The only thing that held me back from using it daily was the lack of cross-platform support. That changes now with a free version for iOS as well as a Google Chrome extension; your tasks are kept in sync through all three clients.

I’ve been using an early version of Any.DO on my iPhone 4S for the past few days and it’s no different from its Android counterpart. And that’s a good thing. You can view tasks by date — today, tomorrow, this week and later — or you can view them by folders, which are of course customizable. Task entry works through keyboard input or by voice; both methods work well.

To quickly add a task, you simply drag your task list down and Any.DO is ready to accept it. Tasks are easily dragged to different days, folders or can moved around in order. A quick task tap offers several options: priority, folder, reminder, notes and share.

Unless you’re a stringent user of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, I don’t see any major features missing in Any.DO for everyday task management. And with some subtle modifications, I think even a GTD follower could use the app. Since first using Any.DO last year, I switched over to Wunderlist, but I made the move reluctantly: I find Any.DO to be visually better and refined than most other task management apps.

Let’s face it: Task management activities typically aren’t what I’d call sexy. But Any.DO’s user interface makes to-do lists a little more glamorous and now that I can use the platform on my Galaxy Nexus, iPhone and desktop browser, my next task is to migrate to-do’s to Any.DO.

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Before that, I had been using The Omni Group’s venerable OmniFocus as my task management tool-of-choice, mostly because, in mid-2010, I convinced myself I absolutely needed over-the-air sync between my Macs and iPhone (Omnifocus has it; Things does not).

Now, if you’re like me, you probably follow the work of some notable figures in the Mac community; people like Ben Brooks, David Sparks and Merlin Mann. It seems that those guys are OmniFocus ninjas. There’s nothing they can’t do with OmniFocus. I’m just not that good, and I don’t think I ever could be. To make the most of OmniFocus, I feel like I need to become both a GTD guru and commit hours and hours of my life to learning the software. Things, on the other hand, is so simple it requires almost no learning. For someone as old and inflexible as me, that’s a bonus!

Fiddly Bits

In trying (for six months!) to really get to grips with OmniFocus, I discovered that its greatest strength can also be its greatest weakness — everything is just so endlessly tweakable! Start dates, due dates, priorities, flags, perspectives, custom folders, nested folders, projects, location awareness, contexts, actions and who knows what else all add to the mountain of fiddly bits of detail that can be added, edited and generally mucked-about-with. In fact, there’s so much scope for fiddly details that Omnifocus offers its own Inspectors to make it more manageable. To be honest, when I have to open an Inspector, I don’t feel like I’m using a to-do manager any more.

Let me be fair; OmniFocus is a wonderful tool. But I always felt like I was neglecting some awesome functionality that could make me super-productive. I suffered a kind of productivity anxiety with OmniFocus: a nagging worry that I wasn’t making the most of this fantastic software the Merlin Manns of the world talk about with such enthusiasm. Finally, though, I’ve arrived at something of an epiphany; I wasn’t missing anything other than the discipline to stop tweaking my to-do lists and just get things done.

Choices, Choices

Mac users today are spoiled for choice when it comes to powerful, beautiful productivity software. Don’t like Microsoft Office? No problem; use iWork. Don’t like Pages? There’s always WriteRoom, Scrivener or TextMate. Every one of those apps is a great word processor without the Microsoft bloat.

This philosophy of “less is more” should be familiar to us all; it’s baked-in to Apple’s DNA, and it seems poised going to become even more of a Mac feature with OS X Lion. It’s also the reason Pages isn’t like Microsoft Word, and it’s why the iPad isn’t a Windows 7 Tablet PC.

So why, when it comes to personal productivity software as fundamental as a to-do manager, do we often think we need more complexity, more sophistication and ever more bells and whistles? Could it be that we all trick ourselves into thinking that time spent poring over our to-do’s is time spent getting things done?

One of the primary reasons for my switching to the Mac was the Apple philosophy of design; everything that’s there — be it in the hardware or the operating system — is there for a clear and obvious reason. It’s simple; it’s easy, and it all just gets out of the way so I can concentrate on doing my work. That’s why I stick with Mail.app instead of using more sophisticated apps like Mailplane or Postbox. It’s why I use TextMate instead of Word. And I suppose I could even use TextEdit to keep a list of tasks; but then, that wouldn’t be as much fun as putting a tick in a box, would it?

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When You Can’t See the Forest

It’s probably only natural to get caught up in details: the how and the what over the why. Big-picture or big-vision thinking is abstract, requires risk and assumption, course-correction and resolve, and it requires faith that something that can (for now) only be seen in your mind will manifest itself someday, if only you stay the course and do those things that will help you make progress for the long run.

Details are much easier. The payoff and turnaround are generally faster, and things are much more obvious. You know what you need to do. There are websites to build, team members to hire, tools and services to research and test, and so on. The list is endless, but with each of these tasks, we have a tendency to slip into perfectionism, procrastination, and avoidance of more important roles and responsibilities within the company. That’s the misstep many small business owners make, which makes it much more likely we’ll flounder or even fail.

Working On What Counts

I’ve been making myself do this exercise fairly often in recent weeks. Businesses are cyclical in some ways, and now is one of those times in my business where things are expanding and growing, so there’s a lot of temptation to forget the forest and concentrate on the trees. Stepping back every once in a while forces me to see if I’ve gotten off track.

I ask myself one simple question, “What counts?” I have a stack of to-dos and ideas I’d like to implement within the company, but when I ask this question, all of a sudden things come into focus and I know where my priorities lie.

Sure, there are still “odds and ends” tasks that need to be done, things like hiring more help and delegating responsibilities that still need to be done by someone; just maybe not by me or the other members on my team who have their own “What Counts” lists.

By doing this exercise, I see that I really have only a handful of responsibilities that count. These are things that have to be done every day, consistently, to move the big vision forward; these are the things I know will have the biggest impact on the success of the company.

Finding Your Own “What Counts” List

If you’re a small business owner, especially, your business is your baby, and it’s hard to let go of the feeling that you have to be the person to tend to it, that things have to be perfect, and that if you don’t obsess about every little detail, something terrible will happen.

Not only is this a good way to run yourself in the ground, it’s also a good way to run your business in the ground, because that kind of intensity will burn you out. You have to be willing to step back and allow some things to be less than perfect and to trust that someone other than yourself can do just as good a job (maybe even a better one) at taking care of certain responsibilities within your business.

As you sit down to make your own “What Counts” list, be willing to let go and be willing to call on outside help, if you need it. Be honest when asking yourself, “What counts?” Really, what counts?

Chances are, your responsibilities will fall into just a few categories: promoting your business; developing products and services; and creating and building relationships with others. Even with those, however, some things will still be handed off to other members of your team, so for instance, you may handle certain aspects of your promotion (writing guest posts, for example), while an assistant handles related aspects of those same tasks (pitching guest posts to bloggers). You have to find those few core activities where you add the greatest value to your business and then fill in the gaps with support staff.

At the end of the day, by ensuring that both you and your team members spend at least 80 percent of your time working only on what counts, you stand a much greater chance of seeing your business to success and building something sustainable for the long term.

What do you think counts most for a small business owner trying to build a successful business?

Photo by Flickr user .curt., licensed under CC 2.0

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First Step: Set Days for Set Projects

I had several main projects that were most important to me at the time, so I decided to reserve certain days of the week for each of them. Here’s a rough overview of how I set up my week.

• Mondays: Project A
• Tuesdays: Projects B and C (since they’re closely related)
• Wednesdays: Writing and Project D
• Thursdays: Projects B and C
• Fridays: Project A

Second Step: One-Stop Organization

It was important that I had one way of tracking what needed to be done, rather than using five different tools to manage bits and pieces of my schedule and to-do list, so I started condensing things down until I was left with just a couple of tools to keep me in line.

I started using Tom’s Planner (which I also use for managing my editorial calendars) for organizing my recurring weekly schedule: those things I have to do every week on a set day (for example, write my WebWorkerDaily article every Wednesday).

At the start of each day, my first stop is Tom’s Planner, which gives me an overview of the “big rocks” that need to be moved that day.

In addition to Tom’s Planner, I use Google Calendar for managing set appointments and events (for example, phone calls and birthdays), and I try to only book phone calls and other set appointments during specific time frames on certain days of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 1:30 to 3:30 PM, for example). This makes me far less likely to overlook something or get my days mixed up.

Great News, It’s Working!

Immediately, I can say that my mind is a lot clearer lately, but there are several other advantages I’ve found so far for compartmentalizing my days.

1. I’m focused and staying true to my priorities. A quick glance lets me know what my top priorities are, as well as the rough percentage of time I’m giving each one. If I want to take on a new project, I quickly think, “What do I have on my plate right now? Well, Mondays I have…, Tuesdays I have…,” which keeps me from over-committing and straying from my top priorities. If I want to take on something new, something else has to go.
2. I’m not constantly shifting gears. Before I started using this method of organizing my time, I jumped from one project to another and felt like I wasn’t giving enough time to any of them. Now, I don’t worry about not giving enough time to any one project. I know, for example, that I will work on Project A tomorrow, so there’s no rush to take my attention off the project I’m working on today.
3. I’m getting more done. At first, I was worried that this strategy might leave me working less on my top projects, and while that has proven to be true in terms of the absolute amount of time I spend on them, I’m actually getting more done for each project, since I’m a lot more focused.

I’m also way more particular about the things I do for each one. On a given day, I know I have to pick the top tasks and hustle to get them done, since I’m not going to pick this project up again for a few days. I’m a lot less likely to get distracted by email, lower priority to-dos, or other things vying for my attention.

The proof is in the pudding. In the past three weeks, here’s what I’ve accomplished.

• Designed a new logo/banner for a new project
• Created a business plan for the new project
• Built a website for the new project
• Wrote and published 13 articles
• Created and published seven audio pieces
• Created and published two newsletters

In the three weeks prior to starting this strategy, here’s what I accomplished.

• Wrote and published 12 articles

Big difference! Plus, I’m spending far fewer actual hours working on any given project, and I feel like I’m working less, even though I’m getting more done.

So, what’s your strategy? Do you have a set way of working to help you move more rocks in less time?

Photo by Flickr user Helico, licensed under CC 2.0

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1. Realign with your intentions. Stop everything. Close the social networks, the news feeds, and your email program, and give yourself a fresh start. Get a notebook and pen or open a Zoho or Google document and list your top priorities in life and business right now. What kind of life and business do you want to lead? What is most important to you? Rather than working in reactive mode over the coming week, commit to living proactively and moving your life and business in the direction you want them to go.
2. Choose your “Big Three.” Make a list of the three things that would make the biggest difference in your life or business if you could accomplish them. Think about it. What three things, if achieved, would have the biggest impact on your overall success? In your business, maybe you need to do more marketing and lead generation, or maybe you need to hire a coach, and on the personal side, maybe you need to take better care of your health or spend more time with family. We have a tendency to work on things that are easy, don’t take much time, or are lower in priority, instead of focusing on those few things that would cause the biggest change. This week, take an entirely different approach and spend at least half of your time working on the most important things.
3. Reserve time for your “Big Three.” You’ve listed your absolute top priorities. Now it’s time to adjust your schedule and to-do list to reflect your intentions. Open your calendar and set aside time each day over the coming week to work on each of your top three priorities (see sample calendar below). If possible, reserve the mornings for working on your “Big Three” so that, no matter what happens the rest of the day, you’re sure to make progress on those things that are most important to you.
4. Choose the tasks you will complete this week. In order to move each of your top priorities forward, you have to take specific action steps to help you achieve them. What could you do this week for each of the items on your list to move them forward as much as possible? List one to three specific tasks, depending on complexity, that you could do to make progress around each priority. Create a to-do list (on paper or within an online tool like Backpack), listing them out by day, if necessary.
5. Work from the schedule and list. When you start each day, the first thing you need to do is refer to your preset calendar and to-do list. Do not open email, news feeds, or social networks until you’ve completed your reserved time blocks and all of today’s tasks associated with your “Big Three.” Whatever is in your email inbox can wait.
6. Do a daily recap and setup. At the end of each day, recite your top three priorities so that you stay in alignment with those things that matter most to you. Run through your to-do list to see what you’ve accomplished and what’s left to do over the remainder of the week. Adjust your to-do list to reflect any changes or additions that will help you make even greater progress on your top priorities. Finally, clear your desk and your browser so that you have a clean slate for the next day, and open your calendar and to-do list so that they’ll be the first things you see the next morning.

While it’s not always easy to stay aligned with your priorities and remain proactive when approaching your days, by taking the time to plan ahead and by making a firm commitment to your goals in life and business, you’ll be far more likely to achieve them. Stay focused, remember what’s most important to you, and approach each day with intention and purpose.

What’s your system for staying on track with your goals?

Photo by Flickr user Joe Lanman, licensed under CC 2.0

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The Logic Behind Teamly

Scott Allison, the creator of Teamly, was scratching his own itch when he started creating the system: He’d gone from one employee to ten and was having trouble keeping track of the commitments each of those employees made. His organization was a little more loosely structured than other businesses might be, making most project management systems seem like overkill. All Allison needed was a clear picture of what his employees were doing and a way to comment on it. He wanted to make priorities a priority.

Teamly focuses on creating very short priority lists — just five things. The web application allows for setting daily, weekly and monthly priorities. It also allows managers and team members to review those priorities and provides real-time feedback for managers. The tool’s statistics make it easy to see how well an individual is doing at completing the priorities set on any given day.

Allison says, “Most to-do software suffers from the problem that they simply encourage very long and demotivating lists to be written, which you never get round to. By having a short list you think about what you are going to do, and what you are not going to do. Once you’ve achieved it you can be satisfied knowing you’ve done a good day’s work.”

The Right Place for Teamly

It’s unlikely that Teamly would be a good fit in a structured enterprise. Rather, its approach is better with loose systems because it allows for more self-direction for each team member. It can be a good fit for creatives or other professionals who have their own ways of doing things — Allison has gotten responses from GTD users saying it has been particularly useful for providing a high-level view for managers while allowing employees to work within the task management structures that work for them. The best indicator that Teamly would be a good fit for your team is if you’ve felt overwhelmed by the features built into more robust collaboration tools.

Allison notes that Teamly’s future growth will be constrained by the need to keep the tool simple: Additional privacy controls on individual team members’ priorities, a way to keep notes on tasks that aren’t priorities but shouldn’t be lost in the shuffle, and similar features are in the pipeline. Teamly’s creators are also looking at opportunities to integrate Teamly into other applications and create mobile versions.

Teamly is currently in beta and offers a free version for a single user.

Let us know what you think of Teamly in the comments.

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Step 1: Prioritize.

The first step is to prioritize. This applies to deciding what projects you take on in the first place, as well as prioritizing the tasks you do each day.

You have to first decide what projects will get your attention. As a business owner, you might have a hundred different ideas for creating revenue streams or even new marketing strategies you’d like to implement, but you can’t do them all at once. The way I like to prioritize projects is using a real estate method called “highest and best use.”

In real estate, agents value property based upon its highest and best use. For example, a house might actually be better suited as a commercial property, thereby tripling its value. You can use the same technique to value your time. Not all projects are created equal when it comes to creating the most value or the most return on investment. You have to decide which project will generate the most value at this time.

Once you’ve selected the project with the highest likely return on investment, you have to prioritize your tasks and how you spend your time each day. For that, I like to use the “revenue line” concept of Julie Morgenstern, author of “Never Check E-Mail in the Morning.” You never want to be more than three steps away from the revenue line. For a business owner, the first step away from the revenue line are those tasks that are most likely to generate immediate (or more immediate) income. That includes things like working on client projects, creating new products, and even invoicing, since it will lead to revenue right away. Two and three steps away from the revenue include lead generation activities, those that more directly influence your revenue, as well as those that indirectly influence it.

Step 2: Take care of yourself.

When tackling a really big project, you have to take care of yourself so that you maintain your energy and creativity for peak performance. Although it can be tempting to neglect your health and well-being, this is not the time to cut corners. Be sure to set aside enough time for exercising, eating right, and getting enough sleep. Otherwise, you’ll lose your edge and won’t be bringing your best work to the table. You’ll end up sacrificing quality for quantity.

Another less-than-obvious thing to leave room for are all those nagging distractions. For each person this will be different, but if a dirty house or working in your PJ’s distracts you, then make time to take care of those things. Figure out areas you can tolerate neglecting so that you have time to take care of those that will slow you down or bug you.

Step 3: Focus on forward movement and progress.

For big projects, done is better than perfect. You don’t want to get caught up in details, perfectionism and procrastination, so keep your feet to the fire by enforcing strict deadlines.

By holding yourself to a schedule for rolling out this big project, you’ll be a lot less likely to allow minor things to distract you from making real progress. A trick I like to use is to actually cut down the time I allow myself to work on something, so I’ll either cut my deadline by 25 percent or cut my working hours by 25percent so that I’m more likely to focus on the most important tasks of getting a project to completion. If I know I only have six hours to do a job instead of eight, I’m more concentrated on results, rather than things being perfect or allowing myself a lot of down time to check email or for other distractions.

Moving big projects to completion really comes down to cutting through the fat so that you can concentrate on the real work at hand, and that starts with prioritizing the things on your plate, making sure to take care of yourself while you’re working so hard, and focusing on getting the project out the door.

What tricks do you use to help you get through big projects?

Photo by Flickr user Ivan Walsh, licensed under CC 2.0

You don’t need to create an account to start using the app. You can sign in using either your Google or Google Apps account, and you can get going straight away — the basic version of GQueues is free (certain features require paying a $25/year upgrade fee).

GQueues looks quite “Google-y” — if Google decided to make a standalone, more fully featured version of Google Tasks, it would probably look a bit like this. The bulk of the window is taken up by your current to-do list, while on the left-hand side of the page you also have “My Queues” (your to-do list, and any other lists you’ve defined), “Smart Queues” (lists such as overdue items, items due today — you can also define your own Smart Queues) and “Friend Queues” (lists your friends/colleagues have shared with you — sharing and assignment functionality is only available with the paid version of GQueues).

The app is intuitive to use; there’s quite extensive help documentation, including video tutorials, but you probably won’t need them to get going, especially if you’ve used any other task management apps. You can create a new list by clicking the “Add Queue” button, while adding tasks to a list is a matter of clicking the “Add Item” button. You can reorder tasks in a list (and move them between lists) just by dragging and dropping them.

GQueues also supports a range of more advanced task management/organization features, too. As well as being able to define different lists, you can create sub-tasks, add notes and tags to tasks, and assign tasks to other people. You can assign due dates and sync them with Google Calendar (Google Calendar sync is only available on the paid version of GQueues). You can also custom color-code each of your lists, which makes it easy to tell which list you’re working on — useful if you’re working on a number of projects. With its range of features and its Smart Queues, it’d be easy to set up GQueues so it worked as part of a GTD system.

In using GQueues, you get the feeling that the developer has paid attention to the details, the little things that make the app easier and faster to use. For example, regular readers will know that I love keyboard shortcuts as they can be a real productivity booster, so it’s good to see that GQueues has shortcuts for nearly every action. There’s no iPhone app, but you can use an iPhone-optimized version of the site to access your lists on the go. I’m also happy to see that you can export your lists as a CSV file, should you so wish.

I have a couple of features that I’d like to see added to GQueues. The first is task prioritization features — I suppose you can simulate them using tags, but having them built in would be useful, especially for folks used to having them in their current task management app. The second is email integration. One of the reasons that I love Google Tasks (and haven’t switched to a more advanced task management app in my daily work) is its integration with Gmail — I can add an email straight to my tasks list from within my inbox.

All in all, GQueues is a neat task management app. It’s nicely designed, easy-to-use and has a great range of features. If you’re looking for something more powerful and full-featured than Google Tasks, GQueues is definitely worth playing with — most of its features are free, and even those that require the paid upgrade, such as Google Calendar sync and sharing/collaboration, are available with a two-week trial.

Let us know what you think of GQueues below.

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(Via Lifehacker)

I often find that when I start spring cleaning my mind becomes flooded with open items that are unresolved. Open items are the tasks, to-do’s, projects, goals, ideas and actions (business or personal) that you need or want to do, but have not yet done. They may be things you need to get done today, or be as far off in the future as retirement.

A good dose of spring cleaning will often bring to the surface a whole slew of these open items. The trick then is to gather them together by writing them down so that you don’t have to waste valuable mental real estate trying to keep track of them.

Think of your brain like your computer’s hard drive – it can only hold so much information. When a hard drive reaches its capacity, it starts to slow down and wonky things happen. By capturing your open items on a list your brain is freed up to focus on what’s in front of you right now.

Just taking the time to capture all the open items in your life and write them down can dramatically improve your ability to focus and get things done. So to drain your brain for spring, do the following:

• Go through all your physical spaces at work and home. Look through your desk drawers, desktop, in-basket, office closets, cupboards, shelves and file drawers and make a master to-do list of anything that needs to be done based on what you see. For example, as you look through your file drawer, perhaps you need to: Clean out last years financial file and store the receipts; make file folder labels for the most recently added documents; follow up with a potential client, whose business card you found stuck in one of the folders.
• Go through your electronic spaces. Look through your email inbox, PDA and voicemail messages and add any action items to the existing master to-do list that you are not going to handle immediately and are not recorded elsewhere. This could include, for example: An email from a colleague requesting you make a few changes to a report you wrote; a voice message from a customer about possible dates for a conference; an email from your professional association announcing their fund raiser.
• Go through your own brain. Look through your own mind and using the source list above write down any relevant to-do items. Once you have done this final emptying out, you can keep this system squeaky clean by adding to your master to-do list anything that pops into your head.

Some people prefer to keep a master list of all these various and sundry to-do items and transfer them to a daily or weekly to-do list as needed. Others prefer a detailed breakdown of the master list into more defined categories.

While this is just a simple way to get started, if you get really into it – and find you’re running high on all the juice your generating from capturing your open items – you might like to consider using a system like Getting Things Done (GTD). GTD’s inventor, David Allen, also has a new book out, “Making It All Work.” I haven’t read it yet, but my husband has it by his nightstand and he’s been reading bits and pieces, here and there.  It contains a detailed process for capturing your open to-do items and a whole system for how to process them.

What tips do you have for getting unresolved open items out of your head and organized?

Photo by stock.xchng user lusi

I signed up for a free Nozbe account to check out the integration between the tools. Evernote replaces Nozbe’s note-taking component, offering a wealth of new options, including access though Evernote’s web interface, desktop client, and mobile device applications. Activating the integration follows a process similar to  integrating Evernote with Twitter (covered here) and Cliqset (covered here). The integration between Evernote and third-party applications is clean and easy for even non-technical users to complete thanks to the Evernote API.

The integration makes use of tags to tie your Evernote notes into your Nozbe account. You create tags in Evernote that correspond to a Nozbe project name or context, and Nozbe searches through your Evernote account for tags that correspond to your projects or contexts and makes the notes accessible in your account. For example, I created a tag “Nozbe Integrates with Evernote” in my Evernote account. When I synced my Nozbe account with my Evernote account, the tagged notes appeared in my Nozbe account in the “Evernote Notes” section. Your tag appears at the bottom of the note as the name of your Nozbe project. If you are new to tagging or still trying to formalize how you use tags to organize your data, just make sure your tags are descriptive and correspond with your Nozbe project names (including capitalization) and you’ll have no problems getting this integration to rock.

In Nozbe, you can only view your Evernote notes. However, you can put the notes into any contexts you set up for your Nozbe projects.

While I am not a card-carrying GTD user, I do use some its principles in my current workflow, so I find this integration useful and think that it improves upon Evernote’s already strong feature set and its ease of use. One last bit of advice: if, like me, you sometimes aren’t as strict about syncing as you should be, to make best use of this integration, you’ll need to get into the syncing habit.

Have you tried out Nozbe’s integration with Evernote? What do you think of it?