Consistency 1.0

If you’re a chronic maker of to-do lists who isn’t satisfied with the time-management help that either pen and paper or calendaring features provide, you should make time to check out Sciral’s Consistency 1.0 — an innovative approach to making sure the recurring tasks in your life that don’t quite have set-in-stone deadlines get done.

Consistency’s interface couldn’t be cleaner or easier to interpret. It contains one window, with rows for tasks and columns for dates. Colored boxes mark the intersection of rows and columns, and these boxes indicate how soon you’ll need to complete a task. Light blue means you don’t need to do it yet, green means it’s time, yellow means you’re almost late, and red means that, for example, your goldfish may die soon if you don’t feed it. You set the deadline parameters and double-click on the box when the task is done.

You’ll need to keep Consistency up and running if you want to stay on track, but we look forward to seeing the program grow to include pop-up reminders even when it’s not active. In the meantime, any well-designed tool that keeps us on top of things is worth $20 any day.