Toodledo and IPhone

by Janet
(Glendale, CA, USA)

I've implemented GTD with http::/toodledo.com. It syncs to my iPhone in an app called Pocket Informant, which also syncs my Google calendar.

My life is pretty complicated, and often feels overwhelming, so I love GTD because it keeps me viewing my priorities in a simplified format, only with next actions showing except during the times I review tasks. The paid version of Toodledo allows for subtasks and delegating tasks to other Toodledo accounts (with permissions!), but I get by on the free version by grouping categories and so on. My first year, I paid for the subscription – but then I found that I didn't use subtasks as much as I'd expected, and that putting tasks on my fiance's Toodledo account was at best therapeutic, since he never looked at them.

In my case, I have groupings by what I think of as “domains” (my company, my family, my “sharpening the saw” – yes, I'm a former Covey Seven Habits to GTD convert!). Toodledo not only lets me rank by next actions, but also allows me to side-step my own task grooming by clicking a gold star next to an item to create a custom “do me!” list, or will generate a hotlist by priority and due date that sanity checks my next actions list. It's a great tool.

I do more of my manipulation in Toodledo on the desktop than in Pocket Informant – PI supports fewer fields than Toodledo, and frankly I am fifty years old and a QWERTY touch typist, and I think that disqualifies me from wishing to do more input on the iPhone screen than absolutely necessary.

Sometimes I need supporting documents for my tasks, and DropBox gives me a great way to securely access many kinds of documents from my desktop to my iPhone, and it's amazingly simple to use. It looks like a special file folder on the desktop, and like an app on the iPhone.

I supplement this with a better PDF reader app, appropriately called PDFReader. PDFReader and Pocket Informant are paid apps from the iTunes app store, but after experimenting I've found they are worth it. Toodledo has a free app on the iphone, but doesn't have the features Pocket Informant has – check them both out.