WAToDo! Android GTD To Do List

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.