I Need Advice…

Tod Kelly

Tod is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He is also serves as Executive Producer and host of both the 7 Deadly Sins Show at Portland's historic Mission Theatre and 7DS: Pants On Fire! at the White Eagle Hotel & Saloon. He is  a regular inactive for Marie Claire International and the Daily Beast, and is currently writing a book on the sudden rise of exorcisms in the United States. Follow him on Twitter.

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8 Responses

  1. Fogeyman says:

    Take a look at Trello. It’s web-based, but there’s an iOS app too. I’m using it to manage my dissertation research.Report

  2. ZW says:

    WunderlistReport

  3. Vikram Bath says:

    I think with finding an organizer it’s about balancing simplicity with flexibility. I don’t need a lot of functionality, so I just use the Reminders app that comes with OSX just fine. If you want something more flexible than the very good options already mentioned, then check out Omnifocus or AwesomeNote.Report

  4. Froggy says:

    Evernote seems to have all the things the other ones people mentioned have. Took me a little while to get used to moving from paper, but it doesn’t have a calendar per se. It has reminders to let you know something is happening, or you can make a calendar. Some guy on YouTube has a video about this, but it seems pretty complicated.Report

  5. Mike Dwyer says:

    This is an area of obsession for me because I really love organization when it comes to work and writing on the side (which is almost another full-time job). A few things come to mind:

    Evernote – this is great for uploading quick notes, saving articles, making lists, etc. Syncs perfectly between desktop, phone and tablet. I use it daily.

    Google tasks – I use this for most of my to-do lists. It has unlimited size so I usually have something like 10 lists going at any one time. I keep lists for the house, errands, things to do for my mom, movies I want to see, etc. There is a third party app called Gtasks that will make it easier to manage on your phone but for the desktop I just log in through Gmail and it is right there.

    Todoist – I played around with this for about 6 months and then decided it wasn’t a good fit but I have talked to some coworkers and they said a lot of the buggy stuff I didn’t like have been fixed.

    Microsoft Outlook – This is what I use for work. My company depends heavily on Outlook to function as we are a big, global organization and email is our primary communication tool to deal with time zones, etc. The task function in Outlook is pretty solid and you can make it more robust by taking advantage of all the available fields in a task or project.

    Nozbe – Michael Hyatt recommends this for project management. I believe it is intended for Mac and I haven’t tried it but I trust his judgement on these kinds of things. If you are just working solo it may be more robust than you need.

    http://michaelhyatt.com/nozbe.html

    Basecamp – We played around with this one at work for a while and it is great for group projects but we ultimately went with an internal system that we built from scratch. I liked Basecamp better but my company generally doesn’t like to use third party software anymore than they have to. It just costs us way too much in licensing and they don’t really trust external cloud computing yet.

    Excel – For basic list creation I sometimes still default to Excel. It’s clunky for this purpose but if you are good with it the ability to customize the format is only limited by your imagination (that sounded like a bad commercial but it is true)Report

  6. Miss Mary says:

    And it should cook dinner too 😉Report