An interesting study by linkedin found that 89% of professionals that start todo lists actually do not complete their tasks for a given day.
63% create todo lists. Of those 50% manage them on paper and 45% electronically. Check out one of our todo tools reviews, if you want to get started using a digital todo manager.
GetPaprika is a very simple tools that let’s you organize your todos and notes in a single list.
The core concept of Get Paprika is quite simple and quite different from other todo tools: You can create projects and every project has one editable text page associated to it.
When you switch from view to edit mode you can capture notes, create todos, tags, dates and format your text using basic formatting options via textile.
Once you save your document you can then mark todos as done, filter and search for tags, dates and projects.
There is also an option to share the document via a link that you can send to anybody and they can edit it without signing up. However there is no history or an indication as to who wrote what.
As far as a personal easy-to-use dump for notes and todos GetPaprika does quite well. When working in a team you would wish for more options, more work flows and automation. Such as assignments, automated priorization, reminders and so forth.
It only takes a couple of minutes to get to know the concept and basic textile commands to use GetPaprika. So you can start working straight away.
The one-list concept for both notes, todos, dates and tags also helps you get started capturing your stuff pretty fast.
On the other hand, once you have captured your stuff and you want to work with your list, you will find yourself regularly switching to edit mode to either remove, reorder or edit your stuff.
The overall design (look and feel, performance and usability) is very well done, straight forward and low-noise. Quite fun to use, actually.
GetPaprika is free, easy and fun. It allows you to quickly capture and format your notes and todos. No real hassle, no complexity. If you are looking for a personal brain dump which still allows you some degree of todo management, GetPaprika seems like a good choice.
If you need more features, more workflow or better collaboration you should maybe take a look at our review of the task manager “flow” or our review of “action method” – a project management tool.
tadalist is a very simple web based todo manager that allows you to create lists with tasks and check them off when done.
The concept of tadalist is straightforward: Todos are grouped into lists. Thats almost it:
There is really nothing distracting you from creating and working with your todos. However the tool is primarily aimed for personal use and offers little or no flexibility when trying to filter todos via tags, importance or other properties.
Feature Rating: 1/5
One of the Design Commandments by famous product designer Dieter Rams says:
“Good design is as little design as possible.”
Tadalist pretty much nails this one on the head. Nothing distracts you from creating and working with your todos.
Even more: The user flow for creating todos is almost impecible. It is fast, you can create them with as little clicks as possbile, as many as you want at a time.
Little details make your todo decisions a little bit easier: The more todos a list contains, the larger the little circle in front of it gets.
Design Rating: 4/5
Even though I really enjoyed the flow of tadalist, for real work or even real todo management, tadalist has too little to offer. Once you get past 4 or 5 lists with more then 10 todos in each, filtering, prioritizing and a better interaction view become necessary, in my opinion. For real collaboration features such as assigning tasks seem useful but not implemented in tadalist.
Overall Rating: 2/5
remember the milk (rtm) is a very popular and free online task manager for personal usage. In its core it works with lists and allows for great integration into your work flow due to a ton of different services and device apps.
The core functionality revolves around lists that you can sort your tasks into. You can create as many lists as you want to – you can even define “smart list” by individual search criteria.
You can email your tasks to rtm and they land in your inbox as do all tasks that you don’t assign to a specific list.
The tasks in remember the milk can have the following properties:
Even though rtm offers you the possibility to share tasks, this feature is not at the center of the tool. The process of sharing a task is not very straight forward and you have to invite the person before being able to send them the task.
A very interesting feature is the reminder. As in most tools you can set a due date for you task. In rtm however you can also set how you want to be reminded: Either by a message to your mobile phone, your IM service or email. And how long before the due time you want to me reminded.
The overview section is supposed to help you decide on what to do next. There are only three list: Due today, due tomorrow and overdue. There is also a tag cloud with all your tags.
The feature that for me personally makes rtm so appealing is their integration into other tools and devices.
There is a whole list of services available:
Without the services I would have probably only given rtm 2 out 5 for feature. Because it focuses on personal usage primarily and apart from the list view there are not many features to help you get things done. But the gmail plugin definitely integrates awesomely into my workflow.
Feature Rating: 3/5
What really bugs me about rtm is the way there main work area. Especially when trying to work through and edit your tasks.
On the top you have tabs with your lists which break into a second row if you have too many lists. This makes it harder to see all your lists. Also there could be a count to the items in each lists displayed – so that you have a better overview of your status.
In center left you have your list with todos in your current list-tab. This basically is fine. However, if you want to edit or change something with your currently selected task, you have to go up all the way beneath the tab-list and select whatever action you like from a dropdown. You cannot really complete a task at the task. Click and done style.
But even worse is the work flow for editing tags or other information of a task. You have check the task and then on the top right side appears an overview of the tasks properties where you click and edit. So if your task is in a list of 20 or 30 tasks the box you edit in is far away from your task and your context.
The last critique holds true for adding a task. After you put in your tasks title you have to select it and edit its properties as described – this really is a nuissance.
The only real remidy is to learn the shortcuts which makes working with rtm a lot faster.
Design Rating: 2/5
Sometimes it’s less about the features or the usability – sometimes it’s more about whether or not a tool fits into your workflow. For me remember the milk works well, because it has a has a widget available in a place I use throughout my whole work day: In gmail. I do most of interaction with rtm through this widget, which definitely works for me.
The tool itself lacks a couple of features (like simple task sharing) and the usability could be improved. If you are looking for a free, simple and versatile task manager – remember the milk could be the one for you.
Overall Rating: 3/5
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For a complete remember the milk guide check out their getting started section.
[via lifehacker und Gmail Blog]
As we develop our own task management tool, we of course ask ourselves what features it should incorporate. I stumbled upon two articles. Here is a summary of the features that a perfect todo or task management tool should incorporate:
Of course there are many more feature wishes out there. We will be on the lookout for more inspiration for our tool.
Feel free to post your feature wishes, ideas and suggestions in the comments.
Jason Fitzpatrick has written up what to-do list managers the readers of lifehacker.com like.
I would have expected paper to be on top of the list, however google seems to be omnipresent, as ever ;)
Check out the post - there is a video and short explanation to every tool. At the end you can vote for your favourite.
