Utilities to manage projects with calendar

Question

What I'm looking for is to have a project management / life management system that allows me to write down what there is do; get a birds eye view of everything, and then drag events into my calendar. It should have the following features:

• Something like a staging area where I can quickly lay out everything that there is to do and handle. Something sort of like Trello; easy, but something that allows me to specify the duration of the task. It would be ideal to allow me to divide this into projects by color, but I'd like both professional and personal items to be visible in the same stage.

• The staging area is just for everything that there is to do and handle - not something that has to be put in my calendar first in order to have it in front of me - what would be great is if I could create items to go in the staging area in something like a Kanban or todo list, and the items from that list would automatically sync to the staging area.

• I then want to be able to drag those items from the staging area directly to a time period on a day. For example: Wash Cat with a duration of two hours could be dragged directly into the calendar at 2 p.m. on Friday, and there would be an event on my calendar from 2-4 that says Wash Cat.

• The point is, I want to be able to see my whole calendar naked, and then populate it with the events that are in front of me, so that I can complete those events at specific times having organized according to everything I need to do.

• It must sync with either Google Calendar or my iPhone calendar so that I can be reminded of events when away from the computer.

• It has to have a clean and attractive user interface. Not because I think that the UI makes the product, but if it is not easy and pleasant to use, I won't use it (at least a predictable outcome).

• It needs to have a week view calendar (with times visible) so I can see the whole of what there is to do. Ideally it has a day view calendar as well, but if it doesn't, and it syncs to Google, I could just tweak minor daily items in gCal.

Is what I'm saying clear?

Basically, what it boils down to is that I want an app that will allow me to plan my life and work-tasks (I'm a web developer) while looking at projects, due dates, daily interruptions, and any other events that will in fact take time to do.

Answer 1

Though my current role doesn't use it, Basecamp (from the company-formerly-known-as-37Signals) is great at this sort of stuff. I used to use it to manage diverse teams and project portfolios.

You can have a "staging area" for your to-do list which lets you organise, tag, etc.

This then integrates neatly with your calendar (which can sync to Google Calendar/iCal)

It's both a web and app interface.

There's a lot of other stuff that Basecamp can do, as it's a well-developed and robust project management tool. It might be too spendy for just casual use (a single-project account used to be free, now you have to cough up at least $20/month), but it's IMO one of the standard-bearers for this kind of PM tool.

Bonus: if you're using it professionally, it plays nice with other SaaS solutions like Salesforce, etc.