Watership Planner

Watership Planner is pretty ambitious for a personal organizer. The developer claims it can help you "Organize your ambitions and mold yourself into a better person."

I'm not sure if Watership Planner actually accomplishes this goal, since I could never get it properly on my trusty Windows XP system. After spending almost an hour with the Help system, I attempted to set up simple appointments and to-dos. The Help system says that you can do this without taking time to define your Values ("a set of virtues that when followed you view as achieving moral perfection"), write a Mission Statement, and specify a set of Roles. However, the program wouldn't let me set Tasks without assigning Roles to them, and to do that I needed to define the aforementioned Values and Mission Statement.

Fair enough. I spent some more time crafting lofty Values (the Help system promises suggestions to choose from, but they weren't available) and an inspiring Mission Statement, and listing my Roles in life. After doing this I could schedule tasks and set repeating appointments. However, not all of these tasks carried over to the Week view--and appointments made in the Week view didn't necessarily show up in the Daily view. Worse, the program didn't reliably respond to the right-click shortcut that was supposed to launch new Tasks--and it even crashed at one point.

Watership Planner is designed to help thoughtful types better organize their lives to achieve overarching goals. As such, it does contain powerful planning features. If you think you could benefit from such a program, it's worth downloading the trial version to see if it runs properly on your system. This version does not expire, but is limited to 30 tasks.

--Kim Saccio-Kent