Snippets of a Life

As some of you may know, I'm a big fan of organizer applications that can manage my To-Do lists. Ever since I bought my very first PDA, a Pilot 5000 by US Robotics, I' ve been hooked on them. Those who know me will have heard about how I consistently overload organizer apps with so many items that they implode.

Not all organizer apps are equal. I've used really clunky ones on my Pocket PC before and up until recently, I've been using Things on my Mac and my iPod Touch. I really like Things. In fact, I'd still be using Things if they had an online sync mechanism that didn't require my iPod to be on the same Wi-Fi network as my Mac. This usually wasn't an issue until I started heavy usage of my organizer apps again.

You see, I have been trying to practice ballet but I could never find the time for it. A lot of it is due to mismanagement of my free time. I tried using Things and while it's great, it simply didn't adapt fast enough to my now-busier lifestyle, not without online sync. So I started shopping around.

I had an old license to Life Balance and while they were certainly full-featured and had a very intriguing feature that promised to balance the task load over all my goals, I could never really get into it. In fact, that's why I moved to Things.

I am now using Toodledo and I'm loving it! Way back when, I wanted to write an organizer app that would fit the way I think. I never did find the time to finish it but that's all right because Toodledo is amazing when it comes to how you can finetune your tasks. About the only thing that's a little clunky about it is when it comes to performing tasks in sequence - there's no clear and easy mechanism to sequence tasks. On everything else, it's exactly what I needed: there's an iPod client for it, it's online, it's flexible and it subtasks beautifully. I tried their free time-limited trial for their Pro subscription and now that it's expiring, I'm starting a year's subscription which costs about the same as a good lunch at a chain restaurant.

Over the course of the past week, I've been putting it through its paces. Nope, no implosion yet. Even better is that it has something similar to Life Balance's feature where it figures out the list of tasks to do so that I have a balanced life (i.e. near-equal time is given to all life goals defined in the app). It even lets me specify the time I have to use and produces the To-Do list based on that! I'm pretty impressed by the algorithm - it looks like it tries a combination of factors including priority and task-duration-best-fit as its inputs. It also has an iPod client, so I'm delighted. Furthermore, the amazing amount of flexibility surrounding start and end dates really make me squee in delight!

Did I mention I'm squeeing in delight? Squee!

The only thing is that the default website looks kind of...plain. I've since created a Fluid version of what looks like their mobile version of their website. I can launch Toodledo without going through my bookmarks in my browser.

Now, if only I can work up the willpower to actually complete the tasks...