Bonsai - The software I just bought

I’ve been bouncing around project organizers for a couple years trying to decide if I wanted something online, on my Palm, on my desktop at home, or some combination of all of them.

I recently got a laptop and my Palm finally broke. For the near future, I have decided to keep track of everything on the laptop. And to help organize all of that I purchased Natara Bonsai Outliner.

It handles very well a lot of things that I like to do.

• Simple lists. I like to make lists of things. Songs to buy, books to read, people I want to email.
• Organizing Projects. Since it handles multi level hierarchies very well. I’m working on projects in multiple rooms in the house. My parent level for that outline is the various rooms. The next level is the projects in that room. And then sometimes I’ll add a third level for steps that need to be done, equipment I need to get, etc.
• Writing Fiction. I’m working on a few stories. A style that works well for me is to write a quick high level outline and then fill it in on a second pass with more details and then a third pass with fine level details and then start writing. I am doing all of the prep work in outlines and only opening the word processor for when I am actually ready to write.

Bonsai allows you to set due dates, but I can’t find anyway to have that trigger an alarm on the desktop version.

Everything that I have wanted to do I was able to figure out very quickly. Besides the alarm, there really are not any features that I have found to be missing that I want.

I did download a free one month sample of Bonsai about a year ago. At the time, I was still using my Palm so I ran both the desktop and Palm versions. It did a great job staying in sync.

All in all, if you are looking for a basic outliner/task manager, you should give Bonsai a try.