saulrosenbaum.com / Workflow redux

On any given day I have 100 things I have to remember and keep track of, projects, phone calls, email, appointments, conference calls - it’s a constant battle, I’m a devot ‘Todoist’ user (www.todoist.com), have been for at least 4 months, now that may seem like an insignificant amount of time but in the world of ‘online-task lists’ that’s forever; prior to Todoist, I tried dozens of others - rather than list them here, I’ll just mention the stand-outs:

• Remember the milk: excellent features, brilliant user experience, fast and clean - why didn’t I stick with it? I have no idea.(»)
• Basecamp/TadaLists/Backpack: clean simple interfaces, exceptional speed - they all suffer from too many features or not enough, plus to use them in any meaningful way you need to upgrade to the pay version. (»)
• TiddlyWiki: I loved TiddlyWiki it’s a brilliant little product, self contained, Javascript driven portable - but it wasn’t particularly Safari friendly, not easily sync-able online, and lacked some of the forced structure that tend to help me stay on point. (»)

There where dozens of others, ultimately I needed to make a choice, for now at least that choice is Todoist - the interface is spartan, functionality is straight forward, and the developer hugely responsive - in recent weeks he’s added Gmail integration (via a bookmarklet), an API, and both iGoogle and Tiger Dashboard widgets - courtesy of the API and the Todoist community both a Firefox extension and a Quicksilver plug-in have been developed - the Quicksilver plug-in really make life easy.

HOW QUICKSILVER AND TODOIST ROCK MY WORLD

Here’s the scenario, I get an email (in thunderbird) that requires my attention - select the portion of the text that’s relevant - copy / invoke QS / hit period (entering text mode) / type ‘add’ (that should bring up the ‘add to Todoist’ action) / tab / type the first few letters of the category/project you want to add the text to (or you can use the up/down arrows to navigate your choices) / hit enter / YOUR DONE.

It may seem like a bunch of steps, but it happens really quick (YES EXPERIENCED QS USERS CAN CREATE A TRIGGER) at the end of every day I have an Automator script that prints out my Todoist checklist for the following day (pretty sweet…huh).