A little bird told me about a new way to manage my lists

As a GTD devotee and techno-geek, I am constantly tinkering with my productivity and time management toolset. I use Evernote to manage my notes. For task management I have tried a number of different products, including Google Tasks, Remember the Milk an Nozbe. These are all great products in their own right, but recently I had settled on Toodledo. I liked Toodledo mainly because its free offering covered most of what I needed. I also liked how it integrated with my Iphone and with my email account.

However, this setup wasn’t perfect. For a start, Toodledo is much more sophisticated than I actually need. I am not one for managing task priorities and inter-dependencies. A task description, a context and maybe a due date is pretty all much all I want to capture. All the rest get sorted out as part of the weekly review.

More importantly, I wasn’t happy with the fact that my notes and todo were split across two separate repositories. The boundary between a note and a task is not always clear-cut. Often, I have notes associated with tasks which I want to keep long after the task has been completed. Similarly, my notes contain some items which lend themselves to be checked off even though I prefer not to manage them as distinct actionable tasks. These includes checklists, shopping lists, books I want to buy/read etc.

Enter Egretlist, an Iphone application which seems to have solved both of these problems for me.

Egretlist is great as a task management and list management solution because it doesn’t manage tasks in its own repository. Rather, it relies on integration with Evernote.

Once you have entered your Evernote credentials within Egretlist, it scans your Evernote notebooks and looks for items that have a checkbox. Any such item gets to be displayed within Egretlist on your Iphone as a list item. You can then capture new tasks or lists and these will be stored as notes within Evernote (where you can view them Via Evernote’s website or PC client).

Any content following the checkbox, including photos, is visible within Egretlist as a note that is attached to the item.

Lists can be setup such that each item is a separate Evernote note, but you can also have a single list with multiple list items associated with it.

I contemplated the merits of both options and finally settled on a hybrid solution whereby the lists that are reasonably permanent over time but where list items change (such as shopping lists, checklists, books to read etc.) are managed as a list of items, whereas all others (mainly tasks) are managed as separate notes (this means that in Evernote you see a note with a title and within it a single checkbox with the same title following it).

Egretlist recognises note tags, which can associated with categories, such as Contexts, Next Actions, Someday/maybe lists, projects etc. This makes is quite easy to use Egretlist as part of a GTD approach. You can customize application start page, and you can tag important items with a star, causing them so show up on the start page and also incrementing the application badge counter. Egretlist will even archive completed items so that they don’t continue to show  (they are still available in evernote). A recent update allows capture of task due dates and it will even supposedly plant a task in your Iphone calendar, though I haven’t been able to test this feature as it is only supported on IOS4 (I am using a first generation Iphone).

Egretlist isn’t perfect. For one thing, the user interface for adding lists is confusing. Secondly, the way in which tags are associated with categories can be a bit complex from a GTD perspective. For instance, I found myself having to create an artificial tag called “Projects” which I then associated with the Egretlist category called “Projects”.

Nevertheless, it is a great solution for my needs and I would have been willing to pay more than double the Itunes purchase price.

The only feature I really miss from Toodledo is recurring tasks. I may consider continuing to use Toodledo to manage my recurring tasks, unless of course the engineers at Egretlist can come up with support for this feature.