I stood there, gaping open-mouthed like an idiot, when I remembered after buying an iPhone that one of the reasons I’d postponed my purchase in the first place was because it had no task list. After a moment, I picked my jaw up off the floor and stroked the screen on my tiny new toy. This was an opportunity in disguise.

I had been somewhat overwhelmed lately and looking at implementing the Zen-To-Done idea of transferring just my most important tasks (MITs) to an index card or something. Well, I still don’t much like paper and pen, so I just put my MITs in an iPhone Note. Voila, problem solved. My three most important things to do are transferred every night from Entourage to iPhone Notes, and so far it’s a not-bad solution.

I do dislike having to replicate activities, like typing the tasks in another place, and then deleting them back in Entourage at the end of the day, but in a way this could be good: I’m forcing myself to evaluate my priorities every day, and I’m not piling too much on myself. Having that added step of retyping information is a nice barrier toward adding too much to my list. :)

I’ve found over the years I too, was getting overwhelmed with long task lists. Then I decided to try just using the calendar. For short tasks, I just use a block of 15 minutes. So if it only takes 5 minutes, I’ve got 10 left to breathe. :) I try to schedule these ‘calendar tasks’ as close to how long I think they’ll take to complete. I try my best not to let them overlap. This way, I’ve got my time carved out and I get a better overall look at how my day’s going to go.I obviously can’t create more time for myself, so now I only use what I have.

It just seemed to get too tough redating all the unimportant stuff I never got around to doing in my task list.

Now I’m less stressed. Well, a little at least. :)

-Marc

I find that I don’t need the to do list on my iPhone, as I usually work with the laptop nearby at all times. However, I found that using the iPhone to capture by sending an email to my Apple Mail account has been great, especially since typing “- -” in the subject line automatically sends the tasks to the inbox on my Omnifocus. I don’t imagine the ninjas over at Omni are going to make us wait to long for the iPhone app anyway …

I have found the perfect application for my To-Do list needs:

www.iwantsandy.com

It works with iCal and with my iPhone. She’s always there to remind me of what I have to do, whether it’s a task a month from now or simply something I need to remember an hour from now. She also gives me a list every morning, waiting in my Inbox (or also via SMS if I want), of the day’s tasks.

Perfect!

Have you tried the web interface for OmniFocus? It’s imperfect but it shows promise. I can access OmniFocus from the iPhone while out of the office, and it works very well, especially for errands. As an example, I was near Costco one day last week, remembered I needed to pick up some items. I went in, took out the iPhone, got my Errands:Costco context, and proceeded to check off the items on my list. Not having to go home for the list, wing it or call my wife for suggestions was perfect.

And the thing is, I do this all the time now.

There are only a few contexts that make sense when using the phone (errands, calls). The web interface is limited to checking off actions and adding items to the Inbox, but it shows great promise. For me, OmniFocus is the missing iPhone To-Do app. OmniFocus in the cloud!

Thanks for this insightful post. The way you shifted your view to “with kid” or “without kid” is a great example of how havin a kid is just not the same as not having one. Sometimes I have to look at how neat and organized I like my actions to be categorized, and how nicely linear I prefer my schedule to be, and just laugh as I know that much of that will be impossible when I have kids.

Great post. Need more like it…

Umm, no offense, and I’m glad it worked out for you, but Apple really blew it. Not including a computer::phone sync for todos and notes is really boneheaded. I can only conclude that it was a personal, fetish decision and not one based on sound design principles.

WARNING: Engaging Hyperbole Drive

It’s like being in awe of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and then discovering he made a simple mistake when adding 1 + 1…it just makes absolutely no sense

END WARNING: returning to Standard Rant Mode

The price to pay for getting in bed with Apple is well mapped out: 1. Early lovers and adopters will be slightly abused by product and pricing changes — we’ve got so much scar tissue on this point that it doesn’t even put a blip on the radar screen anymore. 2. They can get more stupidly stubborn than a three-year-old refusing to go to bed when it comes features that everyone expects and needs. No matter how predictable this is it’s still infuriating.

I’m with sgallivan on this one. It seems like having a simple to-do sync to ical was a no-brainer. I cannot understand why this was left out. Having the ability to sync seamlessly to ical without the need for complex web interfaces and third party software is the reason I purchased the iPhone in the first place. You may have adapted to not having it as all of us iPhone users have done, but I still dream of being able to quickly transform an email into a to do item, that shows up on my iPhone in a list with a nice little check box waiting to be checked off while I am on the go actually doing stuff.

This seems kind of dumb on Apples part and reminds me years ago when Jobs refused to do a color mac saying that users didn’t need color on a personal computer. If to-do’s are important enough to be included in iCal, they should appear in the iPhone. Having that sync would make it so easy to implement with various third party and web apps, like Omnifocus, 37 signals’ Backpack, and many others. It is a constant source of disappointment to me that Apple is ignoring this and I hope if Apple does not pick up the baton, some enterprising young (or old) developer will make this their first priority in Feb when the SDK kit is released.

me? I use windows/firefox/google. I suppose that iStuff is great, but my google page is my life and I don’t want to go anyplace else for a calendar, todo list, etc.

To the OP: Having read your other post on switching, I wonder, could it be that you want a reason to use a GTD/go-do system, but in truth don’t really need one?

Here is a simple way to build a GTD task list on your iphone.

1. Sign up for a gmail account and configure it for IMAP.
2. Set up your contexts (in gmail they’re called labels).
3. Configure your iphone for gmail IMAP.
4. Email yourself a task from your iphone.
5. When it comes into the inbox, move it to the correct folder (context). Once moved, go to the folder and watch it show up. Mark the email as unread and you will be able to tell how many tasks are in each folder.

You can email yourself reference materials, web links, etc.

For advanced users, set up your signature on the iphone to contain things you want to capture, like priority, project name, etc. It is like creating a form to populate.

… you do realize that Omni did write a web app for OmniFocus, right? They stopped work on it because they didn’t want to deal with the technical hassles involved in exposing a web app from your personal mac to the internet (explaining dynamic DNS and port forwarding to the average Mac user? Ugh.)

But they released it under MIT license.

As a result, I and some others have begun working on enhancements and bug fixes to their web app (written in lovely Ruby on Rails). You can find the project here. For a while, launching the web server will be a command line activity — but Omni’s web app already works! It just needs some love.

I hope to have a release including some of the instructions that Omni didn’t want to have to write ;-) within the next few days.

Happy GTDing!

I love Omni. Great guys.

yes, very good for you. but not for me. i still need my to-do list. always on the go, the to-do list is like a compass that sets me to the right direction.

A few folks have mentioned (indirectly) in this post the good folks at 37signals, but have failed to mention Tada list . I consider this the “killer app” for the iPhone, at least for GTD folks. For free, you can set up as many to-do lists as you like, all linked on your own subdomain at tadalist.com for easy access.

They have it ported to the iPhone in such a way that it might as well be an Apple created application—it loads with the neat all-the-way-across bars that make you forget you are using Safari. What I particularly like about it is that you can create and edit the list from your computer, and it is basically instantly sync’ed to your iPhone (since it’s on the web).

They even have a feature where you can allow other people you choose to also have access to your lists. I shared a list with my wife just this week to record thank you notes we need to write for Christmas gifts, and either of us can add items, or mark them as completed. I think we might try something similar for shopping lists.

It won’t sync with calendar programs for sure, but I find that having a Firefox window with my various lists in tabs open on my work machine is not all that different—especially since they are always current.

From some of the things I have read about the iPhone, these web applications have been part of the plan all along—rather than releasing their private inner workings to the whole universe, Apple lets anybody play in Safari and so they can keep the “real programs” (and real profits) to themselves. I remember years ago laughing at Apple for keeping their computers so closed (and slightly behind the times) while I computed away on my Tandy 1000 and then my Amiga—but whose laughing now?

I take the point in the original post about not requiring your whole to do list when you have a toddler around. But I have found that you do get those times when your child is napping or playing for longer than a few minutes without needing your input - especially as they get older and you pretty soon start to miss having the full choices of your proper to do list - and also the comfort it gives in being able to see what you're NOT doing.

I've been messing around with a few of the iPhone todo apps listed on the Apple site and the one I like best so far is "ido" http://ido.pmade.com/

In fact, I'm not going to look further as I think it's pretty perfect as it is - albeit it is fairly simple but NOT *too* simple - it does work well with the GTD concepts - it plays nice with Contexts and with Projects. It also seems to have a clean interface that's optimised for iPhone and loads quickly.

I've experimented with Tadalist and Backpack from 37signals.com. Obviously they have some extra features and Tadalist has the iPhone specific interface - but not all the features of Tadalist web interface work in the iPhone version and this loads faster than tadalist on my phone.

I'd say that Backpack integration with celltell.tv voice notes was tempting me to use Backpack as the other missing app for me is the ability to record voice notes for when I am in the car and can't write stuff down and I haven't yet solved that problem.

So far I really like "ido" though. Would be interested to know what you and other readers think of this. The only negative I can see so far is that the name makes me feel like I'm getting married again.