The Ultimate Personal Task Manager

I've been prototyping a GDoc-based 43 folders for a few weeks now. The biggest two problems I have to date are:

• the ease with which I miss my daily review of things to do
• "Too much trees, too less forest". I need a dashboard that's higher than the daily, ground level view

In a fit of frustration about the second point (cos there's no point fretting about the first:) ), I set about designing the ideal personal task management system - once again. Here's the result:

The Ultimate Personal Task Manager needs:

1. The open task list: which contains all tasks that are to be started or WIP. Routine/repetitive tasks are represented as new open tasks for the next instance when the current one is completed.
2. The review/decide process: which reviews current status and decides what to do next.
3. The todo list: which contains tasks that have been decided upon, and will be acted on in a particular time period - day/week/month/whatever. <==> 43 folders. no sequencing, just "these tasks mush happen within this period or before this milestone"
4. The plan: sequenced list of tasks. <==> day planner. contains time slots when things will be done
5. The dashboard: "dont break the chain" style display of only top level projects. ideally this should be the top 5 things you care about in life shown as a red/yellow/green style view
6. The nagger: Most important piece for procrastinators. the physical reminder to actually use this system. could be a phone reminder system or a spouse/friend. should know what your frequency to run the decision process is and nag you to do it.

Key point about this system: It could be all in your head or on paper/pencil or software

Yes, this is pretty close to GTD. The additions are the dashboard and the nagger. 

If implemented as software it also needs to:

1. Work offline
2. Works across OSs and systems
3. Allow versioning

Software implementation notes:

- Something that works offline and universally is required. simplest i've seen to date is gina trapani's todo.txt. Using it, the functional requirements:

- #1 & 3 are built in.  Use 'repeat' addon for sub point under 1

- #2 and 6 are human tasks anyway.

- #4 and #5 will need additional dev. In particular #5 will require (at least for me) enhancing the project field to a tree of projects. Some simple testing with bash showed that a format like "proj1/sub1/sub11" will work, as will "proj1:sub1:sub11"

  The non functionals have direct answers:

  - it works offline and across OSs - being text and a shell script

  - putting it in a git repo will handle versioning

- Idea: Create an Outlook plugin to auto convert mail into tasks

- how to run cygwin bash from windows? ans: Cygwin's run command

- how to create an outlook plugin? TBD