Microsoft Outlook can be your task, diary, contact and, of course, email manager. However, it’s also a bit slow, too. If you’ve got thousands of email in your Inbox and Junk Mail folders, moving between them can take ages. If you want to simply view your tasks for the afternoon, you have to move to the Tasks folder, each time you want to follow and cross-off your next task.

DeskTask is a tool that resides on your desktop and connects to your Outlook database, reads your tasks and calendar and then will show this information on your desktop, without needing to open or check Outlook.

You can customise DeskTask so it is intrusive or hidden as you prefer, depending on how you want to reminded of the tasks for the rest of the week.