Focus Matrix – Task Manager 4+

Stands apart from other Todo, GTD apps

Been loving Focus Matrix because of the its Eisenhower Matrix prioritization technique, and haven't found any other apps that do it so well and across desktop and mobile.

Here's a quick plug for the prioritization system!

Try the Eisenhower Matrix if you...

- Find yourself running around putting out fires all day (figuratively speaking)

- Are busy but don’t feel like your work has a high impact

- Have long-term goals but no time or energy to make progress on them

- Have a hard time delegating and/or saying no

- Want to be the president of the United States (hey, it worked for Eisenhower)

Quick history:

In a 1954 speech, Eisenhower quoted an unnamed university president who said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

Over 3 decades later in his best-selling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey repackaged Eisenhower’s insights into a simple tool to prioritize tasks, now known as the Eisenhower Matrix (also known as The Time Management Matrix, The Eisenhower Box, The Eisenhower Method, and The Urgent-Important Matrix). This framework for prioritization helps you combat the “mere-urgency” effect (more on that later), eliminate time-wasters in your life, and create more mental space to make progress on your goals.

/endplug

Developer Response ,

Thank you for taking the time to write this review!

Recommended, But Could Be Improved In Two Ways

I love this app - it is easy to use, has a nice logic to it, and works well with Be Focused companion app. I find I am more productive when using the app and tend to last longer energy-wise.

There are two issues I have though, one being a bug and the other being a suggestion for a future feature.

1) Sometimes, my first attempt at adding a task doesn't take. By that, I mean the task will disappear after entering it upon highlighting another task. And when I try to "send" the task to the Be Focused app, the app will complain that it "cannot start the timer for this task". I don't know if others have been experiencing that, but I have been getting this error for every 5th or so task for the last year or so. Not a huge deal but kind of annoying, and hopefully it could be addressed in a future update.

2) After checking off a task, it would be nice to have the option to arrange tasks by whether they've been completed (i.e., move completed tasks to the bottom), or have the option to have them expire or go away immediately (the shortest option currently is one day). If I've been productive - thank you, app! - it can be a small hastle to have to scroll down to the end to see the next task.

I subtract one star for those two points. They would be nice improvements in my opinion, but I otherwise love the app!

Excellent for focusing on today’s must-do items

I like the matrix approach to to-do items, which I first encountered in Steven Covey’s “Seven Habits…” book. This simple app lets me organize my to-do’s in a way that I can easily select the 4 tasks that must be done today (similar to Zen Habits). I put the first step as the title, and the next steps in the notes, so that complex tasks can be accomplished step by step, without losing track. I set up the next step before I delete a step that I’ve checked off.

I gave this 5 stars, even though it lacks one feature that I miss; I can’t keep a record of accomplished tasks, for review of progress or other reasons. I decided it’s helping me to just focus on today, for now, and not spend too much time ruminating over what I actually was able to accomplish on a previous day.