Tasktop

Today, I had the opportunity to attend and speak at the Leading Moms event in Vancouver. I was blown away by the talks I heard, stories of women and moms changing the world from Vancouver be it setting up birthing centers in Uganda to the environmental and health improvements biotechnology can bring us.

I had the chance to speak on something about technology that personally resonates with me. The choice was easy. Eight or so years ago when Mik Kersten and I first started working on the ideas behind task-focused interfaces, my work days and in fact my life started to change. I chose to share some of those experiences by speaking about The Power of Tasks.

The basic concepts of actionable tasks, separated by categories with schedule and due dates can really make a difference in one’s productivity, in freeing one’s mind from the details to allow for creativity and in simply getting things done. This power of tasks is available to software developers through Mylyn and Tasktop Dev. One day in the future, hopefully every mom can also benefit from this technology to make their lives better.

And the winner for the category of Emerging Company of the Year at the British Columbia Technology Impact Awards is …. Tasktop Technologies!

Wow, just five years ago, all Tasktopians could fit into an office at the University of British Columbia, and last week, we were awarded in a very competitive category for a company that is past the startup stage and has shown outstanding performance as a technology enterprise, strong revenues, and is on track according to its business plan. Getting to this point has been possible because of the talent and passion for innovation that defines the people that are Tasktop. This group of people is able to both envision how software delivery can be done more effectively and iterate rapidly with customers to produce the products to make those visions real. It is truly a privilege to work with such a talented group! And just wait for what we will produce by the time Tasktop is six years old.

Congratulations go out to the other finalists for the Emerging Company of the Year: Recon Instruments, who makes some very cool heads-up display ski goggles, and ResponseTek, makers of mobile survey software. It is great be a part of such a strong and varied BC technology industry. Thanks also go out to the BC Technology Industry Association for hosting a wonderful gala night.

Our hiring is continuing at a rapid pace, so please contact us if you’re interested in joining a team that’s transforming how software is built.

Also see the video of the finalists in the Emerging Company of the Year category is .

Note from Mik: I have updated the title of the blog to Less is More, which reflects the design ideology at Tasktop. While I’ll continue to be the main author and editor, I’m happy to announce that others at Tasktop will be posting about our journey towards the task-focused desktop, starting with this post by Gail.

Have you ever wondered what you did last week? Some of the time, you might ask this question because you want to keep improving your productivity. Other times, you have to fill out time sheets or report activity to your organization. If you have ever struggled with this, check out the dashboard view below that will be available in the summer release of Tasktop, coming at the end of July.

What you see above is a screenshot of Mik’s activity. At a glance, it is easy for him to see how much time he spent on each task last week and when he was working without a task active (gray bars). On the right hand side, the pie charts break down his time into categories and working sets, which are split along the different projects on which he works.

The really great thing is that you don’t have to change how you work with Tasktop to get this information, as it is gathered automatically in the background. In addition to giving you an overview of your workweek, the Tasktop Summer release includes a reporting feature that enables you to created sophisticated reports with activity from any past period. If you are a Tasktop user, a generated report includes all time spent at the keyboard. If you are a Mylyn user, a generated report includes time spent with Eclipse active. When reporting, Tasktop allows you to adjust the time spent on a task (up or down) so that you can account for such activity as time spent in a meeting.

Internally at Tasktop, we’ve been benefitting from being able to see where our time goes, even if it’s sometimes frightening to see how long some tasks take! It’s exciting to be able to share these benefits with others. Get on the early access list now to try this if you’re already a user, sign up for notification of the release at http://tasktop.com or watch this blog for news about the upcoming release.