I know that from my experience it has been valuable but rather time consuming to go through the entire Fulham FC fixture list and manually add the individual matches by hand. Now, within a matter of clicks, every single match for the rest of the season (home and away) has been added to my calendar instantly. Happy days.

To add more calendars to your Google calendar, simply click on Settings, then Calendars, then click on the link that says “Browse Interesting Calendars”. From here you can drill down to Soccer > England > EPL (English Premier League) and choose your team. They also cover the championship and other football leagues.

Game on!

Well, google apps help is at hand and fortunately it’s rather simple. There are only 2 steps. First, open your Google Apps mail page. Then paste the following code into the address bar. Make sure you change where it says “yourdomain.com” to your real address – i.e. your domain name.

And that’s it! For more information and for instructions on how to do the same using Gmail, see the original Lifehacker article here.

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(“mailto”,”https://
mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”Gmail”)

1. I am now using an Android mobile – the Google  phone or G1. I expect to be able to use an effective mobile interface if not a dedicated application. RTM has a dedicated iPhone app already and an Android one is on the horizon. This I like. But for the time being the mobile interface is absolutley fine. I can check my list(s), add and edit items with a minimum of fuss and it just works. The Todoist mobile interface is and always was a disaster. And whilst there are many users desperate for an imporved interface, there is just no sign of it happening any time soon. In short – I got tired of waiting.

2. RTM is actually not half as complicated as I had once dismissed it as being. Upon closer inspection it turns out that I can use it in a very similar way to how I was using Todoist. In fact – one of the main things I liked about Todoist was the shortcuts and guess what? The Remember The Milk shortcuts are even easier to use – and shorter! For example to add an item in Todoist, you type CTRL+A, to add an item in RTM, you simple type ‘t’.

3. Remember The Milk is the largest and most popular task manager – the ‘best in class’, the leader in its field. And for those devotees of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology it has consistenly been voted the app of choice. As far as I’m concerned this means that the support and continued development will be there for the forseeable future – and that’s good enough for me.

4. Integration with Google Calendar works a treat. It’s no longer a question of either/or but now I can have both and. In my previous post on Todoist I said that I didn’t want calendaring functionality. Well, I still don’t really. But if RTM integrates so seamlessly with Google Calendar then this certainly eliminates my reason for making this an issue in the first place. I.e. I only want one dedicated space for dates – no duplication. This is what I’ve now got plus I’ve got the choice of how to work the system and the flexibility to adapt to any situation.

5. Once you get round RTM it is such a flexible and powerful system that really eclipses Todoist in so many ways. For example you can choose to use Lists, Tags or a combination of the two. And for dedicated followers of David Allen’s GTD this affords a much more faithful interpretation of the methodology.

Of course, RTM satisfies the core requirement of all web apps recommended by LSDM – that they should be free to use and available through the browser AND on your mobile. If you haven’t already – I suggest that you check out this task manager today at www.rememberthemilk.com.

Yes – a bold claim but it is a genuinely valuable article and well worth a read. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it is the best advice that I’ve ever read on the subject – now that’s saying something!

What do I want from a to-do list? I want to be able to add tasks quickly and efficiently. I want to be able to organise that list by category and/or by priority. That’s about it. I don’t want a built in calendar – I already have a perfectly fine one of them (Google Calendar) and I certainly don’t want to enter into the realms of project management – that’s unnecessarily complicated. Another important reason I don’t use dates at all with my tasks is that 9 times out of 10 we tend to be too optimistic about how long a task will take. Then we miss the deadline and the whole thing becomes depressing and disheartening, when in actuality the date that we put down was not that important anyway. If a date really is that important – then put it in your calendar!

How I used Todoist is indeed a simplified version of how the developer intended it to be used. I do not use the calendar functionality at all and nor do I use the project hierarchies. However, in light of my priorities outlined above, I have found this solution to work the best  in terms of keeping it simple and quick to use. I suggest experimenting for yourself obviously to find a model that is going to work for you.

Step One – visit www.todoist.com and register. This is quite painless. Remember to bookmark the site in your web browser to save time finding it again in the future.

Step Two -create a project and call it something like “To Do List”. To do this click on the Add Project link (see below).

Step Three - click on the preferences link at the top of the page, and copy the set-up in this illustration. Obviously, set the time and and date to suit your own location.

Step Four – adding a task. The best way to add a task is using the keyboard shortcut:  CTRL+A.  I use a PC – it will be the equivalent on a Mac. You will be presented with an input line like this:

Incidentally, if you are having problems seeing these images clearly simply click on them to see in full size.

Step Five – label the item. In the illustration above, you will see that, at the end of the task I want to add, I have added the text “@personal”. The @ sign tells Todoist that you are labelling the task – in this case I want to put it in my ‘personal’ folder. You can have as many labels as you want and you can tag each item with more than one label if you wish.

This is why I do not use different projects in Todoist – because it is much easier to organise the list using labels. You can create a label for individual projects, for work, for personal, for family etc. Try dividing the list in a logical way that suits you. One word of advice is that you can easily get carried away and use too many labels. Over time, I have found it most effective to limit the number of labels I use to 3 or 4. I have personal, work and family labels – and that’s it.

Step Six – set the item’s priority. You will also see that at the end of the task in the illustration, I have added the text !p1. Again this is code that Todoist takes to mean that this is a priority 1 task.

There are 4 levels of priority available. Over time I have based my use of them roughly on Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

Priority 1 – Red – VERY URGENT!

Priority 2 – Blue – Important and timely

Priority 3 – Green – Good to do but no rush

Priority 4 – Black – Someday / Maybe. Would be good to do one day….maybe.

Step Seven – after adding your latest task to the list, press P on your keyboard. This then formats the list by priority, with the P1 tasks at the top, and the P4 tasks at the bottom. I find this to be the most effective overview of your task list. Your list may look something a bit like this:

And that, as they say, is pretty much that.

There may come a time when your list is growing quite long (as such lists tend to over time) and you may wish to see only those tasks that relate to ‘work’ for example. To do this, simply click on any of the work labels, or type @work into the search box. The screen should then look like this:

It is not possible to order this list by priority but the colour coding will make it obvious as to which tasks have which priority.

As I said, this is not the only way to use Todoist by any means and I know that many people get a lot of benefit from the hierarchical projects functionality. I guess it really depends on what you want from your task management application. For me, simplicity and ease of use are key. Your priorities may be different. The important thing is that you find out what works for you.