In part of my new drive to become an organised person I’m spending more time posting on message boards. No, wait, I mean, I have a centralised todo list. Currently it’s a text file on my computer, looking something like this:
SOCIAL - FAMILY
Ring mum.
Look for grandma bday pres.
SOCIAL - FRIENDS
Email Tim
Buy stuff for picnic sat.
JOB - LOOKING
Update CV
Prepare for interview mon
And then I copy & paste all the one’s I’ll do today into another section and the top. Then do them.
The shortfalls are: (1) immediate tasks get confused with long-term tasks. (2) hard to add dates in any meaningful way (3) have to delete things when they’re done. (4) there’s some things which have been urgent for ages to the point where ‘urgent, but another week won’t make any difference now’ is a category of itself, which I’m not sure how to record.
Does anyone have a favorite program (shareware? outlook? write my own database?) they think could help? Or for that matter a useful method of using index cards or something.
I don’t use it much nowadays. My wife loved it because she could put in her regular chores and time them to pop up at various intervals (like clean ceiling fans every month, flip mattresses every three months, renew auto registration once a year).
If you already have MS Outlook (XP or 2003 version, older versions weren’t very good in my opinion) I would suggest using it. That’s what I used before I went and bought a Palm Zire 31. $135 and it does everything I want.
If all you want to do is keep a to do list then buying a PDA is probably overkill but considering you can buy an older PDA for less than $40 nowadays it might be just what you need.