Gordon Meyer recently recommended I check out Sciral Consistency, a neat little app that’s somewhere between an event calendar and a TODO list manager.
It lets you track tasks that need to be done on a regular basis, such as watering plants, changing kitty litter, or washing your car. While Entourage (and, I assume, Outlook) can do something similar with interval-based events, Consistency adds the novel ability to set a range of days over which a task can be completed. So, for example, you might want to change your water filter every 30-60 days or rake the front yard every 5-9 days. Consistency presents your tasks in a scannable Excel-like grid that makes it simple to see which items are in the current “do” range.
It also looks useful as a way to track your progress toward a goal—you can quickly see how close you are to your plan of hitting the gym three times a week or calling Grandma twice a month. It also would be handy for Getting Things Done nerds who want to pull repeating items from their hard landscape calendar and get them onto a list where they can be reviewed and completed in context.
I do wish this were just an integrated function of full-on PIMs or even that Consistency had a basic alarm functionality. As is, the price is just a skosh high for me, but it does provide a clever solution for a fuzzy problem.
Sciral Consistency [Download]. OSX & Windows. $25.00. “The unregistered version is fully featured, but has a few limits to encourage you to register if you like it.”