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Best To-Do List Software?
JojoLinkyBob writes "Greetings, Council of Slashdot. I am curious what everyone here recommends as their favorite organizational software. Specifically, I am trying to find a simple freeware/open-source todo list manager. In the past, I've dabbled with TreePad,
Shadow Plan, Mantis, and various virtual sticky- note apps ..all with mixed success. Currently, I'm back to my old-school ways of scribbling my todo's on the back of each Daily Dilbert Calendar page, which sadly means today is June 23 :)"
Perhaps we could be of more help to you if you would explain why the 'Old School' approach of using scratch paper is unacceptable to you. What features do you require in a to-do list that pencil and paper cannot provide?
It really boils down to self-discipline, much more than some specific methodology. I'm a fan of Covey's methodologies, but unless you really, really, really commit to it (or some other one more to your liking), you're no better off with a slick app than you are with to-do lists on the back of a Dilbert calendar page.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
will somebody please tell me what the fuck is wrong with notepad?
free, creates cross-platform, bloat-free files, no bloat in the program itself.. why bother splashing out on some fancy-pants crap that youll find yourself not using within a week.
win+r, "notepad".. wow, that will take all of, what? 3 seconds, ctrl+s, plonk it on your desktop and your done.
and come to think of it, whats wrong with paper and pen too? dont worry about data-corruption, your comp crashing out on you or anything.. jesus.
yunno, sometimes things ARE faster and more efficient when you DONT use a computer.
"Come on, we need to go shopping before the shop closes!" - "Hold on, i need to boot up my computer, open my fancy $50 program and read my shopping list first"...
I simply use a private wiki. The advantage being I can access it from work or at home or when travelling. Flexible enough to store a to-do list or store some bookmarks or whatever information you want to store. Lots of easy-to-install wiki software out there. I had previously quickly coded a simple PHP todo list but using existing wiki software is simpler and more powerful. Its not like a todo list requires some specialised software.
My TODO list is ~/TODO. I edit it with vim. Sometimes I grep it. When I get things done I dd that line.
I can access it anywhere with ssh.
A nice alternative to the truly awful Notepad
I know notepad is very basic, but what's awful about it? I can say that's the one MS program I've used that has never crashed and I use it a lot.
JPilot is an open-source, freeware organizer. You get a calendar, to do list with categories and priorities, address book, dialer, and memo pad. It is designed to sync with Palm devices. However, it can export to other calendar and address book formats (iCalendar, vCard, LDIF).
If you just want a free-as-in-beer organizer, the Palm Desktop is free for personal use on Mac or Windows.
It is similar to Bugzilla, except it's not software bug oriented
We use bugzilla where I work as a kind of task tracker and don't find it at all "bug oriented". With a small amount of planning and the right configuration, Bugzilla works great as a general issue or task tracker. You could seriously do a global search on the source code and replace every instance of "bug" with "task", nobody would be the wiser. It was a little strange at first to be asked how you were doing on a particular "bug" when the "bug" was something like setting up a new wireless gateway.
Before I came onboard, they tried to use RequestTracker but found it unusable due to the high load it placed on the system when only a couple users were logged in. They said they didn't have the inclination to debug it, so they decided to try Bugzilla next and have been using it since. (Sometimes we use it to file actual software bugs too.
We also looked at Mantis, but were horrified at how limited it was. But a bug-tracking system like Bugzilla is almost certainly overkill for a one-man todo list, which is what the submitter sounded like he wanted. For this, I tend to throw all those little tasks into a text file and then paste them into my personal wiki at the end of the day, where they never get seen again. (This is what has allowed me to post to Slashdot so frequently.)
*sigh*
All that means is your dad cares more about the security of his house than his wifi network. I mean, if they can see the sticky they're either: A-a friend or family. or B-a burglar. If the former, he probably doesn't mind them using his cable modem. If the later, he won't have a computer soon.
Some people really need to put "computer security" into perspective.
As long as the occasional war driver can't see your WEP key through the window, I can't see what's wrong with saving it at an easily remembered, not net-accessible location, ie. on a post-it note.
To me, having a key that can be guessed by a dictionary attack while stopping at a traffic light seems worse.
HandyShopper is another good one for tracking non-hierarchical things that have costs and quantities associated with them. It does nice things like let you tally up totals, as well as maybe schedule recurring need-to-do/buy items. It's bizarre that it doesn't really have a desktop equivalent yet :/
For the Linux desktop, you might want to take a look at MrProject, a nice Project clone that's part of GnomeOffice. I've only played with it a little bit under Mandrake, but it looks fairly competent when you want to add hierarchical schedule and resource loading data to your task list. Sadly, there's little else that I've seen that comes anywhere close, and I've been searching for one fairly recently for a project management class I took last semester. Oddly enough, I don't even like MS Project for doing this kind of thing, it just doesn't give me enough flexibility in rearranging things, scheduling parallel activities, automatically sequencing constrained resources, etc.