Toodledo

Well the end of my first day with Toodledo and so far I am really impressed.  It is really easy to get up and running it with, almost from the first minute.  The help is minimal but you hardly need it so that is fine.

Some of the features are a bit hard to track down, but nothing has beaten me yet, and it beats the socks off of applications like Outlook and iCal for ease of finding what you want.

Big hit is the goals feature.  Simple, but very effective.  I think I would have liked another level, but three levels is fine.  The only big dissappointment is that I couldn't find a way of printing out the goals.  I guess you are supposed to have them elsewhere.

The todo list, which is the heart of the application is really neat.  It allows a multiplicity of views easily, most of the ones I am likely to want to use.   The ability to have both folder views and context views is really handy.

All in all, I am really impressed so far.  I think I am going to be going for the Pro subscription but I will get used to the free features first.

Using Toodledo to Set Goals

TodoodleDo allows you to set up a hierarchy of goals which can then be related to the tasks you are working on.

This is a neat feature software wise.  There are three levels: lifetime, long term and short term.  Long term and short term can be related to higher level goals.   Tasks can be related to any level of goals.  I suspect that the software might use these relationships for further analysis of tasks, but I haven’t got that far yet.

I think it is possible to use Toodledo without using the goals feature at all, but I think that would be a mistake.  Relating what you are doing on a minute by minute basis to your goals, especially your lifetime goals, really is the key to making your time management system something that really works for you rather than simply a way of keeping your desk looking tidy and your fridge well stocked.

Confronted with the goals page I was forced to think through a lot of what I am doing at the moment and why I am doing it.  The software helped – but it was the thinking process that mattered.  The fact that you can add notes to goals is really useful.  I have decided that for all the goals I set I need to write a justification for why the goal is important to me.

The only disappointment is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to print out or export the goals that is immediately obvious.  I find this a shame.  For me, having my goals on piece of paper in the real world that I can carry around and look at is something that I don’t do enough of, and it would be good if Toodledo helped me do it.

But overall, I am really impressed with the simple but powerful way Toodledo gives you a way of managing the goals you have set yourself.

Task management and planning are an absolute disaster where I work now. There's three people in charge of what I do and none of them talk to each other.

I tried showing them the link to Toodledo, but somehow their consciousness if on another plane of existence.

Any ideas how I can make the idea of actually using a planning tool other than an excel sheet on their desktop appealing to them?

Task management and planning are an absolute disaster where I work now.There's three people in charge of what I do and none of them talk toeach other.
I tried showing them the link to Toodledo, but somehow their consciousness if on another plane of existence.
Any ideas how I can make the idea of actually using a planning tool other than an excel sheet on their desktop appealing to them?

-woollymittens

You have my sympathy wooly.  I work with two different companies spread over three sites, several contract manufacturers and run a small business on the side.  Luckily nearly all the people I work with are fine as human beings and communication does happen, but there does seem to be a large number of people for whom a brightly coloured spreadsheet is the only solution they will consider to any problem.

I think spreadsheets are a bit like children.  Your own are beautiful, but other people's are hideous.  And when you get a group of them together there is bound to be trouble.

My advice would be that if you can get your own act together you will help yourself and probably your bosses too.  The first thing I would do is set up a tickle file either in thee dimensions with paper or use Toodledo or similar on a computer.  In whatever system you use treat each of the three bosses as a context.  Make sure you can produce a list of next actions on everything you are working on for all three at any moment.  I think if you keep that up for a few months it will be noticed and you will find that your system becomes the controlling system for your groups projects. 

Toodledo's Task List

The task list is the heart of Toodledo, with the rest of the system built around it.  This approach makes it very easy to get started and is quite flexible.  You can put a task on the system without any context and with no further information.  This works well if you just want to get something off your mind and into your system to work on later.  You can assign a task to a folder and a context.  The way I use these is to use folders to designate projects and the context to keep seperate lists for the different places I work. My current contexts are work desk, work lab, home PC and home lab.  I will probably be adding a couple of contexts to that.  Adding and adjusting contexts and folders is easy.  There is a standard set of priorities - I tend not to use priorities very much.  Something is either worth doing or not in most cases.  But they can be helpful sometimes when you have a lot of things to do and not much time to do them in.

There are a whole set of ways you can look at your job list.  The only thing it doesn't do easily is simply arrange a list in an order you might chose.  The work around is to number them and sort them alphabetically which is a bit of a fag.  But other than that everything you might want to do with your lists is quickly and easily achievable.

The feature I really like is that you can relate your tasks to your goals at any level.  This is where a lot of time management systems, software based and otherwise, fall over.   It isn't difficult to come up with lists of things to do and taxonomically satisfying classifications for your projects and errands.  But if you can't work out why you are doing something it will be difficult to stay motivated to keep to your system.

The other thing I really like is that you can put live links in your task notes.  This means you can have a direct link to things like Google Docs and Zoho.  Very handy for people like me who have a lot of writing projects on at any one time.

All in all, if you are looking for a web based to do list, you should really seriously consider Toodledo. 

Importing/Exporting/Sync

Toodledo offers a whole page of various options to work with other programmes.  The one that on the face of it is most impressive and most appealing is to live sync with Google Calendar.  Well I spent some time fiddling about but completely failed to get this to work.  What is straightforward is exporting an iCal file from Toodledo and importing it into Google Calendar.  This was satisfying simple, but after a bit of trial and error and some thought I decided that this too was a waste of time.  Google Calendar doesn't have all the functions of Toodledo so you can't really work on your data in Google Calendar.  And you have access to Toodeldo all the time you have live access to Google Calendar.  I am going to use this option simply to keep a back up of my tasks data in case Toodledo ever shuts up shop.

I also successfully exported my data to my Palm.  Once again, this is really only useful as a back up facility.

What would be really neat would be a facility to add completed tasks to your Google Calendar so you could build up a diary of what you had worked on.  I find myself doing this by hand as I go along.

In conclusion, Toodledo has an impressive range of sync options, but probably only useful for back up rather than working on elsewhere.

Just experienced my first down time with Toodledo since I started using it at the beginning of the month.  It means that my time management system is working on manual back up at the moment. 

I will be monitoring the level of downtime carefully.  The problem with online services like this is they are totally useless if they are unreliable - in particular you can never be 100% sure that they are going to be around indefinitely so you need to have back ups for all your data. 

I hope to continue my evaluation when they come back.

They are back up now.  Maybe 2 hours down time.

Toodledo is down again.  I am really liking it when it is available but if it is not reliable I don't want to risk losing all my data.  I will keep the trial going for the whole of July but it is looking like the hardware might let down the software.

I have just got through my first full week with Toodledo.  Conclusions so far- its basically a very good platform for implementing GTD. If you use the GTD system already I think you will find Toodledo easy to adapt to your needs.  If you are thinking of giving GTD a try Toodledo would be a good framework to use.  If you have some other time management system I would imagine that Toodledo is flexible enough to work with it.

What Toodledo isn't is a solution itself.  If you feel the need to get organised but don't really know where to begin, don't think this software will help. Because it is so flexible it will simply recreate whatever confusion you are already suffering from in Toodledo format.

The only other issue is down time. It is a purely web based service and I haven't found a way of working off line with it yet.  If you don't have ready access to the internet it isn't for you.  And I have been a bit spooked by a prolonged period when the site wasn't available.

Awesome running review of the service. Thanks for sharing the experience and keep it coming - valuable for people that want to know more :)

Fair enough one week synopsis mate - good work and thank you.

Thanks Dave, it is good to feel appreciated.

Very quick update - I have been concentrating on actually doing work rather than tweaking my system or investigating Toodledo's features.  The downtime last week hasn't been repeated and the basic features of the programme are robust and working well.  I will definitely upgrade to one of the Pro versions, but I am going to keep going as I am right through July and will give a definitive verdict on the free to use option at the end of the month long trial.

Thanks for the update. Often good to persevere with something even if you experience some downtime. It just might be the one bad week they have ever had. I agree it erodes confidence for a new user but sometimes it can be worth sticking with it and finding that it is a good experience.

Well I have finished my full month of using Toodledo.  My only real worry had been with downtime, but there has only been one episode of this.  The rest of the time it has been up and running a dream.

My conclusions haven't changed.  It is a very good task list manager with some really neat features in the free version.  I now plan to upgrade to the paid version to see if that is better.   The only thing that I really don't like is that you can't print out your goals.  There isn't even a clunky way of doing it without literally editing the orginal HTML files.  

But that aside, it does everything you can reasonably expect an online task manager to do and does nearly everything very well.

I thought that there was a "printable" option in there somewhere? Maybe the paid version??

I thought that there was a "printable" option in there somewhere? Maybe the paid version??

-davegray

Dave, you can print out your to do list in goal order, but you can't print out your goals as a separate report.   There is no indication that you can do it in the paid version either, but as I am going to be going over to the paid version I will check.

The print out function for the to do list works pretty well.

There is also an option to print it onto a fold up report you can put in your pocket.  It didn't really appeal to me but some people might like it.

Great review

Importing/Exporting/Sync
Toodledo offers a whole page of various options to work with other programmes.  The one that on the face of it is most impressive and most appealing is to live sync with Google Calendar.  Well I spent some time fiddling about but completely failed to get this to work.  What is straightforward is exporting an iCal file from Toodledo and importing it into Google Calendar.  This was satisfying simple, but after a bit of trial and error and some thought I decided that this too was a waste of time.  Google Calendar doesn't have all the functions of Toodledo so you can't really work on your data in Google Calendar.  And you have access to Toodeldo all the time you have live access to Google Calendar.  I am going to use this option simply to keep a back up of my tasks data in case Toodledo ever shuts up shop.
I also successfully exported my data to my Palm.  Once again, this is really only useful as a back up facility.
What would be really neat would be a facility to add completed tasks to your Google Calendar so you could build up a diary of what you had worked on.  I find myself doing this by hand as I go along.
In conclusion, Toodledo has an impressive range of sync options, but probably only useful for back up rather than working on elsewhere.

-beautyscientist

I am using the iPhone interface (1 week) and it allows you to perform all the important tasks when you are offline.

The live sync with Google Calendar is an option I'm planning on using. I hope I can get it to work. Unless its live it will be useless to me. With the live interface you can work on your ToodleDo data in Google Calendar. Maybe this would then show completed tasks?

Thanks for adding that Robe.  I don't have an i-phone, but efficient syncing with Toodledo might be the killer reason to get one.  The drawback of computer based systems is that even the most hardened geek sometimes is away from direct internet access, and you really want to capture all your tasks.

I am using Toodledo in a slightly different way now.  I set up all but the most trivial of tasks as a daily task.  When I adress a task I set the timer going while I am working on it.  At the end of the day I have a list of the time I have spent on everything and Toodledo keeps a running total.  I then tick all the tasks off and they all appear on my list for the next day.   There is a calender function built in so I can see how much I have done on various projects.

All in all, I am very impressed and pleased with Toodledo, and I think that it is flexible enough that it might be useful to lots of people with differing needs.  Thanks to the AGP for putting me onto it.