To-do or not to-do. That is not the question. Which app?

August 25th, 2010

: Image by Chris Guillebeau via Flickr

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other night who is a successful business owner.

She and her husband do the lions-share of the work in their 2 stores and what came up were all the million and one ways in which to keep track, log, list, remind and otherwise drive oneself nuts trying to stay organized and on top of the workload of a small-mid size business.

This is not the first time I have heard this. Many of my clients are faced with not the lack of tools with which to stay organized but quite the opposite…there are so many!! Which is the BEST?

I wish I could tell you. But I can’t. What I can tell you is that I try to use them all for a while so that I can speak to as many of the productivity tools out there with some aplomb.

Having said that I think the simplest is always best. And on top of that I think that you just have to make a decision to use one or two – for better or for worse and stick to them. Even if something shiner and newer comes out. Just stay where you are and get really good with the tools you have otherwise you’ll go nuts and spend all of your time messing around with productivity tools and no time being productive. I see that a lot.

My short list:

Evernote – it is your external memory. You can use tags and notebooks and don’t really have to be too terribly organized. Just throw stuff in there that you want for later. It is great for information that you want but don’t know where to put. Information that you don’t necessarily need immediately.

Book lists, pic of your friend’s purse that you want to find online, clip web pages of notes for your website etc Syncs to your phone.

Manymoon - great for project management and sharing in groups. You can link to Google calandar and upload docs to it so there is a bit of a dropbox functionality here. There are tasks for each project that you can assign to team members, reminders can be set up, Also syncs to your phone. I’m using it for a work team and will try it with a client too. Stay tuned!

What are your favorite to-do list apps? Project management tools?