quickstart

Quick Start

This HowTo shows you in a few minutes the basics of how you may use and customize Task Coach and what benefit it gives you. During the first weeks using Task Coach, you will have to invest a little time to fit Task Coach to your personal needs and habits, and to adapt your habits to the new possibilities. Later, you will be wondering how you ever got along without Task Coach.

Here is a visual overview:

First steps

If you did not yet install Task Coach, do this now.

The central objects in Task Coach are tasks themselves. So add a task for a project you're working on (in the further text referenced to as Project1) by choosing New -> New task from the pull-down menus. Give it a name and click OK. It appears in the viewer "Tasks". Now press CTRL+INS to add a task for ongoing background tasks, call it "Admi", give priority -2 as it shall be less important than an average task having the default priority 0.

In order to see the priority, change the displayed columns by right-clicking the column header "Subject" and in the pop up menu clicking "Priority". Also show Budget > Time spent.

Click once on "Admi", press CTRL+INS, name the new subtask "Task management". Add another subtask by clicking the according icon within the viewer "Tasks" and name it "PIM" - it's for handling your mail, calendar etc.

Now, click the task "Task management" and press CTRL+E, to register a new effort for this task. Add the memorized time as start time by typing it, add "initial filling" as description, press CTRL+ENTER or click OK. Task Coach's icon in the tray changed to a bumping clock, the task's icon changed to a clock and in the column "Time spent" the time increases. This shows you that you record efforts. Click the icon "Stop tracking effort" in the main icon bar or the taskbar icon's popup menu.

To see a list of all efforts, show the view "Effort" by Menu > View > New Viewer > Effort. Click the title bar of the effort view, drag it and place it on top of Categories view by dropping it on the upper icon in the appearing "cross control". This way of arranging views is as powerful as quick when you got to know it by playing a few minutes with it.

For Project1, add a new subtask "Planning" starting now and due date in 3 days (either enter the date directly or click the drop down button to open a calendar) and a Budget of 10 hours (10:00:00). Add another subtask "Realization", go by CTRL+TAB to the tab "Dates", set Start date to tomorrow and Due date in 2 weeks, set Prerequisites to the task "Planning". Now, "Realization" appears gray as it did not start yet.

To see the tasks in a time context, show the view "Calendar" by Menu > View > New Viewer > Calendar. Click the title bar of the view, drag it and place it at the lower part of the whole window (not just the right area), as it is a wide view. In the view, click on "Day(s)" and choose "Month". Scroll to the right and observe the subtasks of Project1. This view is one of the possibilities to review the time
order of tasks.

Now, click the task "Task management" and press CTRL+E, to register a new effort for this task. As you shall register the layout customizations as effort, but did not start an effort before doing the customizations, click "Start tracking from last stop time" and watch for the changed time. Click the checkmark at "Stop" to let the effort endnow and enter "layout customization" as description. Now, in the effort view, click "Effort details" and choose "effort per day". Now you get the accumulated time for each task, independant of often you switched between tasks during a day, and, by placing your mouse over "Task management", you get the descriptions of all efforts shown as tooltip - quite helpful for time recording.

Now, you are familar with tasks, dates, priorities, efforts, views, table column and layout customization. Even though you may not have the feeling, you do have all the required knowledge to start working with
Task Coach and exploring it further on your own.

Further steps

For the first 1-2 weeks, limit yourself to a maximum of 10-20 tasks - this prevents you from spending too much time for task management as you don't have to apply changes/reorganizations to too many tasks. Moreover, do keep backups instead of replacing them.

Customize the views according to your needs. At the one hand, show an unknown view every few days until you know which you really use and have arranged & resized them as desired. At the other hand, let them display the data you're interested in, e.g. in task view Subject, Start date, Due date, Priority, Time spent, and Budget left. In the first weeks, you will change the view more often than later, when you found your personal way to use Task Coach.

Check the efforts at least twice. It takes some days until you're used to the handling of efforts - in the beginning, you forget to start record efforts, to stop recording when having lunch, to stop & start
when switching between different tasks, to stop recording for one task when starting with recording for another task etc. Later, you do this automatically.

Every few days, try some feature, property or ways of interactions. For example, try start and due days combined with reminders and Prerequisites. Further inspiration can be found in Tips, Tricks and HowTos.