I work for a number of project managers; sometimes as a project team member and sometime as a supporting service provider. Dealdines and requirements of each project is different and sometimes dealines and meetings are missed while I feel lost or overwhelmed.

Do you know a good way to handle and proioritize daily/weekly/montkhly tasks ?

I have been searching the net for daily planners/organizers but none I have seen will do the job. I reaally need asomthing that helps me track things in multiple ways. I should be able to track a cerain project and see what I have accomplished and what needs to be done next day/week, and in addition, it should show me in any given days what are the pending tasks so that I can pick whatever my mood or brain may prefer to tackle first.

Any ideas ?

Don't they have microsoft project at work? It does all this.
The Sock

palm pilot....

Check out "Priority Management." The system works well for me and has specific project management modules you can add. Spring for the training in the system. Costs a boatload, but is worth it for the support.

I'm another huuuge Palm user!

Been using them since the original Palm Pilot. I pretty much just use the basic tools (except for the backup tool, an RPN calculator, and a Boy Scout database), but I squeeze every ounce of use out of each of them. The desktop portion is quite well done considering their main focus was surely the handheld PDA.

Thank you guys, I think I should have elaborated a bit on the situation.

MS Project ? Perhaps but I wanted something to use on the run. Something to help me if I am waiting (almost stranded ) in a car, or waiting for the party to end in my friend's house.

Sometimes I carried my stuff in a flash drive and when everyone was busy partying or BBQ'ing , I would sneak into my friend's home office (with his OK of course) and use his PC to do some work or at least work planning. And there are times when good old "paper & pencil" are used for sketching a work flowchart or timetable.

One of the problems that limits my choice is the constant uncertainity and moving around. The Palm seems the best to suit such condition but still there are times when I have to leave the car and do rough physical work. I would hesitate to leave it there or carry it with me. And in that case, paper and pen seem to be the most feasible.

I have tried to "steal" some ideas from daily planners in the net and used my word processor to design some tables on loose papers. It worked well but then again it was limited to listing tasks and was not conveinient when many tasks werent done in time and had to be copied again and again into the next days and weeks.

Oh, and I forgot to mention a secondary point. Some of the tasks arent all work related, rather they are home and family related. It makes no difference in general but it really adds to the feeling of "being lost". Like working on a diagram of a field site for a client and then half an hour later designing a workbench for my garage, and later try to find material I need from a hardware store after coming back from a library and copying relevant material for the client site.

Your requirements are pretty steep.

At the very least, you are going to NEED project management software and you are going to want a laptop.

Gees, get a blackberry and use the tools on it. I use mine all the time. With enterprise activation, not only do I see all my corporate email in real-time, but my calendar also loads up and keeps me appraised. Project management software is for project managment. It sounds like you really need more of a personal management tool. A palm pilot will also do you quite well.

I used to have a notebook planner that I wrote every little stinking detail about my life in, mostly for work, but with a family I had some of that in there too. I got tired of writing back in 2000 and now just put it all on Outlook and use that program for a lot of my organization. The beauty is I can print out my calendar or contacts list or to do list etc and stick it in a notebook anyways if I really need to go back to that.

This from a senior project control manager for a major corporation personally handling billions of dollars of business volume project management tasks and resources. If I can make it work, anyone can. Keep it simple and easily reproducable and you can't go wrong. The rest you learn by doing over time.

+1 on benjammin's input

The gizmos on the market have enough functionality built in them that outside software is often not needed.

A bunch of years ago I was a training manager for a 500 person squadron in the Air Force. Of course I was expected to know who was in what training class at any given moment or who was going to be any time in the next two weeks. I had a PalmPilot Pro that I bought a $5 shareware program for that allowed me to see dates in snapshots. Best $5 I ever spent.

I reiterate.. +1 on benjammin's input

If you are looking at a Blackberry, or similar device, you can add other emails besides work emails. I have a Motorola Q with my Aol account on it. Why the Q? It was the cheapest of the PDa-type phones that could receive email. I bought it at Bestbuy, and they set up the email.