Organisation with Toodledo

Thingymagigs to help us organise our busy lives are always welcome. I’ve recently looked at the likes of Chandler, which aims to help us organise ourselves, and a while ago Soshiku, which sets its sights upon organising school work for students and teachers. Toodledo is yet another organisational web application which aims to help you plan your day in the form of an advanced to-do list. My current reckoning is that it’s better than Chandler for overall organisation; in fact, it makes Chandler look positively naff. Besides, it’s worth using just for the fact that its name is a delicious pun.

Viewing and editing tasks from the Toodledo homepage is simple and quick

I must admit that I became quite exasperated with Toodledo to start with. After signing up I began to feel rather dopey since I couldn’t find a button to allow me to add new tasks. Turns out that buttons like that are always located at the top right of the application. It’s a little green ‘+’ sign with text next to it which allows you to add new task, create new events, et cetera. Whilst that made me feel silly, I did think that the ‘New’ buttons should be placed more prominently to prevent numpties like me from getting fed up with looking for a way to add a task and poddling back off to our stone-age pen and paper methods of organising ourselves.

Folders can be created for each area that your to-do notes will be relating to. For me this consists of one for each subject I study, and a couple of others which are related to the home or spare time. After creating folders for each are you can begin creating new tasks. This is fairly self-explanatory – give it a title, a priority (ranges from low to high), due date, description, and some other such jazz if you like. You can then submit the task and it’ll be added to both the folder you placed it in and the front page. The front page is rather smashing in that it arranges the tasks by the priority you’ve set. Therefore, if you add a task which needs to be completed tomorrow you can set it as high priority and it will appear more prominently on the front page. Another smashing feature is that it’s very easy to edit the tasks directly on the front page simply by clicking in the relevant area; the text will magically become editable so you can change it quickly and easily.

There’s also a calendar which keeps track of when things are due and when they were completed. It’s easier see how long you’ve got left to complete a task by seeing it visually on a calendar than by reading the date in its info. If you don’t like the calendar included with Toodledo (it does seem a little bit simplistic and dated), you can also have the items imported onto an online Google calendar, allowing you to view and edit them there instead, as well as use them in conjunction with other events on your calendar.

To keep you motivated there’s also a ‘Goals’ section. It’s like an online replacement for the patronising careers adviser you may have encountered when you were at school. You can set long-term goals for yourself, for example you might list a career plan or a monetary goal. After creating your goals you than then choose which goals your tasks help you to work towards. When you’ve got tonnes of things you need to be doing, at least you can remember that finishing reading that long, dully book will help you work towards your goal of “Becoming a more educated person” or “Getting good exam results”.

An online notepad is also included. Like the calendar, this is pretty simplistic, but it might prove useful if you need to quickly jot (more accurately, type) something which you need to be able to access from another computer. Simply signing into your Toodledo account from another PC will allow you to see and edit the note.

You can sign up for Toodledo at www.toodledo.com. If you don’t like always visiting the website, there’s even a Firefox addon which will allow you to add tasks from your browser.

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