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?
