The Big To-Do Over To Do's
Years ago, life was simple. You created a to-do list - on paper. You checked boxes. And that was that. Somewhere along the way, as technology unleashed more inputs into our lives, the simple to-do list became glorified. The rising demands on our attention spawned an entire cottage industry of stand-alone to-do apps!
Remember the old song Sixty 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover? It seems like there's even more ways to manage and track your tasks on a PC, Mac, mobile device or in the cloud. Here's one list. And here's another. And the market keeps expanding too, a sign of our times,
I have tried many of these - in some cases multiple times: Backpack, Toodledo, Google Docs, Things, Omnifocus, GMail Tasks, Remember the Milk, Evernote and more.
My needs are relatively simple: I want to follow the general principles outlined by David Allen in GTD and have all my lists be: a) searchable, b) cross-platform, c) mobile and d) private.
I haven't been able to find one that sticks. But now I think I have finally landed on an outstanding combo: Taskpaper, pictured above. This is a Mac app but it also has an nearly identical Windows cousin called ToDoPaper. Both are super. A web service powered by Google Appspot is coming soon to Taskpaper.com as is an iPhone app.
What's great about Taskpaper and ToDoPaper is that underneath they are just plain text files. This means I can read/edit my lists anywhere, mark them up in any editor and have the changes sync back everywhere via DropBox.
Let's see if this one sticks but so far, I am loving this combo. What do you use?
Comments 63 Comments
Unfortunately I'm locked into Toodledo because of the effort I've made to set it up - and I'm guessing these tool vendors are not too keen on data portability.
But I'll still give it a try :)
I have recently settled in with Listingly (http://www.listingly.com/) -- mostly because it also has an iPhone app. And you can EDIT via the iPhone app (with some programs, you can only view your lists). It's also a "smart" list-maker that remembers previous things you've typed. It's very simple, yet highly functional. I love it!
For the To Do list, I find GTD-based 'Things' for Mac superb.
http://culturedcode.com/things/
I've tried all the ones you've mentioned too, Steve. Ended up with simple lists with checkboxes in my moleskine... It's easy, free and no crashes. The perfect app for me would do what my moleskine does between the desktop, laptop and iPhone but have not been able to get into any of them yet.
Status: 500 Internal Server Error Content-Type: text/html Hickup.. What? what just happened?
I guess that answers the question of whether they are reliable or not.
My current tool is Things, a Mac app that runs on my Powerbook and iPhone. They sync with each other everytime one of the programs is started.
I have been using it for a few months now and it is just the right balance between structure and flexibility. Things models the GTD methodology well. Strong recommend.
"I have recently settled in with Listingly (http://www.listingly.com/) -- mostly because it also has an iPhone app. And you can EDIT via the iPhone app (with some programs, you can only view your lists)."
Not sure what you're talking about. Almost all the apps in this area (mac wise) have an iphone app, and the ones I've used (Things, Omnifocus) let you do just about anything on the iphone version as you could on the desktop.
I use Things. It can be a basic todo list, or more. A desktop and iphone version is all I need. I find the great benefit to keep everything text humorous. But who wants kids on your lawn, am I right?
(I also can't believe that the 'I don't get the same satisfaction as paper and pen' argument is still alive. There are so many advantages to at least having a partial digital solution that to stick with that nonsense is sticking your head in the sand.)
Heather (@prtini)
> Toodledo went down for an extended period of time recently.
The downtime, although not ideal, didn't affect me. I continued using the excellent iPhone app. The thing that expressed me most about the developer of Toodledo is that he kept us informed during the entire time. He didn't try to make excuses (even though the problem was initiated by power problems at the facility containing the Toodledo servers), and he described the "lessons learned" which should preclude future issues.
Found Things just after I bought my first Mac just over a year ago. I really liked the great interface and simplicity, yet it still did most of what I want from a todo app, like Projects, Areas, Someday and others. But just after they went full release, and got many of us to pay to continue to use Things, Cultured Code got noticed by Apple and completely stopped communicating with their power users in their forums to devote themselves full time to get an Appple Developers Award. For over 6 months, no communication, no new releases, and no bug fixes. Then they came out with a new release with enhanced Applescript support, something only a very few users can use. They needed to enhance the Ascript to win the award, which they did. But they utterly abandoned their users to do it, to the point of completely removing the link from their site to the forums, which remain unlinked today. They didn't want Apple, or prospective users to see how they had abandoned us, so they just buried us!
Now they're back and saying they're going to "revamp" the forums, which I'm guessing means "censor" and that they still are interested in forum/user feedback, were just too busy to bother with us for 6 months! They did make a token release with an important bug fix to try to get some credibilty. So I'm not trusting them much at this point.
I've switched almost entirely over to RTM, which I like a lot, is cloud based (Things just syncs directly with the iPhone app, no cloud app). I'm getting an iPhone later this summer and will try it out with RTM and with Things to see which works better, but I'm still very leary about trusting CC.
There is a school of thought that all "to do lists" are a complete waste of time for disorganised people, because you never get to the bottom of the list due to the fact that they are either not important enough to you or you cant be bothered......rake up the leaves!!
To become more productive and organised why not start a "THINGS NOT TO DO LIST!" that way all the time wasting, unprofitable and unproductive things get delegated, stopped or binned, leaving you with more time to do the things that you enjoy, earn you money or give you more time to do those tough things properly!
What's on your list now.... Leaves - get the young lad next door to rake up the leaves and get the shopping in!!
Have a nice day!!
I've been using The Hit List since Macheist 3. It's got a bunch of neat features and also has an iphone app. It's Mac only at the moment.
One issue is the sync across multiple machines. I've managed to work around that (current) limitation by syncing the programs library file. Nice app but still needs a few more features to be exactly what you want.
Did you encountered any problems while synchronizing via Dropbox? It would be a dealbreaker..
Waiting for a wiki based version to be collaborative and obviously for the iphone app
In any other case Vitalist.com deserves a nice review as well
There's something about the to-do lists on the web that leave me a bit cold but I'm going to look at some of the suggestions here.
Oh...oh! So, your estimation of time lost in all these activities searching for the PERFECT to-do manager is?.... What? How much time do you actually spend on doing well, actually OUTPUT.
Have you read Merlin Mann recently? Gee.
thnkas!