Watch your productivity skyrocket with Tasks on Android

Many business professional rely on the “tasks” or “to-do” functions found in popular desktop software such as Microsoft Outlook to help keep themselves organized. Tasks are useful for prioritizing your day, or just keeping track of the things you don’t want to forget. Anyone who has read David Allen’s Getting Things Done will tell you that the key to time management is to organize your priorities on an external to-do list. This way, the brain has can better focus on the task at hand than on keeping track of all your tasks.

CompanionLink’s software for Android phones allows you to carry your tasks with you, ready to access at a moments notice. Users are able to sync tasks/to-dos from Outlook, Lotus Notes, ACT! by Sage, Novell GroupWise, Goldmine and Palm Desktop to an Android phone via a secure USB connection.

CompanionLink works through the CL USB Sync app users download to their Android phone. This app has advanced Tasks functionality to group and sort by category, date or alphabetically. Power users who use categories to manage their Tasks on the desktop will be pleased to find that these categories sync across to the phone. With the powerful built-in search feature, managing hundreds of tasks is a breeze.

For more information and to download a free trial, visit www.companionlink.com.

Syncing tasks with Google, Gmail or Google Apps

While Google still hasn’t given us access to their Tasks API (so we can sync Tasks), we’ve created a workaround for the time being.  CompanionLink will sync your Tasks in Outlook, Palm Desktop, and other desktop software to your Google calendar as untimed events.

If you have a phone that syncs with your Google account, you can complete the task on your phone by inserting (complete) at the end of the subject of the task.

Original Task:
Task: Send email updates on the new product line

Completed Task:
Task: Send email updates on the new product line (complete)

Syncing overdue tasks in Google

When you sync overdue Outlook tasks to your Google account using CompanionLink, they now get summarized into a sorted list (by date) and entered as a calendar event for the current day.  The calendar event is called Overdue Tasks.

This is extremely useful for people who use Outlook tasks with Google, and tend to lag behind the due dates they set on those tasks.  Previously, you would loose sight of those tasks as they fail to show up on your calendar after a certain point in time.  The latest build of CompanionLink for Google fixes that by having all overdue tasks summarized for you in a single calendar event.

Here’s a screenshot of how Overdue Tasks look in your Google calendar.