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

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.

So far most of the To do List applications that i have been talking about seems to be revolving around the iPhone platform. Don’t worry i am not a fanboy, just that i used this device more than alot of others that i have come across with.

I actually started off using a to do list with Remember the Milk some time ago, so i do know abit on web task management.

This week i was given the opportunity to try out a Web To-Do application called GTD Agenda. GTD Agenda, as its name sounds is a task management application that attempts to be close to what David Allen have envisioned to help a person manages his task.

Pricing

Like ToodleDo or Remember The Milk, GTD Agenda is those web app that have different tier pricing. The free package gives you just about enough to try, but if you are going to run it as your main to do dashboard then i think its not gonna be enough.

You should be thinking about the Basic and the Premium

Using GTD Agenda

Most of the web apps nowadays would have an element that makes them compatible with GTD (or Stephen Covey) for the matter. The only web app that blatantly does not is Remember the Milk.

GTD Agenda’s strength is that it is constructed out with GTD in mind. For those that are new to this term you can check out this series of articles on what Getting Things Done is About.

What i like about the presentation of the interface is that it is more clean compare to apps like ToodleDo which is very cluttered. A clean interface enables the user to focus on what he should be occupied with at this moment.

The user can go about setting his 20000 feet to 50000 feet goals and visions under the goal tab

Notice that all the goals would need to below to a certain category.

After all these are defined you can get down to planning your projects. Projects can be linked to a particular goal. So that during review you are able to list out the projects that you will undertake to meet that goal.

With the goals and projects defined we have set up the basic infrastructure of our todo list. Whats left is to explore how we use it daily.

Suppose that a thought enters you head that you have an actionable task to perform or you are doing your daily mindsweep, you can enter the task one at a time through its easy to use interface.

By doing this, you will not bother about the Categories/Contexts and due dates, notes. A key difference between GTD Agenda and many of the other todo list applications is the absence of an Inbox when you work on tasks that have not been processed yet.

At times i would need to skim though all my tasks to identify those that i have not organized.

The task details is important and gives you a good idea how you can filter in your review and do it phase. The Context enables you to freely define whether you want it to be based on Location, Person or Something else. You can set 5 levels of priority and you have a check box to mark this as next action.

The repeating option is great. But most other todo list have this and they do provide for more flexibility like repeating on Thur,Sat and  Sun. Repeating is important to me and certainly is a good initiative here.

Reviewing

A good feature for GTD agenda is the ability to set Daily and Weekly Schedule. Before you go about doing your task you gotta plan what you want to do for that day. That would mean breaking your days down into chunks. This will give you a good marker what is planned out for that day so that you attempt to use each day to the fullest.

When it comes to actually making use of the task list to do work, you will always want to use a Next Action and GTD Agenda does provide that.

Else when you switch to another location or with a person that you might have things for you can make use of the contexts to bring up tasks related to the person.

If you would like to have a one stop shop where you can view key milestones or important events there is a calendar section for it too.

Mobile GTD Agenda

In this age and time, if a web application is not ubiquitous then its not really going to be useful. I try out the mobile version of it and i have to say its very good.

I am using an iPod Touch trying it out on the Safari browser. You can bascially review and add new task on your phone or pda now. The flaw is that you cannot use this offline on your mobile device.

Conclusion

Its a good package i feel and it certainly helps that if you are going to do GTD you might as well go for one that matches the work flow as close as it can. However, i think there could be some challenges for GTD Agenda as the free Web apps around are getting close to this capability. They would need to up their game if they really want to start differentiating themselves  from them.

Do give GTD Agenda a try by using the image url below

Introduction

eToDo have in recent weeks zoom to the top of the productivity category on app store. So what makes etodo so appealing?

eTodo as a late comer to this task management and to do list space have to really distinguish itself from the competition.

What it offers is to carry out task management GTD way in the simpliest way. but that doesn’t mean that it is shitty, rather I see that it appeals to users who aren’t thY big on gtd and just want a simple way of managing tasks

The Presentation

eTodo have the nicest to do list interface I have ever seen, but you may disagree with me. Take a look at the screenshots below and you will see that it’s high on the colors and funky icons.

let’s be frank here. I am an engineer by training an while I like to prefer functionality for my todo list over beauty, it will turn me off if it’s really ugly. thankfully I don’t see many of those at the app store. at the configuration you can change the background wallpaper as well.

The Front end

eTodo provides task bins much in the Gtd way. If you guys are familiar with my post on Appigo Todo you will know that Appigo provides lists which houses projects and tasks. these task bins are like this list, only thing is it’s fixed based on what is required by Gtd.

• Inbox- basically your starting point. any thoughts that is vague will go here. you should have one daily or weekly mind sweep to add to your inbox.
• All- all your tasks whether it is anywhere will be here.
• Actions- all your actionable tasks (which to me is almost everything). the key distinction here is between Actions and Someday. This is where your tasks in your Inbox that are actionable will be shifted to.
• Someday- tasks that do not have a definite start date. pending tasks. If your Inbox tasks are nit gonna be carried out anytime soon and might be a project or task next time, shift it here.
• Next- the tasks that should be carried out next. The next task from your actions bin that u will carry out next.
• Completed- your completed task will be housed here. More for review purpose.

Task Creation

Touching the cross will bring you to the task creation screen.

This screen to me is freaking colorful and I think it’s a bad thing as the user have a hard time perceiving if this is a textfield.

You can enter the standard stuff:
Due Date – A joy to enter. The developer took note to include frequently used reference dates such as Today, Tomorrow and Next Week. I feel people should stop using the date roller tool. Its really sickening to roll for far reaching dates!

Repeat - Great here. The standard outlook level recurring tasks options Days, Weeks and Months. The developer also includes standard reference recurring options as well: Day, Week, 2 Weeks, Month, 3 Month and Year.

Tags – You can tag each task with multiple tag contexts so you can better filter your tasks during review or do phases.

Priority – None,Low,Medium,High,Urgent. Personally i think priorities don’t work haha.
Images – You can append images that will be shown describing what task this is. The range of images is limited, they look good and imo it clutters the screen.

Task Filtering for Review and Do

How you use eToDo to carry out your task in an efficient manner differs from person to person. If i were to use this, I would reference the All List quite alot.

One thing that you would really appreciate about eToDo is really the number next to the titles that tells you the number of tasks in there. I mean, If there isn’t any tasks in there I wouldn’t want to bother reviewing it and doing it right?

Touching the Filter Icon allows you to filter not just by Starred,Overdue,Today,Tomorrow,Next 7 Days and Future Tasks but also by the Tags. The filtering is eToDos strong point and it is a very important aspect of Getting Things Done as
- You need to Tag your tasks with the right context during Organize
- You need to filter and do tasks when you are at the right Context/Environment
- You need to filter well to make Reviewing of your Actions easy

This gets an A+ for me as this is where Appigo ToDo lacks. The number of tasks in each category is very useful!

Search

eToDo has a search as well. Not Sure when i will need this really!

Mailing Actions List

I love this option! What  you can do is that you can use Task Filtering to Filter
-Specific Tasks meant for Certain Colleagues
-List of Tasks You are Waiting for
-List of Tasks Tag with a certain category for others to review

and then send it out. Another A feature.

Conclusion

Overall, at USD 0.99 cents this application is a winner. It still won’t pull me away from Appigo ToDo as
- It does not have Sub-Projects
- No Sync backup to online server
But for folks that is looking for a flexible, well thought out to-do list 0.99 cents is a small price to pay.

Best iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ

Some of you would prefer to have a To Do List as a desktop client but would like it to assess a task database on the web. There is a solution for Remember the Milk, now it seems there is one for Google Tasks.

Actually it does more than that.It actually displays google’s application on mobile on an Adobe Air client. Thus the requirement is that you need to install Adobe Air.

I seriously sometimes wonder the rational of this.Everyone knows that the mobile apps are more limited then the desktop web application. So in that case why would someone want one on the desktop? The only reason is if you want to put a small task list at the side of your dual screen  setup so that you can take a look at it. if not why not just alt tab to your browser?

[Download Google Tasks here>>]

The guys at Remember the Milk are really trying to become the kings of task management with their ubiquitous task management system. I blog about it before that i used to spend some time on remember the milk as my main task manager and its a pretty good application.

The good thing about it is that

• they make task collection and reviewing a ubiquitous experience. you can find it
  • on their cool web interface
  • on google gadgets
  • on gmail
  • print it out
  • iphone
  • mobile web browser

Now you can add Android to it! My experience with Android have been that many establish task management developers have not taken to this platform yet and Remember the Milk looks to be the first among them to establish a foothold on this platform.

Shortly after refining their web task input methodology, they announce that their Android platform will be available to those that are willing to pay $25 per year for the Pro Account.

Here’s taking a look at the features and announcement:

Stay in sync.

Yup, it’s got background sync. Background sync! (Sorry to make all you iPhone users jealous! Everything that you create in the app syncs back to RTM (and likewise everything from RTM syncs to your device). That’s tasks, notes, lists, Smart Lists, tags, locations… everything! You can even use the entire app offline without an Internet connection, then sync up later when you’re back online.

Get notified.

The app wants to help you stay on top of things; it will pop up your reminders in the notification bar so you’ll know instantly when tasks are due. Running around town? The app can (optionally) keep an eye on your location, and let you know when a location with tasks is nearby.

Organize your way.

Organize efficiently by list, Smart List, tag, or location and prioritize your tasks. Not sure what’s next? See at a glance how many tasks are due today, tomorrow, and this week. Don’t like the ordering? Choose to sort by priority, due date, or task name for each list.

Manage your tasks.

Add and edit tasks with ease: choose from a quick ‘Add task’ bar and a full add mode. All the fields you’ve come to know and love are supported (task name, list, priority, due date/time, repeat, time estimate, tags, location, and URL) and you can even customize the fields shown. So if you’re big on tagging, you can set that field to always display when adding tasks.

Get stuff done.

Need to complete or postpone multiple tasks? No problem, just check to select those tasks in the list. You can also long press on individual tasks in the list to perform quick actions, or alternatively head over to the task view screen and do it all from there. You’ll be adding tasks just so you can say you’ve completed them.

Add tasks the Smart way.

Use the ‘Add task’ bar to add tasks with our new Smart Add syntax (e.g., “Pick up the milk tomorrow”). Save time with add by context: tasks added to your today list will be due today, while tasks added to Smart Lists inherit their criteria. If your Smart List happens to show all your high priority tasks that are due today and located at the office, any tasks added to this Smart List will automatically inherit all these properties.

Note it.

Need to store additional info about a task? Write a note for quick reference. You can manage your existing notes too, and easily edit or delete them. Email addresses and links in your notes conveniently auto-link to the mail and browser apps. Phone numbers in notes also auto-link for handy one-touch calling.

See tasks located nearby.

This is why we love devices that can detect your location! See your nearby tasks and plan the best way to get things done. Add new locations easily by current location or street address. Remember that if you locate your tasks in the app (e.g., “pick up the milk” at the supermarket), you can view them on a map on the web.

Your own personal tasks search engine.

Not only can you search for tasks by name, you can use any of the advanced search operators. Want to find your high priority tasks located within one mile and tagged with ‘errand’? Done! Save your favourite searches as Smart Lists for quick access.

A handy widget.

No need to leave your Home screen to see what’s due today; this widget will let you know what’s due (and overdue!) so you know where to get started.

The little touches.

Want to quickly switch from the Today to the Tomorrow screen? Just swipe the screen! Prefer landscape mode? No problem, just flip your device. Anything to make managing your tasks (and life easier.

Thanks to…

A big thanks to the RTM users in the Pro Tester Program who helped us to test the app, giving us lots of feedback and reporting the occasional bug. Bob really appreciated your help with testing!

Ready to use RTM on your Android device?

Just search for “Remember The Milk” on the Android Market; you can also find a download link here. If you don’t have a Pro account yet, you’ll be able to try the app free for 15 days (login to the app to start your trial).