Mac OS X/iOS: If you’re looking for a speedy and polished to-do list manager, SimpleTask offers a streamlined interface, easy editing, and Mac to iOS syncing. More »

iOS: Due is a simple iOS app that manages your tasks, alerts you when their due date has arrived, and also provides you with simple, re-usable “egg timers” for time you need to schedule right away. More »

By itself, task manager GQueues is pretty handy—a list-oriented task manager with sub-tasks, due dates, assignments, tagging, and other neat features. But its integration with Google sign-in, Calendar, and Google Apps make it more than just another to-do app. More »









Google – Search – Search Engines – Google Apps – Companies

Behance and 99 Percent founder Scott Belsky spent years researching how creative leaders at Google, Disney, Zappos, and other firms turned brainstorms into completed projects. This excerpt from Making Ideas Happen suggests ways of tackling urgent matters without sacrificing long-term goals. More »

Google Tasks may be one of the lesser-used Google services, but for those who like their tasks integrated with everything else Google in their lives, it certainly does the trick. Now, thanks to the same developer as Remember the Task (a desktop client for Lifehacker-favorite Remember the Milk), you can get Google Tasks in a small window on your desktop—plus so much more.

The really cool thing about the Google Tasks client is that, since it’s merely built on the Google Mobile API, you can actually access any Google app available as a mobile site from Google Tasks. Just scroll to the top and choose your app (or hit “more” for a larger list), and you can access Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and others within the same client, essentially making it an all-around Google Mobile client. If you feel like you have one too many SSBs open at any given time, this is a pretty nice solution.

Google Tasks is a free download for all platforms, and requires Adobe AIR.

As noted in the video, you can sign up directly from the pop-open bookmarklet, and clicking the bookmarklet while an email message or search/tag results page is open gives Todoist a little special context for your tasks and sub-tasks. Got another tool to integrate Todoist, or another task manager, with your Gmail? We’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Using the application is fairly simple—just start adding tasks and resources just like you would on the desktop version of Microsoft Project. Once you've finished, you can download the project as an XML file, which can then be imported back into Project. You can import projects, open saved files, and use the wide array of keyboard shortcuts all from a web-based interface that works anywhere and requires no account to use—making this worth a look for anybody dealing with project plans and TPS reports.

Gantter is free to use, available in your web browser. For more, read about project management in a nutshell, check out free hosted project management with Clocking IT, or replace Microsoft Project with the open-source OpenProj. Thanks, Climbup!

Sincerely,
Following Up

Dear Following Up,

You can do more than just send emails to create a task on a specific list—you can also set the due date, tags, priority, or even make repeat using these instructions from the Remember the Milk help section.

Simply forward your email to your specially formatted secret email address found in the RTM settings panel, and then add any one of the following lines to the beginning of the message body to set the task parameters:

Priority: 1
Due: Monday at 9am
Repeat: Every Week
Estimate: 2 hours
Tags: report coffee
List: Followup
––-
This is a heading for the first note.
––-

The key is to end your list with 3 dashes, to signify to RTM that everything below should be considered a note—and keep in mind that the subject line will be the name of the task in RTM.

Since typing all of that every time you want to forward an email would get really tedious, you can use Lifehacker’s own text substitution utility Texter to do most of the typing for you. Just create a new hotstring similar to this one, which will insert the text anywhere you type “fup1″ and hit the tab key:

The magic piece of text in this hotstring is the %| bit, which will place your cursor right at that location once the text has been inserted—in this example the cursor is left right where the due date is so you can easily type in a date (like "next friday").

You could (and should) add in your own set of options to the Texter hotstrings, or you could even create multiple pre-defined hotstrings for common followup text. Note that sometimes rich text formatting in your email client will confuse Remember the Milk’s parser, so you may want to stick with plain text if possible.

Update: As marness points out in the comments, you can also create custom signatures or something like Outlook’s quick parts in your email client to accomplish the same thing without extra software. Thanks!

Love and Geekery,

Lifehacker

If you’re a command line lover who skips checkboxes and drop-downs to dash off notes and tasks in a regular old text file, or you’re intrigued by the idea and wish your todo.txt chops were stronger, read on.

I’ve been a heavy todo.txt user for years. Back in 2006, I started developing a command line interface (CLI) to my todo.txt which lets me add to and check off items without launching a full-on text editor. Three years of daily (or at least weekly) use later, version 2.0 of the script is now available. It offers basic to advanced commands for managing your todo.txt and other text files you might use to capture information, like ideas.txt or maybelater.txt. Let’s take a look.

Who This Is Meant For: If you’re comfortable working in the terminal, changing permissions on a file, and working with Unix-style text commands, then the todo.txt CLI is for you. If you don't spend a good amount of time at the command line—either in the Terminal on your Mac, or using a Unix command line or emulator on Windows—you're going to think this whole thing is arcane and confusing. (In that case, we highly recommend getting organized with Remember the Milk. If you want to boost your command line chops on Windows, check out our introduction to Cygwin.)

You’ve already got CLI religion? Good. Let’s get started on some hot todo.txt command line action.

Quick Start Guide:

1. Download the Todo.txt CLI 2.0 zip file and extract it. You’ll get two files. Place both todo.cfg (the configuration file) and todo.sh in your home directory.
2. Open the todo.cfg file with your text editor of choice. Set the TODO_DIR variable to the right path for your setup. For example, on my Windows PC, this line reads:
   TODO_DIR="C:/Documents and Settings/gina/My Documents"
   On my Mac, this line reads:
   TODO_DIR="/Users/gina/Documents/todo"
3. Make the todo.sh file executable by using the command: chmod +x todo.sh
4. (OPTIONAL) Alias the letter t to todo.sh to save keystrokes while you use it. In your ~/.bash_profile file, add the line:
   alias t='~/todo.sh'

Now you’re ready to put this script to work!

Basic Usage

Before we start, keep in mind that this CLI isn’t trying to reinvent the text editor. If you want to do big bulk edits to a lot of items in your todo.txt, just open it up in your favorite text editor to do so. But for quick, one-hit access to add items, mark items as complete, or slice and dice your list by project or priority, todo.sh is for you.

For example, to add a line to your todo.txt file, at the command line, type:

$ t add "Pick up milk"

Add a few more items for good measure:

$ t add "Pick up the dry cleaning"
$ t add "Clean out the inbox"

Now, to see all the items on your list, use:

$ t ls

The output will look like this:

$ t ls
03 Clean out the inbox
01 Pick up milk
02 Pick up the dry cleaning
--
TODO: 3 tasks in C:/Documents and Settings/gina/My Documents/todo.txt.

Now, you can reference each item by its ID—which is actually the line number it lives at in the todo.txt file. For instance, to prioritize task 1 to the highest level—priority A—use this command:

$ t pri 1 A

To mark task 2 as complete, use todo.sh‘s do action:

$ t do 2

Since a video is worth a million words, see this in action in this screencast demonstration of a to-do list you might find for a crew member on Battlestar Galactica. (Go full-screen to see what’s being typed more clearly.)

If this video clip isn’t clear enough for you, try this alternate high-res location.

Advanced Usage

Once you’ve got the basics of working with your todo.txt down, it’s time to dive into more advanced tricks. Here are a few more things this CLI can do.

• Replace or delete a task; append or prepend text to a line. When you want to re-word a task or add a context, project, or additional info to it, use the replace, append, and prepend actions to do so. For example, add “ready at 3PM” to your “Pick up the dry cleaning task” with this command:
  
  

  $ t append 2 "ready at 3PM"

• See all the contexts and projects in your list. If you’re using the + and @ sign format to signify projects and contexts, use the listcon and listproj (or lsc and lsprj for short) commands to see a short list of all your contexts or projects in your todo.txt.
• Move items from your todo.txt to another text file. Say you've decided that the "Learn how to speak French" task is actually something you're not quite committed to doing—yet. Use todo.sh‘s mv command to zip that task from todo.txt to another text file in your todo directory. For example, this command will move it into a maybelater.txt file:
  
  

  $ t move 10 maybelater.txt

• List the contents of another text file. Since I got so used to working with todo.txt this way, there’s now support for working with other text files. For example, you can list the contents of your maybelater.txt file using the command:
  
  

  $ t listfile maybelater.txt

  Likewise, you can add a line to another file using:

  $ t addto ideas.txt "My bright idea"

  You can also search the contents of another text file by adding a keyword after the list command, ala:

  $ t lf ideas.txt apple

See all the options available to you using the todo.sh -h command. The full usage manual is available here.

Further Info and Related Projects

The todo.txt CLI has lived over at its official homepage, Todotxt.com, for years now, and although I haven’t posted an update there since 2006, an active mailing list of over 500 members is still going strong. Since this project is open source, happily several other todo.txt projects have sprung up over the years, including Task, which offers even more features than my little script does.

If you’re a programmer who wants to add to this script or a user with questions or ideas about the todo.txt CLI, either post them here or consider joining the mailing list for support. For a full history of this script's development—including its three-year hiatus—see its full changelog.

Think using a command line interface to a text file is insane or fantastic (or both)? Tried out todo.txt? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, is still married to her todo.txt file even after a sordid affair with Remember the Milk. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.