In this post I'm going to describe an efective and practical form of controlling a project plan and its associated task list using a Sony Clie Palm PEG-SJ30.

First, we have to have in mind that not only the project plan is important but also to take control over that project plan and achieve the goals doing the rigth tasks.

In this point we have the famous ToDo List or task list. In this list we are going to register the concrete activities that can be measured in time, short period of time, this tasks are indivisible work units (they are the bricks of the general actions).

So we have:

1-Project Plan:

In this image we apreciate how the projects are divided, first in "roles": Company Projects, Personal Projects, so on...

After that, in each "role" or area are the projects and inside them the stages (E.1 = Stage 1).

Each stage have a begining and ending date.

Inside each stage there is a concrete task list that make us achieve the stage goal(s). These are the task we must control to complete inside the planned time.

The software I use for the project plan is progect

Here is where the ToDo List embebed in the Palm enters in the scene.

2-Task List (ToDo List):

This list contains the daily task or short term task that we have to complete for achieving the goals.

The Palm has a pre-installed software for the ToDo List. The progect can function with this software in an integrated way. The progect and the ToDo List can be synchronized so when we mark a task in the ToDo List it refreshes its state in the project plan inside the progect.

A last tip I can mention is: In order to mantain more organized the information we can to take advantage of the ToDo List categories as clasifiers in the form Role-Project, we have to create this categories too in the progect so we can have suitable "views" of our tasks.