Taskade Review: The Second Brain Productivity App

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In a world cluttered with multiple, disparate, and disconnected systems, productivity suffers, whether in personal pursuits or business endeavors. The fragmented nature of such environments breeds inefficiency, chaos, confusion, and frustration, hindering progress and success.

Thanks to Tiago Forte’s concept of “the digital second brain”. This is a revolutionary methodology developed to address the complexities of handling vast amounts of information in the digital era. Instead of juggling with so many disjointed tools, we can use a unified technology to capture, organize, and handle all the important information we need.

Taskade serves as a digital second brain, an extension of one’s cognitive abilities that simplifies knowledge management, enhances efficiency and effectiveness and harnesses creativity both in work and life. The productivity software solution consolidates multiple systems into a single, cohesive interface while leveraging the power of AI.

What is Taskade?

Taskade is a workspace, collaboration, and productivity software that provides a central online hub for managing projects and tasks, streamlining processes, brainstorming ideas, and engaging with colleagues and clients.

It is robust, flexible, and smart enough that you can implement it as a project management, note-taking, outlining, writing, or team collaboration app. Taskade places a variety of tools and capabilities right at your fingertips, which relieves you from the burden and cost of using multiple, disparate systems.

That way, you will be able to gain focus, clarity, and confidence and free up time for more important matters. Moreover, at the heart of Taskade is an AI assistant that you can call up and interact with across your workspaces, projects, or documents within the app to help you get your work done faster and smarter.

How Taskade Works?

Once you’re logged into Taskade, you’ll immediately find yourself in your primary workspace on the app’s home screen or account dashboard. To streamline your Taskade experience, tabs on the left side of the dashboard allow you to swiftly navigate to specific sections of your account.

These tabs include access to the projects you’ve recently worked on (Recent), a compiled list of tasks from various workspaces or projects (My Tasks), a calendar view showcasing all your projects and tasks with date ranges and deadlines (Calendar), your most important projects (Starred), and projects shared with you by others (Shared).

One of the standout aspects I appreciate most about Taskade is its capability to empower users to craft personalized online work environments suited to their unique preferences and requirements. Through Taskade, users gain access to dedicated, compartmentalized spaces, meticulously organized within a hierarchical structure.

For instance, you can establish a centralized workspace for your entire organization, comprising distinct folders for departments such as sales, marketing, HR, and accounting.

Within these folders, you can then effortlessly create, assign, and track projects and tasks tailored to each department’s specific objectives and responsibilities. This hierarchical approach facilitates seamless coordination and ensures clarity and efficiency across teams.

Taskade Features

Taskade is packed with a plethora of features, but some stand out as particularly unique to the app. Let’s dig deeper into these features and examine how they contribute to Taskade’s overall value:

• Taskade AI
• Custom AI Agents
• AI Project Studio
• Communication and Collaboration

Taskade AI

Powered by the GPT-4 model with a 128-token context window, Taskade AI serves as your indispensable companion within the Taskade app, available round-the-clock to enhance productivity.  

With Taskade AI, you can pose questions related to your uploaded documents and files and receive instant answers.  One way to do this is by uploading a file as an attachment.

Simply click the + Add-Ons button located to the right of a task/node. When you hover over the file attachment and click “Ask AI”, a pop-up window will appear where you can type your question.

In the following example, I’ve uploaded a couple of resumes and will use Taskade’s AI to extract some info from them and evaluate them based on experience.

You can also ask Taskade’s AI questions based in the documents you’ve uploaded to quickly answer questions without having to look through the document for answers.

Aside from extracting key insights by chatting with your documents and files, Taskade AI empowers you to swiftly summarize texts or documents, and convert them into actionable items.

This capability is possible because of Taskade’s AI’s ability for viewing information, which allows you to seamlessly toggle between various formats.

Whether it’s a calendar, list, table, mind map, Gantt chart, or organizational chart, Taskade provides versatile visualization options for your projects and data.

Custom AI Agents

Custom AI agents are specialized assistants that you can design, train, and deploy for executing specific tasks and roles such as research, file management, SEO, and sales with minimal human intervention. Beyond customizing their name, tone, and personality, you can set commands, knowledge base, and tools.

Taskade AI offers a library of pre-built AI prompts for convenience as well. You can use these AI agents within your projects via the project chat, add-ons menu, or slash commands (type “/” + your custom agent command).

In my opinion,  leveraging these custom AI agents requires a strong grasp of machine learning and natural language processing for users to create more appropriate and sophisticated AI commands or prompts.

AI Project Studio

Looking for a tool that combines AI, BPM (business process management), and task coordination? Taskade’s AI Project Studio is the ideal solution. It simplifies structuring, planning, and monitoring workflows, processes, and tasks.  

With the AI Generator button, you can create to-do lists, sprints, campaigns, SOPs, SEO outlines, mind maps, notes, or meeting agendas.

Plus, the AI Project Studio automatically populates projects with pre-designed “blocks”.  Blocks are sets of tasks and subtasks that are displayed in various formats like checklists, bullet points, numbering, letters, or paragraphs.

You’ll have the ability to collaborate seamlessly with your team using Project Add-Ons, which lets you assign tasks, set due dates, make comments and reactions, and add documents and web resources to tasks.

Communication and Collaboration

Taskade provides a suite of integrated features designed to enhance real-time communication and collaboration. Users can easily invite participants to their projects via email or a shared link, facilitating private one-on-one chats or calls, or video conference meetings.

The platform enables multiple users to work simultaneously on the same projects, tasks, or documents, regardless of their location or device. Every user can stay updated with recent changes or edits made by others.

The app also includes indicators to identify when someone is currently online or actively typing and editing within a project.

Taskade Pricing

Applying a subscription-based pricing model, Taskade offers various tiered plans that grant increased benefits as you upgrade, such as higher user, workspace, storage allocations, and more advanced features.

Opting for Personal and Pro Plans requires a long-term commitment, yet entails only a fixed annual fee, irrespective of the number of users or team members you have.

For personal projects, you can consider the Plus Plan at $8 per month annually, enabling you to set up 5 users and 2 workspaces, along with 5 GB of storage and integration with Google Drive and other cloud platforms.

On the other hand, Business and Ultimate Plans require payment for each unique team member, but opting for an annual subscription can yield significant savings.

For example, the Ultimate Plan’s annual subscription fee is $16/user/month, which signifies a 20% reduction compared to its monthly counterpart. This plan offers unlimited collaborations and workspaces, alongside enterprise-grade features like API access and third-party SSO integrations.

Taskade Personal Plans:

• Free Plan – $0
• Starter Plan – $4/month (billed yearly)
• Plus Plan  –  $8/month (billed yearly)
• (billed yearly)

Taskade Business Plans:

• Pro Plan – $19/month (billed yearly)
• Business Plan – $12/user/month or $8/user for annual billing
• Ultimate Plan –  $20/user/month or $16/user for annual billing

What Are The Downsides of Taskade?

I commend the creators of Taskade for developing a comprehensive app aiming to replace popular tools like Asana, Trello, ChatGPT, Jasper AI, Notion, Slack, and MS Teams. Taskade’s versatility promises enhanced efficiency and productivity by eliminating the need to switch between multiple apps.

However, the attempt to combine various app features into one may pose challenges that could undermine its intended purpose. After thorough analysis and testing of Taskade, I’ve identified several challenges and drawbacks.

For example, Taskade excels in content and document creation and handling with its generative AI integration,  but it falls short in project and task management. It cannot automatically re-assign tasks if the assigned owner misses a deadline.

While Taskade lacks support for this type of automation in its AI features, Sunsama, a task management app, offers this functionality. Sunsama can automatically roll over unfinished tasks from the current day to the next.

Another concern I face with the app is its overwhelming array of features and information that often feels excessive and intrusive.  Everywhere I navigate within the app, I’m presented with options to engage with an AI assistant, be it in the project editor, chat window, or elsewhere.

I find it difficult to disable this feature, leaving me feeling compelled to use it for every task. However, there are times when I prefer working without relying on any AI assistance to better harness my creative thinking.

Conclusion

In short, Taskade revolutionizes productivity for individuals, teams, and organizations with the power of generative AI. Taskade can transform the way we work by infusing AI into our everyday tasks and tools, without being gimmicky.

This app can be your ally in writing and perfecting articles, orchestrating projects and processes, managing crucial documents, and collaborating with stakeholders, if you can find how to use it efficiently.

at the end of the day, you should harness its versatility to fit your unique needs and objectives. Let Taskade become your “digital second brain,” mirroring your thoughts, speech, and workflow.

But remember, productivity tools like Taskade are only as effective as we make them. Don’t hesitate to explore other options like Motion or Sunsama to find what truly resonates with you.