I think this topic matches well my habit of keeping track of todos by means of mind mapping tools.
Have a look at http://www.marcomilani.it/topics/mind-mapping and leave a comment if you like.

Kind regards

Marco

Thanks for the comment, and for being interested in the community here at TV (we appreciate it! :D)

You’re right – it would be useful for you guys as readers to see why I’m moving away from Remember the Milk and towards a simpler solution. I didn’t think about that when I wrote this article, to be honest, so thanks for pointing that out.

If I have time, I’ll try to do that in the future.

Hope you’re well!

- Ryan

very nice article!

I’m already practicing this way of todo listing, but on paper. A have a huge list of overall todos. Every day in the morning i mark the items to be finished that day.

After reading your post i’ll try to switch to your tool based weekly variant.

Thanks and best regards
Jean Marie

One of the nicest features is that it has a gmail addon that allows you to attach emails (with link) to your items so I get email requests, “add email”, set a date and when it’s done, I can click on the link, then reply to the person and say “done…”.

Works for me :)

I’d be super interested to hear in detail about why you’ve switched applications, a comparison piece kind of thing. This would be so valuable because it takes time to get to know an application well and since you obviously knew Things pretty well, I’d like know what it did do well and what it didn’t do so well.

By not referring to that blogpost or your GTD app usage history at all, I feel like you are not acknowledging us regular readers and this leads me to think that you’re more interested in driving new traffic to your website rather than engaging in an ongoing discussion with your community.

http://masteryourworkday.com/

Here at Imulus we had a same issue of task management across the team. We tried using different types of applications such as Things, Ta-da list, etc., but we still found loopholes that end up costing us more time in the end. I’ll have one task item that I’m concentrating for that day or week, but another team member would have no clue of my workload and assign me with an urgent task that would need to be completed by the end of the day, when in fact I already had two other urgent tasks due that day. Time for some hair pulling? To resolve that problem, we developed Stacks (http://www.usestacks.com) that visually represents individual workload and has been of great help for our team. Nothing gets in the way anymore.

As far as my personal to-do tasks, I’ll use The Hit List or Simplenote for jotting down notes.

Aida

A great article and somewhat similar to what I do. I assume you’ve heard of the Pomodoro Technique. I use a variation on that in that I have a master list of various To-Do’s relating to projects and non projects. Each morning I take 25 mins to pick out the important tasks for that day. I start work on each task in turn and have a seperate sheet for things that come up during the day that aren’t planned for. I then decide whether these are things that should be added into my ‘To-Do Today’ list or whether they’re added into my master To-do list for another day.

I like your idea of having an overall To-Do This Week list. If I was to start to use this I would use it to populate my To-Do Today list. Yes it adds an extra layer to my overall process but I see no problem with this as it just makes things more granular.

Thanks for the advice!

Doesn’t it freak you out that you’ve got so many open todos on your RTM site?

Also, I’ve looked at RTM but have been a bit confused about the bazillion ways you can catergorise tasks etc – what approach do you take to organising RTM please?

I tend to use Highrise, a 37 signals tool, which is a simple CRM but also handles simple task lists.

@Joel_Hughes

Good article though!

I’ve been using Basecamp’s for all my business projects and good ol’ Moleskine notebook for daily activities that have to be accomplished by the end of the day.

And this goes hand-in-hand when you say: “Make sure these are atomic, do-able things…” — I think that’s key in setting up tasks and getting them done.

I wasn’t so sure about your suggestion of using two various web-apps to accomplish one thing, but I than I realized I’m doing the same thing using Basecamp for ‘global’ and Moleskine for ‘daily’.

Thanks for sharing Ryan.