Thu, 05 Nov 2009 Check Off 4.0.2 review

We love to-do lists – they allow you to dump all the junk you’re carrying around in your head somewhere else. Shopping lists, menu plans, work tasks, appointments... And best of all, when you’ve finished posting the parcels or taking out the recycling, you can cross it off. Every little thing you do brings a momentary reward – a sense of micro-achievement. Or maybe that’s just us.

This preamble goes some way towards explaining why we like Check Off so much. The other reason is that the name sounds a bit like Chekov, the Russian helmsman from Star Trek.

It’s a very minimal tool. Start it up and you’ll have a new icon on your Mac’s main menu. Click that to get a small window that will contain your to-do list.

The options are simple, but add up to a complete and easy-to-access task list system. Add new tasks by clicking the Add a New Item button. You’ll get a text box to write a short description and each item can have additional notes – just select and type into the field at the bottom.

Furthermore, items can be arranged in folders, so you can organise lists into categories. You can create folders within folders too – which you can use to break projects down into sub-tasks. When you complete a task, you simply check it off the list. Checked items can be removed with a single click.

Though Check Off is very handy, we’d like it more if you could assign due dates and alerts to items. We’d like it even more if you could add a new item with a shortcut key. You’ll find this functionality in Google Task List which, unlike Check Off 4, is free.