Managing Your To-Do List

I have been meaning to right a post about task management for ages now. A while ago I posted about getting my emails organised and always intended to follow it up with a to-do list post. Well, with the amount of things I had on my to-do list, posting about it kept getting put off, and life got in the way. But I have actually been testing out a few options for keeping on top of my tasks, so I thought I’d give you a run down of a few of them.

Now, obviously, if you prefer, you could use a simple pen and paper, there’s really no need for fancy gadgets or software, but I do like to organise these things on the computer - partly because I am a gadget geek, but also because the ease of updating (and keeping things neat) appeals to me. Many of the online and desktop tools I’ve found have other functions that can make getting and staying organised much easier, so if you like to be “electronically” organised, you might like to try them out.

Microsoft Outlook

I’ve noticed a lot of people spend a lot of time complaining about Microsoft products which I have to admit annoys me sometimes. To be honest there are a lot of computer snobs out there, and I don’t really buy into that philosophy. Yes, there are some products, like Firefox that I find to be better than the Microsoft version (Internet Explorer), but I don’t subscribe to the “everything Microsoft is crap and you’re stupid if you don’t believe me!” camp.

As I said in my email organisation post, I use Outlook and have done for a long time. Regardless of how you feel about Outlook, chances are if you work in an office, you’ll be expected to use Outlook and its probably a pretty common product for most (PC at least) users to use.

One of the reasons I like Outlook is that you can manage a lot of different things from the one place - email, contacts, calendar and tasks. There are also a lot of hidden functions that once you start playing around with you can make work for you. For example I always start up Outlook with the “Outlook Today” page which gives me a snapshot of upcoming appointments, tasks and email. This works quite well, but I would love to see a drag and drop gadget style “home page” for Outlook, along the lines of iGoogle, with lots of options for customisation for displaying only the information you want. I have seen a few tutorials for building your own Outlook Today page, but I haven’t had a lot of success with these (I think my HTML knowledge needs a bit of work for that).

I also like seeing my tasks in calendar display and there are a number of different views in Outlook to allow you to do this.

This view is activated by default when you are looking at the Day or Week View of your calendar, but you can also adjust it through View>Daily Task List.

It is also very easy to turn an email into a task or a task into an appointment or any other type of item in Outlook - simply by dragging and dropping it into the heading on the left taskbar (in my image above - see Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks at the bottom left). I use this frequently when I receive an email containing a task I have to do - just drag it to tasks and a pop-up box comes up allowing you to put in due date and other information.

So I like using Outlook. It’s familiar and useful and has a lot of functionality. The disadvantage of Outlook, however, is that you are tied to a particular computer to use it. If you regularly switch computers and would prefer an online solution, then Outlook probably doesn’t meet your needs.

Remember the Milk

Remember the Milk (RTM) is an online task management tool, developed by Aussies, so I I like the idea of supporting it. It has a lot of useful features and can be used in conjunction with Gmail, which brings Gmail slightly closer to offering all the features of an all-in-one manager. RTM is a fairly simple task management tool, which allows you to enter and track tasks from any computer.

I had planned to give you a review of Remember the Milk, but I’m currently having trouble logging in (some problem with a desktop shortcut keeps logging me out). These are the features the website lists:

• Managing tasks easily and quickly with intuitive interface
• Receive reminders via email, SMS and instant messenger
• Create as many lists as you like and organise them how you like using tags and notes
• Give your tasks a geographical location and see them on google maps
• Share send and publish tasks and lists with you contacts
• Add tasks by email even if you’re not logged into RTM
• Access RTM on your phone
• See tasks grouped by today, tomorrow and overdue. Set up recurring tasks
• Search tasks with Advanced search

So the things I like about RTM are that it is simple to use and allows hierachical task lists - ie a top level task (list) with lots of “sub-tasks” within each list so you can group your tasks effectively, it integrates with gmail and igoogle, google calendar, twitter, iphone and blackberry.

I was going to say that I didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t see your tasks in calendar format, but I just noticed the link-up with Google Calendar which allows you to see your RTM tasks in your Google Calendar and plan your time.

Lifetick

This last tool is actually the one I am using the most at the moment. It’s a new player on the market and is also developed by Aussies. Lifetick has a lot of the good features of RTM including hierachical task lists - it starts with “Core Values” (your top level groups). Within each Core Value you can add Goals, and then within each goal add tasks. The interface is slick and easy to use and if you’re a very visual person, you’ll like this tool - there are a number of different views for your tasks, including pie charts, lists, various widgets and a journal.

I really like the way tasks are organised in this tool and have found it not only helps me keep track of tasks, but helps me organise in my head the things I have to acheive using the Core Values and Goals.

For example, my Core Values are the big things in my life I need to work on - Kids, Travel, House, Blog and a few others. Within the Blog Core Value I have goals of “Re-design Roaming Aussie Mum” for all the tasks to implement my new theme, “Blog Maintenance” for all the ongoing tasks, and “Aussie Bloggers” for the guest posting and things I have to do as a moderator of the forum at Aussie Bloggers.

The Status page also allows you to drag and drop widgets to display different information about your tasks, such as Next 10 due tasks (from all goals), Overdue Tasks

Lifetick is free with limited functionality (limit of 4 goals and no access to status and journal), but it didn’t take me long to decide that I wanted the full version which only costs USD$20 (AUD$22) for a year.

So, how about you? How do you manage your to-do list?