WAToDo! Android GTD To Do List

Reviewing and Executing Tasks with WAToDo

We have discusses about collecting tasks and organizing them.

We will need to them review and execute them. WAToDo! provides different views to filter and zoom in to whichever tasks you should be tackling.

Reviewing Today's tasks

In the Main perspective view you will be able to review the tasks that are due today.

This will show a list of tasks that is due today.

Reviewing Next Actions

We mention in Collecting and Defining Tasks how to set a task to Next Action. Other than in the Task Perspective, you can set it in the main list by long pressing on the task to bring up the action bar. Touch on "Next Action" to set or unset it from Next Action. Not the green Next label appearing if you set it to next action.

In the Main perspective view you will be able to review the tasks toggled as Next Action.  These will be tasks that you have earmarked to do next.

GTD: A good way to use Next Actions is to review each project and find one main task that you want to Focus on each day and tag it as a next action.

This is typically a time intensive task. Each day you would want to focus on 1-4 next actions so setting them as Next Action brings focus to them.

Reviewing via Tags

Once you tag your tasks with the appropriate tags you will be able to use them to filter based on what context you are in.

There are 2 ways to go into review via tags. The first way is to click on the "Tag" button at the bottom action bar of most screens in WAToDo!

The second way is to go to the Main Perspective and click on the Tags row.

Recall that in Organizing Lists and Tasks, we talk about 3 kinds of contexts: location specific, person specific and time intensity

Touching on Tags, you can then select based on what context you are in currently. A list of tasks matching your tag filters will be displayed in List perspective.

Working with AND and ANY

WAToDo! can carry out 2 kinds of tag filtering. At the Tag perspective you can toggle from "AND" which is default to "ANY".

As an example of how powerful this is here are some examples:

The above selection is an AND selection and 2 tags are chosen: *long and office. Basically, you want to review tasks that you can only do in the office that are long intensity.

We find that there are one task here that falls within this criteria. Basically you have only one nasty long winded task in the office.

In the screen above, we select ANY and 3 tags:contact, errands and office. Basically,we want to review tasks whether they are in contact, errands and office.

This criteria is more lax and you get all the tasks that falls into either of the 3 tags.

Overdue and Uncompleted Tasks in Tag

You may have notice that there is a blue and red number next to each tag. What it indicates is the number of overdue and uncompleted tasks.

This is to better help the user know which tags have more uncompleted or urgent tasks.

Reviewing Custom Lists and Projects

Normally it is not advisable to do a task based on list or project reviews. This is because you do your next immediate actions or due actions that you have planned for using Today, Next Action or Tags.

Reviewing Custom lists and projects is only during your daily or weekly review where you empty your head during Collecting and Defining Tasks and then organizing and prioritizing what to do next (setting which task out of your actionable task in the list will be the next action).

Metadata of each row in List Perspective

Task Grouping

Tasks in the List Perspective are grouped as either No Grouping, Due Date or Priority with Due Date as the default. Completed tasks are displayed separately. Touch on the group by icon at the bottom action bar to change.

Users can change the default for Group By and Separate Completed in the settings.

Organizing Lists and Tasks with WAToDo

In this section we will be going through how to organize your tasks.

Recalling that in the previous tutorial we outline some examples :

• emails and calls you have to make to your clients
• groceries that you need to buy for the week
• phone bills that you need to pay due on the 13th of this month
• warranty expiry of your smartphone
• get down to doing a requirement to add on to your development at work
• draft out documents required for the audit coming up
• check with the QA personnel what is required for the upcoming audit
• to manage monthly paychecks by distributing them to various spending accounts
• get my subordinates to validate the existing documents for audit again

How to move tasks

Under Each Task there is a Lists/Projects. Touch on it will bring you to this list of Lists and Projects you can attach this task to.

Touching on the desired item will move the task there.

But where can you move your Tasks and projects to?

Inbox list

By default all tasks will be collected in your Inbox. This is where you collect ideas and thoughts before defining them fully.

GTD: The key is to get things off your head and inside here. You do not need to defined them fully just what they are about. It is then advisable to plan a 10 min interval in a week or day to then better define them. You can call this your"Daily Review" or"Weekly Review"

When to use Someday/Maybe List

Someday/Maybe List is a default list to store the tasks and projects that you would not want to pick up now but want to remember to do.

Some tasks like this would be

GTD: Typically these tasks do not have a dead line and can be archive indefinitely or even deleted but should you be ready to carry them out you can move the tasks and projects to other lists.

Custom Lists and Projects

Organizing with Custom Lists

Our lives are full of complex things and men have rely on lists to help us group things that have a common objectives or related together.

Custom Lists is to do just that. You could create a list called "Mom" to pit down all the things your mother wants you to do or "Personal" for all the things personal and not work related.

GTD: I urge you to create lists based on your Areas of Focus or Areas of responsibility. This would be objective things to achieve goals or milestones within 1 year.

Some examples are

Notice they are all roles that you play a person or areas where you focus in.

Organizing with Projects

In Defining and Collecting Tasks, we talk that in your Inbox some tasks are made up of multiple actions. A good example is this:

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 likely procrastinate and not fulfill it.

A better definition of this task is as a Task Project.

Here is another  example. Let us examine Project Waterloo. Delivering Project Waterloo entails satisfying many milestones and in each milestones there are work to be carried out such as planning, costing, integration and closing etc.

Project Waterloo is the custom list in this case. In the list we have:

1. Project: Milestone 1
2. Project: Milestone 2
3. Project: Milestone 3

In Milestone 2 we have more tasks or rather requirements that we need to fulfill.

To toggle a task that have multiple actions as projects, go into the task and toggle the task to become a project. Then you would be able to add the  tasks under this project.

As a default, each Custom List can only have 1 level of Project, but you will be able to increase the number of levels up to 8 levels in Settings.

Organizing with Tags

As briefly explained in Defining and Collecting Tasks, Tags is another way of grouping your tasks.

Generally you can tag them with any context you prefer: Boss, Mom, Girlfriend 1, Girlfriend 2, Intensive, Errands, Supermarket so on and so forth.

We think that tags can be broken up into 3 categories:

Each task can be tag to multiple tag and later in Reviewing and Executing Tasks we will show you how useful tags can be in filtering out what you should be doing at a specific time or place.

How to edit Tasks, Custom Lists, Projects and Tags

Edit and Update Tasks and Projects

Editing and updating tasks can mean alot of things but when it comes to all your editing options you can carry them out in the Task perspective view.

For a Normal Task, touch on the task will bring you to the Task Perspective. There you can further touch into each item to edit it. Once you touch "Save" for most items, the task attribute is saved. Refer to this tutorial for further screenshots.

Edit and Update Custom Lists

At the Main perspective, long touch on the custom list you want to edit.This will bring up a menu, touch on "Edit" which will bring you to the Custom List perspective view.

Touch on the name of the custom list to edit the description.

Edit and Update Tags

At the Tag perspective, long touch on the custom list you want to edit. This will bring up a menu, Touch on "Edit" which will bring you to the Tag perspective view.

Touch on the name of the Tag, this will bring you to the edit tag. Edit and Save your new tag description.

How to delete Tasks, Custom Lists, Projects and Tags

Deleting Tasks and Projects

There are 2 places where you can delete tasks.

Note:  if you delete a project with sub-tasks all the sub-tasks will be deleted.

In your List perspective, long touch on the task you want to delete. A menu will pop up and you can then touch on "Delete" to delete the task.

In the Task perspective, touch on the "Trash Bin" at the bottom of the task to delete it.

Deleting Custom Lists

Note:  all the tasks in the custom list will be deleted as well

In the Main perspective, long touch on the list you want to delete. A menu will pop up and you can then touch on"Delete" to delete the task.

Deleting Tags

In the Tag perspective, long touch on the list you want to delete. A menu will pop up and you can then touch on "Delete" to delete the task.

In the next tutorial we will discuss how to review and execute tasks.

Defining And Collecting Tasks with WAToDo

What to Collect

WAToDo! allows the user to collect alot of things into its lists and projects.

In your life you would encounter alot of thoughts, such as ideas, problems and repeating things to remember.

WAToDo allows you to collect them.

Collecting your tasks into Inbox, Someday/Maybe and Custom Lists

Inbox

Inbox is a universal list to collect anything that you can think of i.e. all the life examples listed above.

Once you collect everything here, you will then be able to re-distribute it to other projects and lists when you organize them

Custom Lists

Should you know which lists or projects these tasks fall under, you can directly create these tasks into custom lists.

We will explain more about custom lists later, but as a short definition, custom lists allows you to categorize tasks based on your areas of focus or responsibility. This could be your personal goals for this year, the individual big projects you manage at work, or  a specific responsibility your boss task you with.

You will be able to edit and delete these lists as you like. Which we will show you later.

Someday/Maybe List

Someday/Maybe according to GTD, contains all tasks and projects that the user has decided not to commit to at present. Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean it needs to be followed through on with action. Examples of projects like these could be:

• Plan for extra training for your employees which are not mandatory
• Learn to make a wooden toolbox when i have free time

This list is also a permanent list which means you cannot delete it.

Creating Custom Lists

Unlike Inbox and Someday/Maybe Lists, WAToDo does not provide you with any starting custom lists. It is up to you to decide what you name these lists!

Note the "Cross" button on the top corner, touch on it will bring up the custom list create.

Enter the name of your custom list. Then touch "Save"

Your list will be created you can touch the "<" to go back to the main view.

Now you have one more custom list to add tasks and projects to.

Defining the task

To create a task you will need to go into your Inbox, Someday/Maybe or Custom List. Similar to the custom list there is a "+" button on the top right corner. Touching this button brings you to task creation.

Enter the task by defining the tasks. Provide a clear actionable definition to allow you to relate next time what you need to do. Touch "Save" to create or "Cancel" to discard.

You will be brought to the task details. Your task is already created, but to make it easier for you to manage, review and do your tasks in the future, you may want to configure some options. If you do not wish to, touching the "<" arrow will bring you back to your lists.

Making a task a project

Task also needs to be granular level for you to easily carry out. If a task is made up of multiple actionable steps, you can turn this task into a Task Project. A project would allow you to specify more sub-tasks.

Note: If you toggle from Project to Task, all existing tasks in that project will move to the parent of this project.

Defining Due Date

Defining a due date enables you to keep track of when the tasks becomes due. It prompts you that you have Yo get this task done immediate and not procrastinate.

A specially created calendar makes selecting dates easier. Navigate by monthly calendar or for fast entry select from 9 Pre-defined date below the calendar selector.

Setting Priorities

There are other ways to group importance of tasks. One common way is to use priorities.

Things To Do provide 4 priorities: High, Medium, Low and None. 4 priorities allow you to group tasks based on the urgency nature of task. You may also choose to use only 2 priorities: high or none, it's all up to your workflow.

Next Action and Complete

A task by default will be saved as incomplete but can be triggered in 2 modes.

Next Action works abit like priorities. It is essentially an uncompleted task but earmarked by you to be next in line to be done. Next action tasks is sorted higher than due dates and priorities in lists and projects since it is what you intent to do next.

GTD: WAToDo provides a list of Next Actions at the home screen. Any tasks or projects toggle as Next Action, will show up there. Essentially, use next action to flag off 1-2 tasks you wish to accomplish next.

Uncompleted tasks and Next Action tasks when finished will be toggle to complete. This will essentially be equivalent to checking the tasks in the list screen.

Attaching Tags

You can specify tags for tasks or projects. Tags is a way to further classify your tasks and enables you to better manage and execute them later on. For more on how to organize your tasks using tags, go to Organizing Lists and Tasks to learn more.

GTD: Think of this as your contexts. WAToDo! allows you to select multiple tags per task and you can categorize them yourself into person agendas, location or duration.

Moving or Re-assigning tasks

At times you would want to move tasks from Inbox list or another custom list to another project or list. WAToDo! allows you to do this as well as move it into Task Projects.

Select the List or Project you want to move it to.

Attaching notes

When you have more things to keep note, remember or specify you can make use of notes to attach more details. It will show up in snippets in your lists as well as in your task view.

Specify Repeating Tasks

Tasks like "to manage monthly paychecks by distributing them to various spending accounts" is something that you will do repeatedly every month.

Touching from Repeating will bring you to the Repeating Manager. Here you will see what is the current Repeating Status, from "No Repeating" to "Repeat Task every weekday"

Repeats from allow you to specify when the repeat will start from. Selecting "Due Date" will repeat from the date the task is due. Selecting "Completion Date" will repeat from the date you completed this task.

Example:  Today is 4th Dec 2010 and task due date is 3rd Nov 2010. From Due Date for a every weekday task will result in the new task being created on 4th of Nov 2010. From Completion Date will result in the new task being created on 6th of Dec 2010 since 5th of Dec is a Sunday.

WAToDo! allows 3 categories of repeating. Touching on "Daily", "Weekly" and "Monthly" allows you to specify which time frame to repeat. Touching on "-" removes any repeating.

Daily

There are 2 forms of Daily repeats.

Every Weekday will result in the task repeating on every Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday and Friday

Repeat every X day(s) will result in the task repeating in a specified interval.

Example: Every 3 days, Every 1 days

Weekly

In Weekly, you specify that the task repeat every X weeks on which ever days of the week specified.

Example: Every 2 weeks on Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday.

Monthly

There are 2 modes for Monthly

Repeating day X of every Y months enable you to set repeating to a specific day of the month for every few months.

Example: Repeat day 2 of every 1 months repeats on 2nd of every 1 month interval.

You can also specify the task to repeat every 1-5 week days of every month.

Example: Repeat every second Thursday of every 3 months!

Task Created

Once a task is made completed, a new task will then be created.

To learn how to organize Lists and Tasks proceed to Organizing Lists and Tasks.