Brian Benzinger at SolutionWatch made another of his incredible posts, this time listing 25 To Do Lists to help you stay productive, and following his truly amazing Fifty Ways to Take Notes. I personally use Salesforce.com to manage my tasks, mainly because it lets me link tasks to any object such as marketing campaigns or sales opportunities. Nevertheless, going through Brian’s list made me think about a couple of areas where to-do lists need to be improved.

First, it would be great to be able to relate one task to another through some kind of dependency relationship. According to such a model, if A must be completed before B does, B should be displayed to the user as a follow-up task whenever A is displayed, and A should be automatically marked as completed when B is. This kind of thing is possible when using a GANTT-based project management application such as DreamTeam, but I tend to find these too heavyweight for daily usage. A simpler way to create dependencies between tasks would do the trick, without having to re-think the task-oriented workflow process entirely.

Second, I like to set deadlines for my tasks, for they keep me going, but sometimes I find myself having to reschedule a lot of them, either because some priorities changed, or because I could not work on any of them for a couple of days. Having the ability to mass-edit upcoming tasks would be a lot faster than rescheduling tasks one by one. Dabble DB supports this kind of edit mode, and I see no reason why Salesforce.com could not do the same.

Third, for tasks that are related to a contact, it would be nice to automatically notify the contact by email when the task is completed. This feature should be optional and disabled by default, for some tasks must remain private, but in many instances it would save the user quite a bit of time, by automating something that is done manually today. Customizing the Task object and creating custom workflow rules and workflow alerts might allow one to implement such a feature with Salesforce.com today, but I have not tried it yet.

Finally, Salesforce.com should make it easier to send reminders for tasks. Remember the Milk and e2dolist do that fairly well today, and it would be quite useful for Salesforce.com users that are using the ‘Today + Overdue’ view for upcoming tasks. I am one of them and would have loved to be notified in advance when some tasks are due tomorrow and require preparation work today.

For more on the subject, you can read this article on SFDC and the GTD.