Web Daily Worker has posted a list 
of twenty ways to organise your to-dos.
Options include everything from the writer’s personal low-tech favourite (some sheets of paper stapled together) to purpose-built task management apps, passing things like wikis, web-based to-do services, PDAs and Filofaxes along the way.
If you have a few minutes to kill and don’t actually feel like getting anything done, it’s an interesting read. Perhaps the writer cheats a little to get to twenty, but there will be no stone-throwing in this little glass house.
Some of the items were new to me. David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner PDF templates seem full of promise, a pre-made version of the “Back to Paper” system propounded by Bill Westerman , Mike Rohde and others.
Equally surprising are the omissions. With so many good desktop and web-based apps now available, it’s odd to see so many missing.
I’ve been searching for year (even threatening to write it) for the application that works to-do lists in a way I patterned form Covey’s 7 Habits. On paper, it looks like this…..
A 4 quadrant, poster sized piece of paper, with one axis IMPORTANCE and the other axis UNGENCY. Yelow stickies go into each quadrant, based on these factors. Until the sticky gets into the URGENT AND IMPORTANT quadrant, it does not get worked on. Even in this space, I have a box the size of one sticky, for the current top priority.
It is surprising how many stickies are in the NOT/NOT quadrant – things that need to be done at some time, but are neither urgent or important at this point of time. I also use 2 colors of stickies, one for business and one for personal.
At the bottom, I have a space for completed stickies – makes writing status reports a piece of cake. I have used TEAM TASK, with 5 open windows for this, but it is clunky, dealing with the multiple windows.
Works great when the boss shows up with a new “priority”. I just point at the chart and ask “what task from the URGENT AND IMPORTANT box do you want displaced? Usually, a new sticky gets into either Important or urgent, but seldom in quadrant 1.
I’d like to add features like in the application PROCESS or Plum Canary’s excellent CHIRP, where change management of status, and status flagging are incorporated, but right now, it is 2 different worlds.
If someone knows of an app that works like this, let me know!
Kirk@kpj2.com
Tim, thanks for the mention of my custom Planner Hack Moleskine. :-)
A tidbit-capturing Mac app I can highly reccomend is Journler:
http://www.journler.com/
Journler is along similar lines to Yojimbo nd DEVONthink, and very powerful. I use it to archive mails and to store commonly used emails for later. I’m sure it can be used more powerfully than I presently use it, but it works for my needs.
I did the icon design for this one, after seeing how useful it was.
Thought I’d mention it for potential consideration.
Cheers!