TaskTimer: A programmer's/hacker's/hobbyist's time management "egg timer"

Introduction:

TaskTimer is a program that helps over-applied computer freaks and other obsessed workaholics manage their computing time effectively between projects. It achieves this by acting as a multiple-stage, configurable, controllable "egg timer", constantly reminding you of the tasks you have to complete and how much time is left for each task.

Too many times, I have sat down at night when the wife and kids are in bed and essentially wasted my time. (By "waste", I mean getting distracted reading web pages, playing a game for too long, and so on instead of applying my time effectively to the various projects that I am trying to juggle.) Plus, I always feel like I have no time to just plain RELAX with a computer game now and then. This leads to frustration as I go to bed not having accomplished anything, not having relaxed, and not having used my time effectively.

TaskTimer fixes this. It's basically an egg timer that serves as both a priority list and a realtime controllable "nag" that I use to remind myself what I should be working on and for how long. It works by displaying a task and a countdown, then beeping when the time for that task has elapsed (an alarm) and then displaying the new task. Tasks can also be paused, or skipped entirely. By including *all* of the things I want do on the computer, from answering email to fixing PCs to programming to playing games, I can go to bed knowing that I've used my time as effectively as possible -- that every task got a slice of my computing time.

In other words: If you've spread yourself too thin and can't manage your time effectively, this is the program for you.

Documentation:

Full documentation for Task Timer is included in the downloadable archive. See below:

Where To Obtain:

You can download Task Timer v1.2 here.

Future Plans:

One look at the source code and you can see that this program is just screaming bloody murder to be rewritten in object-oriented code. Each task state is contained in an array, when a linked-list of objects (hell, even an array of object pointers) would be much more efficient. In fact, I think the source of this program would make an excellent programming class project ("Class, for extra credit, convert this relatively simple program into OOP."). If this program's horrible source code starts to bother me in my sleep, I may do just that. (I'll keep the previous code around for comparison.)