The best way to organize stuff is to create lists. However, creating them on paper can get messy after a few edits, and if you lose the paper then you've lost the list. Plus, it's all to easy to get out of hand, and have a desk filled with endless lists on assorted scraps of paper.

A computer-based solution is the obvious answer, but somehow they don't always work the way you'd hoped. Conventional list manager software, whether online or on your PC, just doesn't seem to work the way I want to. And I want to work in the way that I'm used to, rather than having to change my existing arrangements to fit in with the whim of some software designers.

Imagine my delight to discover a really neat list management tool called Hyper Plan. Think of it as a PC-based whiteboard onto which you can stick an assortment of coloured sticky notes. And of course you can drag those notes around the board in order to arrange them how you want.

But what I particularly like about Hyper Plan is that the collection of notes is 2-dimensional. It has rows and columns. So instead of just having a single batch of notes, you can arrange them more sensibly. For example, if you're planning a party, the rows can be used to allocate tasks to individual people and the columns can be used to divide those tasks between urgent, important, and non-urgent. Now, if you decide that a task is worthy of being classified as urgent rather than important, just drag the sticky note to the relevant row. Equally, if the task is best done by Alice rather than Bob, just slide it into the relevant column.

Hyper Plan is paid software, and costs $40. But because I liked it so much I've managed to persuade the developers to give away 10 licences to Gizmo's readers. You won't find this offer on any other web site so enter now. As they say,"You've got to be in it, to win it." Read More