least – storing, prioritizing, and tracking the status of any to-do item.
As an example, writing an article is a task. Of course, a task may have sub-tasks or actions, or can be part of more complex tasks or projects.
Usually tasks are shown as cards, or items of a list. A common view is the Kanban board, where tasks are disposed by columns, where each column represents a progress stage.
Task management has two major benefits.
The first one is freeing your mind from the necessity to constantly remember everything you have to do, feeding distraction and anxiety. Once you’ve written a task to do in a system that you daily consult, you’re free to focus on the current task.
The second one is an automatic help in prioritizing and tracking statuses. When your to-do list gets longer, especially when it grows beyond your current capacity or you depend on other people, it’s easy to get lost and miss an objective overview.
A few minutes spent in keeping track of your tasks can be of great benefit for your organization.
You can read more about the benefits of a task manager here.
Of course, there’s a multitude of task manager of different characteristics and complexity.
While you usually prefer to keep things simple, any individual or group has different needs – which normally evolve – and has to find the right tool, that usually means a compromise and some flexibility both on the tool part and the users part.