Monday, March 21, 2011

Online To Do List

To do lists have never been my forte.  Looking back on my various attempts to maintain one, the primary downfall has been my inability to remember to take the list with me.  At work I'd make up a fantastic to do list and then ... leave it at work.  Since I work from home at least two days a week, having the to do list at work does not help me much.  Once I realize I've left my to do list behind, if I'm feeling particularly organized, which is rare, I start up a new to do list, placing on it what I can remember from the work list, plus any new items.  Inevitably this new list meets the same fate as my work list.

And keeping a personal list has never worked, simply, because I'm never going to be carrying a pad of paper with me everywhere.

In episode 61 of webcomics weekly, the webcomic gurus were talking about productivity applications, one of which was an application called "Things" for Apple platforms.  Revisiting this episode I realized that while I could not use 'Things" directly due to my lack of an Apple computer and iPhone, I could benefit from a similar product if I could find one.

This morning I Googled "to do list" hoping to find some online to do list applications.  And to do list applications I found.

After looking at two applications for about 15 seconds each, I settled on an application called "Remember The Milk" largely, because the name made me chuckle.  Luckily, the application thus far seems to provide the majority of the functionality I'm looking for.

Paul's Functionality Wish List

  • Online interface to manage tasks
  • Categorization / tagging of tasks
  • Due dates for tasks
  • Time commitment estimates for tasks
  • Quick add functionality
  • Incorporation into iGoogle
  • Incorporation into GMail
  • Incorporation into Google Calendars
  • Able to create new tasks via SMS from my phone (can not be done with the application directly, but you can hook your application to Twitter so that direct messages sent to Twitter in a certain format are made into tasks and you can hook Twitter to SMS)
I'll be playing with this for a few weeks before I'm completely sold on it (not that I have to pay for it), but initial impressions are favorable. 

3 comments:

  1. Just tried out adding a task via SMS through Twitter, worked great. Man, this is gonna be sweet.

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  2. The "Remember the Milk" application always receives great feedback and praise in the Android circle of life. I downloaded it once to give it a whirl, but since I didn't have "Try Remember the Milk" on a to-do list, progress on this fell to an unfortunate fate of a vicious cycle of being forgotten.

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  3. Ha, too bad you don't get the "Try Remember the Milk" default task added to your to do list until AFTER you signup for the service.

    Maybe if I add "do something with sans-pants" to my to do list, some progress might get made on that front too.

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