It’s all to easy for your digital life to become a sprawling, unmanageable mess as you keep tasks, notes, photos and files across multiple accounts — a problem that Taco is designed to tackle head on. It pipes in information from a huge range of online portals (from Evernote to Gmail) and lets you track them all from one place.
The list of supported apps is impressive: Gmail, Evernote, RSS, Basecamp, Trello, Instapaper, Asana, Remember The Milk, Todoist, Zendesk, Wunderlist and Things are just some of them. The emphasis is on developer and project management tools but Taco can be a useful resource for just about anyone.
When you’ve signed in, start adding some services. It only takes a couple of clicks for each one but you can configure them differently — in Gmail, for example, you can specify particular labels you want to use to import messages, whereas in Instapaper the app asks you to import one specific folder. In Evernote, Taco looks for any unchecked items.
Everything found in your connected services is listed on the left of the Taco interface to begin with and you then drag the tasks that are most important into the center of the pane (with the option to hide everything else). You can tick off jobs as you do them, and in some cases Taco can sync this action back to the service in question.
There are some useful extra features here too, including the option of a daily digest email sent straight to your inbox (if you haven’t checked Taco that day) and theme customisation settings to freshen up the look of the app. There’s a Taco Chrome extension available too that will put your Taco tasks on Chrome’s New Tab page for easy access.
Being able to get so many services (over 40 are supported) into one place can be a real boost to your productivity levels, even if Taco doesn’t do too much besides that. It also saves you having to have 20 different tabs open at once as you try and stay on top of everything you’ve got to get through during the day.