We are used to manage our goals and tasks by placing them in lists, setting deadlines and sorting them by importance or urgency. However, the developers at Funky Cloud / Digital Heaven Ltd seem to think otherwise. LifeShaker brings a new approach to task managers and to-do lists, since with it you don't see your tasks organized by priority or deadline, but shown randomly in a 3x3 board to help you have a general idea of your goals.

The Looks

The main window of LifeShaker is divided into several panels offering you different views on your goals and tasks. The Categories list shows your defined categories with their specific colors and the 'Manage Categories' button, the Goals table lists your goals and, for complex tasks, you can also see the steps of the current goal in the Steps list. The innovative element of LifeShaker is the grid view that shows 9 of your tasks and goals randomly and the 3 tools displayed on the sidebar of the grid: the Shaker, the Backburner and the Tick.

The Works

LifeShaker helps you keep an eye on your current tasks and goals. It allows you to define new categories for your tasks, create goals, divide them into several steps and view 9 of them in a grid.

The first thing you'll have to do when starting to work with LifeShaker is to configure the list of categories. This can be easily done with the help of the 'Manage Categories' button. It opens a new window displaying your existing categories, with samples of their corresponding colors, and it allows you to create new categories or delete the ones you already have. In the Categories list, the active categories are shown in fields of their corresponding colors. If you want to disable a category, just click on it and you can see how its assigned goals disappear from the grid view and from the goal list.

Adding new goals is very simple in LifeShaker: press the '+' button on top of the Goals list and just type the name of the goal in its field. By default, new goals are assigned to the category that was most recently used, unless that category is disabled, in which case your goal will be placed in the category used before it. Right click on the category field of the goal to change the assignment. If you move a goal into a disabled category, it will disappear from the Goals list.

You can easily define complex goals by selecting one in the list and adding steps for it in the right panel. The order of the steps can be changed with simple drag and drop operations. The goals are automatically sorted by category taking into consideration the order you specify in the 'Manage Categories' window. You can give high priority to a goal by activating the star-shaped button attached to it and it will be moved to the top of its category.

The most important feature of LifeShaker is definitely the grid view, which displays 9 random goals from your list. The grid view always includes the high-priority goals for a category and only the left fields are chosen randomly from the task list. The number of items on the grid is distributed evenly for each category and even if you have more high-priority tasks in a category than the number of assigned fields, only a part of them will appear in the grid.

The Grid view also includes a sidebar that provides you with three tools: the Shaker, the Backburner and the Tick. The Shaker, as you can imagine, refreshes the grid and brings other goals to your attention. Dragging a goal to the Backburner temporarily removes it from the grid. When you complete a goal shown in the grid, just drag it to the Tick and it will be replaced by a new task. Another way of marking goals as finished or completed is to check their corresponding tick buttons in the Goals list.

Even if LifeShaker doesn't provide any explicit instructions in the main window, it does show tooltips to help you understand the functionality of all the interface elements.

The Good

LifeShaker is an easy to use application that gives you the possibility to look at your goals and plans a little more relaxed, and at the same time it proves that you don't need a very strict order and prioritization to  achieve your goals.

The Bad

The random placement of goals and tasks may be funny for some people, but to me it doesn't really seem of much use. Showing the most important goals in a grid view is a good idea, but I resent not having the possibility to control the goals included in the grid.

In my opinion, a context menu in the empty fields of the Goals list would make it easier for users to add new goals than having to move permanently between the last field of the list and the '+' button.

The Truth

The main purpose of LifeShaker is to display your tasks and goals in a different manner. If you're bored with the classic task managers and to-do organizers, you will probably enjoy this program. LifeShaker is very good for people who don't take their goals and tasks very seriously, but I wouldn't recommend it to people who like their to-dos organized and prioritized. Download the 14-day trial version and decide for yourselves if LifeShaker is the tool you need.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: