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I’m a disciple of David Allen and his ever-popular Getting Things Done method for efficiently managing all the “Stuff” we need to do.

There are dozens of great tools our there to help you GTD. (See what I mean?)

For about the last six months I had been using NetVibes, a popular start page application, to create and shuffle todo lists. NetVibes lets you easily create and categorize todo lists and its ajaxy goodness lets you drag list items (and entire lists) around to prioritize them.

Still, in some ways NetVibes was lacking. I have an iPhone, but there’s no iPhone app for NetVibes, so I couldn’t add new todos directly to my list while on the go. And trust me, you don’t want to use the iPhone’s small view screen to browse NetVibes.

I also couldn’t set deadlines for my NetVibes todos – and moving a todo from the “Calls” list to the “Waiting for” list required a cut and a paste. I started to think I could do better.

So over the last two weeks I’ve been reviewing a veritable tag cloud of todo apps, and after creating countless user accounts, my vote for the best time-management app (at least during this election cycle) goes to…. Remember The Milk.

RTM was built to be a todo management tool, unlike NetVibes, which is really primarily an RSS feed reader. It’s also built for speed. It’s loaded w/ajax – I wonder how it performs w/a screen reader – which allows you to add and manipulate todos almost as fast as you can think them up. Items can be prioritized and assigned a deadline. And you can easily move items from one list to another w/a click or two.

You can search/sort your todos in a number of ways. Yep, you can tag ‘em too.

RTM is everywhere. There’s a widget that lets you integrate it with your Google Calendar; you can also tie it to other handy apps like Jott, and you can tie todos to locations.

SMS reminders? Check. iPhone app? Check.

I’ll still use NetVibes to compile long-term GTD project lists; and it’s a great feed reader.

If you’re feeling swamped trying to manage the crush of things you need to do each day, you might want to give RTM a look. As always, YMMV, depending on what you need to do and where/when/how you need to do it. Tomorrow I hope to post a list of some of the other time-managment tools I found while rummaging around the Internet.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 4:59 am by Rob and is filed under GTD, Jott, NetVibes, Productivity, Web 2.0, Web apps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.