Over the past ten years, I’ve used three different programs to manage my to-do list.
The first, Life Balance, is still a program I love. It runs on the Mac, Palm, PC, and now iPhone. I like its basic idea of sorting your tasks by giving higher priority to tasks in areas you’ve been neglecting; I enjoy the interface and find it fun to work with. It’s great for projects that have subtasks, both ones that need doing in order and ones that can be done in any sequence.
So, why don’t I use it anymore? Because my Palm died, and this made the program far less useful to me. Even before that, because I used it both at home and at work, it was a hassle to keep it synced; once my Palm was no longer there as a go-between, it became too much trouble. (If I’d had a good thumb drive at the time, I might have tried keeping the file on that, but at the time it wasn’t an option.)
Enter cloud computing. Through someone’s blog, I discovered Remember the Milk, an online to-do list. I was immediately hooked. While I missed many of the LB features, the convenience of having my task list at work AND home, hassle-free, outweighed the missing capabilities. And RtM has many handy features of its own, most notably its use of tags and its easy keystrokes for editing tasks. I used RtM for well over a year, and was planning to finally pony up for a paid account even though it wouldn’t give me any new features that were useful to me….
…until one of RtM’s quirks bit me in the rear.
I don’t know if this is still true, but at the time, when you selected multiple tasks in RtM, you had to invoke the multi-edit function to change details about all the tasks, but you didn’t have to invoke it to delete them all — or complete them all. And when you created tasks, they stayed selected until you unselected them. This made it easy to accidentally delete or complete a task, especially when one of the selected tasks was so low on the screen that you had to scroll down to see it.
It was an accidental completion that got me. One day my boss asked me about my progress on a project that I hadn’t started and that had completely slipped off my radar. While fortunately I was able to complete the project in time, I wondered how it could’ve escaped my notice since I was regularly reviewing my work tasks in RtM; on investigation, it turned out to have been accidentally completed when I completed another task, so it never showed up on my to-do list afterward.
I’d had several accidental deletes and completes before that I’d caught and been able to undo, but after this one, I no longer trusted RtM. The whole point of using a to-do list, whether on paper or in pixels, is because my brain can’t keep track of all my tasks and obligations; if it’s too easy to lose a task on my to-do list, then it’s a bad to-do list for me. (Granted, there’s an RtM workaround: always unselect all before selecting tasks to complete or delete. But by that point, I wasn’t comfortable with trusting the system during the time it’d take me to ingrain the habit.)
So I searched for a replacement program, and eventually decided to try Toodledo, the program I’m still using.
Toodledo has most of the features I liked about RtM — the cloud, the tags, the convenience. It was easy to import my RtM data (though I did have to do some data wrangling with my exported file to keep from having too much cruft), and while it took me a few days to get used to the different interface, one day I realized that I’d been using Toodledo happily for a few months and wasn’t having any “but I wish I could do this RtM thing” thoughts. Plus, I can do a few things that I can’t do in RtM (most notably, have the equivalent of an RtM smartlist for “overdue tasks that were due within the last week”). There’s a few things about the program I’m not crazy about (I don’t like the checkmark when you hover over the task checkbox being the same color as the checkmark when you’ve completed the task, for example), but overall I’m satisfied — enough so that I’ve paid for a Pro account.
To someone who’s looking for a good to-do list program, I’d recommend checking out any of these three. Life Balance is a fine program; I’d recommend it to a business who wants a to-do program that lives on their own servers, to a Palm user, or to an iPhone user. In the event that I ever shell out for an iPhone (or get myself an iTouch, if it runs on that too), I might start using it again. RtM, in spite of the quirks has many features a lot of folks find indispensable, and if you start out with the “unselect all” habit, it’ll work fine for you. And of course, Toodledo does what I need from a to-do list: shows me what I need to do, when I need to do it, with lots of fun features.
(Now, if only a to-do list could actually do some of these tasks for me….)
