How many of you use an electronic device with a Getting Things Done software to practice effective GTD?

I know I am one of those. Currently my set up is to use Google Calendar together with Toodledo. But due to work, I use a monologue notebook to record my to do list.

I came across this post on lifehack.org that makes a lot of sense. It gross over how many people new to Getting Things Done will spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect platform to practice GTD.

I know the feeling of first finding out Getting Things Done through reading David Allen’s book and learning that there are so many software on Windows, Mac, iPhone that allows you to make yourself more productive.

Like what was mentioned in the article you either

1. spend a lot of time trying to find the right application
2. spend a lot of time entering and planning your action lists

I been through that stage and safe to say I seldom fell off the Getting Things Done wagon.

Taking a break from electronic GTD

But it wasn’t always like this. I tried so much applications, review so much applications that I forgot what is most important about GTD.

Its about being well rounded and executing each stage of the GTD process well.

What does that mean? You can’t just focus on one area of GTD. If you focus on collecting and planning and don’t review and execute, you end up pilling up your tasks.

Similarly, tagging everything based on context and not switching to them when you change context, you will end up pilling up your tasks as well.

Not reviewing your tasks, is the most dangerous. I fell off so many times because of this.

So what is my advice? Take a break from using an electronic device. Record your actions and collect them using a paper notebook.

What it does is to go back to square one and focus on the most important thing: The process.

When I went back to practicing Getting Things Done on paper, I realize a lot of short comings of not having things electronically

1. I cannot keep my list clean. There is no erase and edit. Instead I have to make sure I use a mechanical pencil and eraser and use very nice handwriting.
2. Maintaining a projects list is difficult. My main lists are list of my location context, agenda context with certain users and person. How can I relate those tasks with project? It is that difficult.

But having paper GTD has its perks. For one, my task collection and context switching Is much easier. It also lets me focus on the process of collecting tasks, planning them, doing them and reviewing them.

It makes me appreciate what I can get on a iPhone and Android To Do List app as well.

If you are confuse about Getting Things Done after some time, why not go back read the book again and review how you can practice that process on paper? I am sure you will learn a lot from that experience.

Sometimes we carry out working and doing without really having a systematic idea how most effectively they can be carried out.

David Allen and Stephen Covey tried to inspire us that we need a systematic process and they provided their most effective process in Getting Things Done and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

While its most important to understand, apply and use them so that you gain the most from it, having a view of your own implementation greatly helps you and people you are trying to explain to, to understand how you do things.

In my getting things done article, I have a diagram to show you how I used to carry out getting things done with my smartphone:

My workflow here shows how ideas, thoughts and frustrations enters my system and how I systematically process them. I always go back to this diagram to keep me focus on effectively doing things.

Brett Swift, whom I got to know here from my blog also came up with one that shows how he carry out his GTD process:

How I created my flow chart

I created my flow chart with this Microsoft App called Visio. It is an industry standard to create network diagrams, software development diagrams and such. You need to pay for this.

Here is 10 reasons why you might want to get Microsoft Visio >

FREE Diagram tools

If you want to create a good looking flow chart for GTD only you might not want to spend money. There are free solutions out there.

Gliffy

Gliffy is a web 2.0 web app that does diagramming. The basic package is free but you can only have 5 public diagrams and only 2MB of upload limit.

That is quite minimal but if you only want to create one diagram you might want to sign up for this and create only one.

Diagramly

I really like diagramly because it is really no frills! They do not require you to do any form of signups. Create your diagram straight away!

Although it is a web app, you can easily create a good looking flow chart and save it as an image to publish or keep with you.

Here is what I created:

Create yours today!

You probably have procrastinated more than enough on doing things but there comes a time when you need to get things right.Why not start today?

Tune in to Productive Organizer and start with out Getting Things Done Series to make your life better today.

Ever feel there isn’t enough time in a day to do things?

Ever forgotten something important?

Ever wondered how highly successful people manage their time?

Ever wished you had more quality time to spend with your family?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, read on. I hope these short educational tips will help you get control and ahead in your life.

Before beginning, I know that most of you will have this sense of procrastination of change. It is perfectly normal to feel that inertia in changing the way we currently do things or that the technique below may not work for all.

But tell you what, spend the next few minutes reading to the end and if you feel like it made some impact on you, give it a shot, it cost nothing and you got nothing to lose. If things don’t quite work for you, you can always revert to what you are doing currently.

The 10 steps are as follows:

Step 1: Jot down everything you wish to do or need to do that comes to mind at that moment

Ideally if you have a PDA or smart phone (a device which you carry around all the time) with a to-do list application or program similar to outlook, jot down the task that comes to mind immediately.

Alternatively the pen and paper would work too though not as inefficient.

Let’s call this list of things the ‘inbox’. A task could be as simple as “pick up milk on way home” or as complex as “design a management information system for client by end June”.

There are two kinds of items you should jot down.  The first is an action task.  These are task where you have a known solution or course of action to perform.  It should be written in a clear, concise and most of all actionable manner.  The second is an idea.  Pen down any thoughts or ideas you may have.  Use this opportunity to collate them and not let your creative spark be forgotten and go to waste.

Step 2: Clear the inbox

Either at the end of each day or at the start of the next day, go through your ‘inbox’ to categorize and sort all the items there.  The key idea is to place similar items together and rank its importance.  I’ll go through some concepts next.  From this stage on, you will likely need some form of an electronic organizer, outlook or to-do list application.

Step 3: Importance and Urgency

For each item, mark it with two properties, degree of priority/importance and whether it is time bound (has a due date or no due date).

We may have many tasks to do each day and by using the above, we can prioritize and focus on the high priority and urgent tasks first.  It helps us form a clear picture of what is really important (a necessity) versus what is a good to have (a want).

Step 4: Moving it to the right list

All tasks from the inbox should be moved into pre-defined lists that you have previously created to categorize them.  A tip is not to create too many of these category lists else it defeats the purpose of consolidating similar or related tasks.  An example of such pre-defined category lists could be “Personal”, “Investment”, “Job”, “Family” and “Someday”.

You might be wondering what the “Someday’ list is.  Basically for me, this list stores all my long term goal, wants and good to haves.  For instance, “learn to play golf”.  Collect all the things you eventually want to do here but currently have no clear deadline or requirement to get it done but hope to accomplish it someday.

Step 5: Tagging

Tagging simply means to use one or several words to be used as properties of the task.  It is an added dimension to group similar tasks together.

Let me illustrate, for instance, I usually tag a location with a task.  Say using the tag ‘mall’.  All my tasks which can be performed at the mall (e.g. “buy present for anniversary”, “pick up dry-cleaning”, “purchase garden hose” and “get 2 packs of dog food”) will have this tag.

Optimally if your to-do list has this search function, you can easily do a search on the tags to pull up all the tasks you can accomplish at the mall.  These may include tasks which you may not have planned for the day but for convenience you might want to clear the task now anyway.  Even if your application does not have this feature, you can manually scroll for these tags to aid yourself in consolidating similar tasks.  That way if you can accomplish them together, you free up more of our time in future.

Step 6: For a large complex task, use sub-tasking

Some task are rather complex and may require several steps in completing it.  If that is the case, you should create sub-tasks under this main task, detailing the small steps required.

Let me illustrate with a simple example, let’s say my task was to “arrange meeting for shareholders”.  I might have to do the following steps to accomplish this such as “check shareholder calendar to select meeting date and send invite”, “collect responses”, “book a conference room” and “order refreshments”.

As you may have noticed, I may not be able to finish the main task in a day depending on shareholders responses to the invite, but with sub-tasking, at least I know the task is moving along (i.e. something has been done) and I can come back to it later.

Sub-tasking is ideal for project management; it lets you keep track of what is due, what is outstanding and what is required for successful completion.  It also allows you to add additional task you might think of along the way that would aid in the main task’s successful completion.

Step 7: Create list for things to do today

Scan through your pre-defined category lists each day and determine what you want or can accomplish today.  Move these to your to do list for the day.  If your to-do list application supports due dates, those tasks due that day would have already been pre-populated for you.  You can also make use of tags to search for similar tasks you can accomplish in the same day.

As you scan your lists, make sure to delete any tasks that are redundant or no longer valid. Your list for the day may be lengthy and you may not have the time to get through all, but remember the two task properties mentioned in step 3.  Use this to determine which ones to handle first.  The remaining items can be completed another day.

Step 8: GTD (David Allen’s Getting Things Done) “two-minute rule”

Every time you read a task from your list or come to mind a task which can be performed in less than two minutes at that location and time, immediately, just do it!

Step 9: Keeping track of what is done

As you might have guessed, your completed tasks stays in your device’s memory provided you don’t delete it.  You can always pull up a record of what was done in the past.  This I feel not only serves as a diary of events but it also lets you record what worked in the past and what doesn’t.  For instance, if you had a complex task, say a project before, and the sub-tasks in it led to a successful completion, you can use them as a guide for your new project’s sub-tasks.

Looking through your completed records also serves as reminder for recurring events.  For instance, you may need to service your car every 6 months.  If your to-do list application had a recurrence event function, that task would have been created for you automatically.   Otherwise, you can always add this manually when reviewing my previous completed tasks.

Step 10: The psychological and time benefits

Free your mind; focus on the doing rather than spending effort remembering the things to do.  By adopting this organized approach, you will have one less worry in life about forgetting things that matter.  Furthermore, for me personally, I get a sense of satisfaction each time I strike off an item and at the end of the day when reviewing what I had accomplished.

Though it may seem like a daunting exercise initially, but once you get used to it, you will realize that the simple 15 minute exercise each day of clearing your inbox and building a list for the day will reap you much more time saving benefits later.  I have adopted this approach and not only am I getting more things done, I have more time for my family and leisure.

That’s it! Give it a go!

I wish you all the best in getting more productivity, having more control in your life and most importantly having more fun with your time! – Cheers

If you have an Android enabled phone and want to jump straight in at applying the above, have a look at the to-do list application I have developed below.  It is built with the above concepts in mind.

Note that though the concepts above relate to David Allen’s Getting Things Done methods, I am in no way associated with it, but I highly recommend you have a read of his book.

Another book I would recommend is Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Around June last year, 3 friends and I got ourselves interested in this new open source platform called Android. Back then, we only have Astrid as the main to do list.

Over at iOS we have very competitive alternatives to choose from and we felt can offer something competitive over at the Android platform.

This week we release WAToDo! Android To Do List on the Android Market.

For Agile and Simple task management

WAToDo! aims to be the to do list to help users to Collect, Plan, Execute and Monitor tasks on their Android Smartphones and in the future Android tablets.

It aims to not just follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done to make sense of task management (For a primer on this, read my Getting Things Done Series), but also to be malleable for users from all walks of life to bend WAToDo! to fit their personal task management system.

Community Driven Development

For this to work, we decided to offer what we feel are the most basic functionality and seek users support and feed backs through our community forum to build subsequent features or workflows into it.

Apply Getting Things Done to manage task the right way

WAToDo! was created very much with the GTD methodology in mind, but really what it hopes to achieve is to make you the user more effective.

Here is a modified workflow diagram from my Getting Things Done Series. Why GTD works is because it make sense of the aggregation of ideas, thoughts, frustrations, finds a way to process them and teaches you how to execute and monitor them in a systematic manner.

In the following sections, I will guide everyone through how GTD can be carried out with WAToDo!

Collecting your thoughts, ideas, frustrations and things encounter

What makes the smartphone such a great device is that we always have our cell phone with us, when we have an idea or something that we just thought of that needs to be done, we want to lock in that idea immediately and not forget about it.

With WAToDo! your thoughts and ideas can be entered into your smartphone Inbox. Just like a mail inbox, this will be information in the most raw form.

The cross in each Task List brings you to the task creation section. Be sure to use actionable key words to describe your task. The more clearly define your task, the more likely it gets done.

Our interface is coherent in the sense that for most decision and entries area there is a Save and Cancel button on the top action bar.

Upon Save, task will be created. You will be brought to the detail manage task section

WAToDo! provides numerous parameters to tag to each task.

1. Make Task into a Project
2. Due date for task
3. Assign Priority to task
4. Change status easily between uncompleted, completed or next action
5. Assign multiple tags to task
6. Assign which Task List or Project the task belongs to
7. Recur task upon completion
8. Tag Notes to task

We recommend assigning due date to task that are constraint to finish within a certain day and tags to better describe how this task should be handled. We will go into Tags, Task Lists and Projects later.

Better Monthly Calendar Date Selector

One of the thing I find lacking about the Android platform was the date selector. While on the iOS we have a calendar selector that we can at one glance see where Today falls upon, how far we want the due date to be.

At WAToDo! we provide one step further by providing some commonly used date entries like “Today”, “2 Weeks from now” or “3 Months from now” simply because most of the time this is how our cognitive minds think about setting due dates.

Setting Task to Next Action

Why do we enable you to toggle a task to “Next Action” ? Simply because while reviewing your task it makes it easy for you to select a task to do immediately and highlight it as Next to do.

Attach Multiple Tags

WAToDo! thinks Tags is one of the most important aspect of a to do list, so much so that you need to be able to create your own tags and choose multiple tags to tag to your task. We will later see why this is important.

Repeating Task

Some people see value in repeating task. We do as well as some tasks you will do it every day, every 2 weeks or every 30th of the month.

At WAToDo! you can easily specify this.

Planning with Task Lists and Projects

Once you have collect the task it is time to organize them so that they make sense.

WAToDo! provides 2 kinds of task containers: Task Lists and Projects. What is the difference between the 2? When do you use each type?

Each Task List can contain Projects. And Each Projects can contain more Projects. Nested Projects is a feature of the Full Paid version.

For a better tutorial on this read Organizing Lists and Tasks with WAToDo! >>

Task List

We would recommend using Task List to group your 1 year goals or your areas of responsibilities.

Some examples are

• Personal (Family Man) – for all things done to be a good father or mother or spouse.
• Project Manager Duties (Work) – to be objective in your focus to be a good planner/manager at work
• Project Armada – all tasks and projects to ensure the success and completion of Project Armada
• Project Waterloo – another project but its another key performance indicator and better to be kept seperate.
• Investor & Money – to be focus in your pursuit for good wealth and capital appreciation

Project

Readers would be aware that a task can be toggle to be a project. A task can be explicitly define as a project when its likely make up of multiple actionable tasks to fulfill an objective.

A good example is this:

• draft out documents required for the audit coming up
• check with the QA personnel what is required for the upcoming audit
• get my subordinates to validate the existing documents for audit again

These tasks belong to a common theme. They are not so much of an area of responsibility or focus to create a custom list for them, but you cannot group them under a task called "To prepare for audit".

This task is too big and if you define it as just "To prepare for audit" you will procrastinate and not fulfill it.

A better definition will be a task project.

 

Easily move tasks between Inbox, Lists and Projects

WAToDo! makes it easy for you to move tasks

Doing the Tasks

Each individual have a different way of doing their task. They either:

1. Go by date
2. Go to a specific List or Project and do it

What we recommend based on Getting Things Done is to really Tag tasks well and execute them by filtering the Tags.

We believe that tasks fall within 3 dimensions:

1. Location Specific – Tasks can only and only be carried out in this specific location. e.g. Site A, Office, Home, Errands, Commuting
2. Person/Group Specific – Tasks that are related to a person. Agendas with a certain person or group of people. e.g. Team A, Boss, Best Friend
3. Time Intensity – An estimate of how much time it requires to carry this out. Normally broken up into Low, Medium and High Intensity or Long/Short, 1 hour/half a day/1 day or more.

Either way, with WAToDo! you can easily create tags flexibly based on these 3 categories of contexts

Notice that next to each tag, you will be able to see the overdue in red and uncompleted tasks in blue.

So how do you do the tasks based on these tags? We have provide you with a workflow as follows:

WAToDo! enables you to filter by ANY or ALL tags selected to carry out the workflow above

More Tutorials at WAToDo! Guides

We can’t cover everything because there are just so much you can do with WAToDo!

At WAToDo! we provide these guides:

• Defining and collecting tasks with WAToDo!
• Organizing lists and projects with WAToDo!
• Reviewing and executing tasks with WAToDo!

In addition, we continue to add more guides to the site to help users make sense of task management.

Value Pricing

There will be 2 version of WAToDo!

1. The LITE Version will be Ad-Supported. Although it is termed LITE, it is fully functional and we are not limiting the duration you can use it or number of task input. You can download and install it here >>
2. The FULL Version is priced at USD 1.50. We believe this is less or around the cost of a burger in US. In UK its even lower than that. You can purchase and install it here >>

 

Conclusion

We humbly don’t think we have gotten everything right currently, but we made a commitment to continue to improve upon WAToDo!

The great thing is that Android is a great platform for us to see how we can take leverage on.

We continue to explore features that would benefit our users. A list of what we are exploring can be found here.

So why not download a FREE copy of LITE version and experience WAToDo! first hand today

This article was original posted at WAToDo! Android GTD To Do List. For more of what WAToDo! and Getting Things Done is about visit the official page here.

As followers of GTD, we tend to use ‘Waiting For’ a lot for things we are waiting for from Delegation to colleagues friends and family. Perhaps what you need to do is to make use of Agendas more. Agendas are like things you want to bring up in a meeting. The problem is many of these meetings take place really ad-hoc.

Enter WAToDo!. With your to do list always by your side in your Android Device you can collect your tasks but also dish out task when you suddenly meet this person along the passageways or before you leave the house.

Tasks in WAToDo! can be tagged with multiple Tags which you can use for locational,time duration and agenda based contexts.

Meeting your boss on the passageway, you can quickly bring up your device and use Tag filter to identify what you want to update him, just before he leaves for the week.

A list of tasks for him is presented. If something comes up that doesn’t require us to speak face-to-face, I can still use the idea of an agenda and gather topics into one email. The best thing is that you consolidate what you want to let the person know, what you want he/her to help you with and do it at one time. What we do here is we save your time and you save their time. It shows that you are able to be a true professional.

I think the Pomodoro Technique suits some people. My friend Wilson recently chanced upon it and find that it really helps him to focus on small amount of work at a time.

It also allows you to know when you should have a break.

If you are on the Android Smartphone you can check out Pomodroido which enables you to practice the Pomodoro on the Android platform. Here is my review of it >>

For folks who want to learn the technique, the ebook is FREE and can be viewed here >>

However not everyone agrees with it.

Colin T. Miller, a Yahoo! employee and blogger tried it and have this to say:

Pomodoros are an all or nothing affair,” he says. “Either you work for 25 minutes straight to mark your X or you don’t complete a pomodoro. Since marking that X is the measurable sign of progress, you start to shy away from engaging in an activity if it won’t result in an X. For instance…meetings get in the way of pomodoros. Say I have a meeting set for 4:30pm. It is currently 4:10pm, meaning I only have 20 minutes between now and the meeting…In these instances I tend to not start a pomodoro because I won’t have enough time to complete it anyway

Mario Fusco argues the following:

Aren’t we really able to keep ourselves concentrated without a timer ticketing on our desk?…Have you ever seen a civil engineer using a timer to keep his concentration while working on his projects?…I think that, like any other serious professional, I can stay concentrated on what I am doing for hours…Bring back your timer to your kitchen and start working in a more professional and effective way.

To a certain extend I do agree with them. You should be able to break and monitor your time in short intervals. But we human beings sometimes suffer from short attention spans and distractions.

This technique aims to address that by using a timer. I don’t think it will always work myself.

For me, I follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done using WAToDo! Android To Do List. The key to assign specific time tags to tasks so that you can focus on short task better.

Notice the *long, *medium, *short tags. WAToDo! is flexible enough for you to specify that.

Once you assign tasks with these duration specific contexts, all you need to do is selected location and time specific context to focus on it:

We are on a roll when it comes to To Do List today as shortly after going deep into discussion on Someday/Maybe list we have a great tip and tricks from the Remember the Milk website.

I am always a fan of task management that can be customized as close to your own workflow as possible which is why I really like Remember the milk, which is a very extensive web to do list that is available on the iPhone and Android smartphone as well.

One of the main advantage is that you can create Smart Lists based on search criteria and in this tip from a reader having a list of tasks you do at a certain location and at a certain time intensity is very good:

Having so many things to do, sometimes it’s so easy to get overwhelmed even when you’re organized with RTM! Even if those things take only a few minutes to do, they feel like mountains.

So, I find that if I can just do one or two things, then I will feel like I accomplished something. Even better, I could get the energy to do even more on my list.

I created a smartlist called “Today’s Quickies” which are any tasks that are due today and take less than 5 minutes to do. I used these parameters:

dueWithin:”1 day of today” and timeEstimate:”< 5 min”

It’s a great way to see all those little things that you can do and be done with!

What a great tip!

Interested to know more about Getting Things Done with mobile applications on the iPhone and Android? Take a look at our Getting Things Done series on step by step guides to apply GTD in everyday life.

I know I do talk more about other lists in Getting Things Done methodology more than Someday/Maybe list so you would think that I do not think this list will work for everyone right?

You are probably right. I don’t have a lot of things on my Someday/Maybe list. This is probably because on a daily basis I have enough tasks to contend with then to add more things to it.

But essentially having an empty Someday/Maybe list could be a sign of a problem in that you did not plan for areas where you can expand your scope in other ways.

Tools for Thought discusses on this subject in this article and highlights 7 problems with it:

1. It’s a procrastination list
2. It’s too long
3. It’s teeming with fantasies
4. It’s not used for practical issues
5. It’s filled with many things in a few categories
6. It contains unresearched projects
7. It sounds non-committal

Its an interesting read for avid GTD practitioners.

[Read Article here >>]

Interested to know more about Getting Things Done with mobile applications on the iPhone and Android? Take a look at our Getting Things Done series on step by step guides to apply GTD in everyday life.

I saw this good post at around the CHAOS that I thought I would highlight to my readers.

This is written by a guy with loads of experience in consulting for systems implementation and project management. Something that I am far far away from.

But essentially, here he shows you a personal GTD system that is basically free. It makes use of free Google Apps

Getting Things Done (GTD) , heard of it? Chances are you have and are probably using it to some extent. GTD is a extremely popular organizational method created by David Allen.It has been described as the productivity cult of the new info age.Over the years there have been many variations of this method, but the essence has remained same.The popularity of the system is evident from the number of systems that have become avilable that support. They range from simple papaer based systems to automated software systems. The post however is not about what GTD is , but about creating a GTD system using Google Apps.I will try to keep the information on what GTD is to the bare minimum, if you need more information or help on GTD. Just try Google search. There are a lot of excellent sources out there.(A comparison of the most popular GTD apps)

The Set-up

So why use Google Apps? Firstly It is free.All the Google applications used to set-up this system are free. Secondly it is accessible everywhere i.e You are not bound by system, hardware or software. You can access your system from anywhere as long as you are connected to Internet. You can even access it on your smart phones, both iOS,Android or Blackberry.However the most compelling reason for me is that I am yet to come across a application or a product which has all the components of a GTD system i.e. mail,to -do lists,calendar and a filing system.

Before jumping to the set-up details, lets quickly summarize the elements  of a basic GTD system

• The Inbox (Or the Capture System) – Dumping everything for later processing (Gmail,Google Tasks, Chrome Plug-ins)
• Next Action Lists – Storing your next actions (Google Tasks)
• Projects Lists – For storing your projects and associated tasks (Google Tasks)
• Waiting Lists – For your waiting and delegated tasks (Google Tasks)
• Calendar – For your scheduled events and tasks (Google Calendar)
• Reference Filing System – Storing for reference (Google Docs)

[Read the full article here @ around the CHAOS >>]

Firstly thank you Charles for being kind enough to extend a beta copy of Action Lists for me to do this review.

So far i have the chance to investigate 2 Task Management Software:

1. Appigo ToDo [Review Here >>]
2. eToDo [Review Here >>]

For sure, these are not the only lists around and the fact that the competition is so hot means there is only one winner here, which is you the consumer!

Action Lists is brought to you by Daze End Software, you may have come across another of its software which is ListMaker and this one is working on the same formula as List Maker.In fact you can say that action Lists is building on the same formula as List Maker.

Action Lists, like most task management applications on iPhone enables you to follow the GTD Workflow by David Allen but for me, it can be much more than that.

How much does it cost?

There is a free version for you to try that is FREE. However, it only enables you to create a limited number of tasks and projects.

The paid application cost USD9.99, which is the same cost as Appigo Todo and Things.

When you cost that much, you gotta be as competitive as them. Here we will see if it measures up.

How does it work?

Action Lists does task management according to the GTD workflow, but you have the flexibility to do it in alot of ways.

Typically you start off by doing a sweep to collect any thing that you can think of. Any thoughts that translates to actionable tasks will go into the Inbox.

Task entry is similar to Appigo ToDo in that you can use a Quick Add button to add a task without detail specifications. But most would prefer to use the detail entry screen.

Here you can enter the

1. description of your task
2. start date of the task
3. end date of the task
4. notes for the task
5. context/categories of the task and
6. which project it belongs to
7. set task to repeating

whatever a good todo list have, Action Lists have it for you. You can specify your own contexts and later you can filter by them.

The repeating task is abit special. You can set them to continous repeat, and the tasks will be generated either when the day have been reached, or when the task have been completed.

I find this to necessary in the past to have the task recur on its own when the day comes but i realise that doing this, you can very likely litter your todo list should you fall off the to do list bandwagon and attempt to hop back on.

The preferred method will be to recur when you have complete the task. Either way, once you marked a task completed, a new recur task is added to the Inbox

This is abit different but its Action Lists way to make sure that all new task is handled at Inbox level. some people will like this, some will not.

Nested Projects

When you are organizing your tasks in your inbox, if the task needs more than 1-2 steps to be handled, you will create a Project to group them together.

This is where Action Lists differs from all task list on the market. Action Lists enables you to have unlimited projects within projects and there will alot of folks who appreciate this as you can really group your tasks by:

1. Personal and Work
2. Strategic Goals
3. Area of Responsibilities
4. Project Milestones
5. Small Projects

I used to want this nested feature alot as i think it makes alot of sense. Even the Desktop ToDoList that i have created based on Nested Tree List. People that are in software development would have use Microsoft Project and it enables you to have nested task. If you look at your life as one big project then having nested list will really help.

Not having it is not end of the world. In fact most people will just make do with 2 levels: the first level being your Area of Responsibilities be it Project A, Being a good family man and the second level being your Project milestones to achieve that area of responsibility.

Task Status and Doing the Task via Context

How you perform the “Do It” after “Organzing it” will be based on 2 things: the Status of the task and the Context.

When defining the task you can select the status.

Setting the Task to Waiting will cost the task to pop up at the Waiting Tab (notice the increase in number badge indicating the number of waiting task) for me this is good as it really provides a clear seperation of tasks that are currently waiting. Currently with Appigo ToDo, i have it as one of my Tags and while i have said Appigo toDo main problem is that you need to go into the tags to see how many unfinish task you have. With Action Lists you don’t have this problem.

The Same goes with Someday. Once you decide to do a Someday task, just switch the status to Active or Next Action

As i have said, you hop on over to Action Lists Tab to go through your context to see your next action.

You will note that there aren’t alot of task queued here. Why is that? This is because only task set to Next Action Status will appear here!

Its a novel way of filtering away all the freaking task and only show what you have to do next.

There is abit of a problem here. So lets say you completed a task, what you need to do next is go to the Projects tab and go to that particular project and set the next task status to Next Action from Active.

what happens when your task is so deeply nested inside?

This is where Task Queue comes in. Touch the blue arrow next to each project folder and you will see the option “Queue Next Actions“.

Toggle it on and after you finish one next action, it will immediately set the next earliest due task to Next action from Active. This may not work well if you have tasks that have dependency not based on time of completion. the jury is still out if this performs well enough

Synchronize and backup to ToodleDo

Action Lists enables you to back up your tasks and folders to Toodledo. I have not tested how well this works since my ToodleDo syncs with Appigo ToDo but i have a feeling it will be another case that ToodleDo will act as a backup rather than allow you to use it both online and on your iPhone.

Do tell me your experience with syncing.

Where to improve upon

This App have alot of potential i feel.However here are some things that they need to iron out.

Full Calendar selection – We cannot rely on the roller to select the date! As we are setting dates, we want to see clearly which day of the week or which weekday we set upon. Using a roller selector is not good for this.

More Description details – from the picture below you will see that its very difficult to tell at one glance what you need to do. you will have to go into the task itself. I feel this needs to be expanded

Conclusion

On the whole a very good to do list i feel. Does everything the competition has and a very niche and competitive feature in Nested Projects. Fix the problems that i mention and its well worthed the price.

For one that have program a todo list, i can truely appreciate this product and its difficulties. We hope that the next 1 month users will give ample feedbacks to increase the stability of the software. Appigo Todo have this problem for all versions, due to the complexity of to do lists in general.

so do contribute and highlight the issues to make this a good todo list!