Friday, October 10, 2008

Hi, my name is Trish and I make lists.

I am addicted to lists. Lists to keep track of what I've done, lists for what I'm about to do, and lists of what needs to be done in the future. The problem was that I always had too many lists, often on various scraps of paper that continually needed to be compiled and rewritten into one master list.

Enter TODOIST (note there's no “L”) — a simple online to do list and task manager. It is very easy to use and, best of all, it's free!


I have been using this site for several weeks and am finding it incredibly helpful and versatile. To start, you simply add a project and then add the tasks associated with that project. In my case, the “projects” are really categories, such as Blogging, Household, Personal, etc. It is very easy to rename things or move tasks around if you need to as well.

For each item, you can specify a due date if you want, and this date can be recurring. If I add a task to write a post for Created and Called and I want to write a post once a week, for example, I can make the due date “ev 7 days”. Then when I mark the task complete, it will simply move it to the next due date instead of to the task history section.

There are a lot of things you can do to integrate this system with Gmail or other applications, although so far I have just installed the sidebar for Firefox. The standard views are today or 7 days, both of which include overdue tasks, but you can view your list just about any way you want – by project, priority level, or other configurations through a query.

If you are a chronic listmaker like me, you might want to give TODOIST a try today!

You can find Trish at Another Piece of the Puzzle and also at 5 Minutes for Special Needs.

3 comments:

Hands-Free Heart said...

I've been using Remember the Milk which sounds similar. I believe it integrates with calendar programs... possibly ones on PDAs as well, but I'm not sure, as I don't yet use calendars.

Maddy said...

Whilst I should never label myself as a chronic anything[!] I would admit to a slight hankering in the list department.

The post it note system broke down a few years ago as someone close to home decided that they needed to be lined up and colour matched......

I'll go and take a peek.
Cheers

Anonymous said...

I've tried Todoist. The Hub raved about it. I'm not sure if he still uses it. But it was nifty how you can have an "agenda" too.