For me, the most iconic, most-used tool on the Palm Pilot 1000 through the Palm Treo was the To Do app. Since getting the iPhone, I’ve been trying to find a halfway usable replacement. I may have it now.

The Importance of Making Lists

Everything I do is longer and more complicated than I can keep track of with my limited short-term memory and easily (OOH, SHINY! Wait, what?) distracted attention span[1].

day in and day out,
while I work,
or while I do anything else,

And that’s exactly (and all) the Palm To Do app did. It was as close to perfect yet complete minimalism as a piece of software can get. It was an abacus for keeping track of urgent, soon, later, someday tasks.

Nobody else has ever seemed to get the concept. Mac OS X hides its To Do list inside iCal (and you can only edit them with a shitty pop-up dialog box; BusyCal shows them in an info editor on the side, but it’s still crammed into a calendar app where it doesn’t really fit, not a simple To Do editor.

On the iPhone, the situation was even worse. I could make a calendar entry, which meant my calendar was full of junk to-do items that couldn’t be searched on the iPhone, and were hard to find even on desktop. I could make a Notes entry, but Notes has no organization ability, and still doesn’t sync very well.

It got so bad I went back to pen-and-paper, keeping my TODO list in a Field Notes in my pocket, with a short keyword on the right side. No search, just flipping through paper, but at least it was always with me.

I tried quite a few To Do apps, none of which really worked the way I needed. In particular, they were all flat-category, no way to search by keyword, no priority levels. Few of them synced at all, and those mostly rely on a cloud service (i.e., watch all your data vanish when they go out of business or have a Microsoft/Danger-type meltdown in a year or two) rather than your own computer or MobileMe.

Things

The closest yet is Cultured Code’s Things. It’s still more complex than I really want or need, too much organization and not enough raw data piles, and there are some UI flaws that drive me crazy, but it’s good at what it does, and doesn’t force its anal-retentive GTD[2] roots on me.

The main screen shows several top-level lists: Inbox, Today, Next, Scheduled, Someday, Projects, and Logbook, and a [+] button to add a new item to any list.

Inbox is a normal list containing items. Today is a smart list of items on any other list which have been marked to be done today. Next is a smart list of all items, sorted by overdue, due, today, and then everything else. Scheduled is a smart list of items with a due date, sorted by date. Someday is a normal list of stuff you’re putting off (the icon is a cardboard box…) Logbook is a record of everything you’ve checked off as completed. Projects is a container for multiple lists, used essentially like Palm’s categories.

In each list, the bottom toolbar has buttons to [+] Add items, [★] Star items to be done today (while the icon here is a star, and a star is shown on Today’s smart list, the item’s checkbox just goes yellow, which is unintuitive), or [→] Move items to another list. The top toolbar has an [Edit] button to rearrange or delete. There is no ability to re-sort the items of a list, which is a pretty serious omission if you have more than a dozen items.

In Projects, but NOT anywhere else, you can tap the (>) disclosure button on a list to get a view screen where you can edit the list info, Show (all items in the list) in Today, Move (all items in the list) to another list, or Send (all items in the list) as Email.

In Projects and in all sublists of it, you can hit a [Tags] toolbar button to show all contained items with a single tag, or items with no tags assigned. However, it only finds immediate children, it does not search the contents of sublists. Say I have Notes, Shopping, and Perilar lists in Projects; Shopping and Notes are not tagged, but Perilar is tagged Code. The only thing I can filter at Projects is “Code”. If I go into the Shopping list, I can filter on all the tags I’ve used, like “Movies”.

The closest thing to app-wide tag search is in Next, but the big-bucket-o-stuff isn't always what I want. There is no text search, and items don’t show up in system Spotlight. That’s why I’m currently sticking with very broad category lists in Projects, even though I’d like to have much tighter ones; Things’ pathetic excuse for search just doesn’t support it.

When adding an item, you just get an editable title field, and a Create In button to change the location (default is the list you were currently viewing, usually correct). To set more fields, you have to hit a “Show Details” button, then you can pick tags, enter notes, or enter a due date.

“Show Details”, trivial as it may seem, is almost a deal-breaker. I need all the fields visible on note creation, because I almost always (90%) want to add a tag, and often (50%) some note text or due date (50%). A short title and broad category is not enough context. It’s only one button and an animated form transition, but it takes 3 seconds (I timed it repeatedly with my stopwatch) instead of half a second and not having to remember this annoyance, find the button, and wait. Oh, and it hides the keyboard, so I can either remember to do it after entering the title, or have to tap on the title again, losing more time. Frustration is born of such UI missteps.

To view a note, you tap on its name (but not the checkbox), and get a view screen. Now “Show in Today” and “Move” are list buttons, not bottom toolbar buttons, which is inconsistent and confusing.

When you check off an item, on your next restart of the app it’ll be moved to Logbook. Also at restart, the icon badge gets updated; unfortunately, this is exactly the wrong time, IMO, it should update the badge when exiting, but with the limited time to clean up on iPhone, that may not be practical.

There’s no priority system. You either do stuff today, or later. There are High, Medium, Low priority tags in the default tag set, but they don’t seem to do anything, they don’t make items float higher or lower in the Next smart list, though you can search by tag in the Next list. I find this pretty disappointing. Some tasks are more important than other tasks, and Things has no way to express that.

Syncing requires the desktop Mac app. If the desktop app is running, and the iPhone has wifi enabled, it’ll automatically sync. I found this to work reasonably well, though it once got stuck and wouldn’t see any new items from the phone until I unsynced and resynced.

A trick I use for visually identifying items is to put an emoji icon in front of list and tag names:
Code
This works great on the iPhone, but at present emoji are not supported on computers, so there I just see an 💻 error box instead of a cute little computer icon. There are proposals to add emoji to Unicode, so perhaps soon this will work on the desktop as well.

The Things iPhone app is $10, and despite the flaws, it’s a reasonable tool until something more like the Palm Pilot’s circa 1997 To Do app comes along. The Mac app is $50, which is extortionate for such a small app that does nothing more than the iPhone does. If you’re ONLY going to sync from iPhone and just want a desktop backup, it’ll keep working after the trial period in read-only mode with a nag screen.

Now I just need to deal with my notepad situation. More on that in a later blog post.

[0]

The post title is a reference to Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, which is a song by my favorite dead musician Warren Zevon (iTunes link), and a grim but entertaining crime movie.

[1]

I’m not as bad as the protagonist of the “Memento Mori” short story by Jonathan Nolan, which the movie Memento was based on, but my inattention has similar results. If you use external memory, you can accomplish a lot anyway.

[2]

Just in case I hadn’t offended “Getting Things Done™” users enough: I think GTD methodology is the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, or Arnold Judas Rimmer on Red Dwarf spending all semester color-coding his study materials but never studying. It’s the appearance of organization without any real productivity.