Smart To-Do List software

If you're looking for a straightforward way to track your to-do's, organize projects, and keep yourself on track, you might find what you need with "Smart To-Do List." This Windows-based application helps you create projects, track progress, rate task importance, and filter your tasks.

The software is intended to be "GTD Friendly" so you can manage projects, priorities, and contexts all from within the tool. For example, you can tag tasks @Office if they need to be peformed at your office, and you can filter based on these tasks. Pretty neat approach.

The product does a nice job of segmenting tasks by projects, as well, and I found it very easy to change projects or contexts and quickly refocus on what I should be doing.

For me, the only drawback is that all of my task information "lives" in Outlook, and there is no automatic synchronization. This product does offer import/export capabilities, but they are manual as this is really a standalone application.

I am experimenting with using To-Do List as the UI for a couple of projects to see how a blended approach works. Basically, I put a "pointer" in my tasks list in Outlook for a project, which reminds me that the project 'lives' in Smart To-Do List so I can manage it from there.

I've been trading emails with the folks at the company, and they are really passionate about this product and committed to ongoing enhancement of the product so I'm optimistic the product will be even better in the future..

The publisher provides a free, 30-day trial so you can download Smart To-Do List figure out if this is a tool you want to adopt. By the way - if you decide to evaluate it, be sure and read the help file - while you can start using the product immediately without it, the Help system introduces some advanced features that are not obvious from looking at the UI.

Comments

[Steve]

There's well featured and free ToDoList application available at
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/todolist2.aspx

It's a stand-alone app that allows you to maintain multiple todo lists, order and prioritise items, have sub-items, integrates with a calendar, etc. Worth checking out.

[Scott Karstetter]

Dwayne,

Thank you for the kind comments.

There are many to-do list applications out there including the free one mentioned above. There are significant differences though. I set out to make an application that is so simple that you're able to actually get things done instead of filling out 6 fields just to add an item to your list. Also the availability of many keyword shortcuts greatly simplifies filtering and other tasks. Another item that truly sets Smart To-Do List apart from the rest is the ability to save a to-do list as a template for future use. I use this feature every time I'm traveling and it really comes in handy.

I would love to hear any feature requests, feel free to contact me.

Best Regards,
Scott Karstetter
scott.karstetter@smarttodolist.com