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For all of you poor bastards that have been following along with my GTD evolution over the last few years, you’ve seen the implementation change courses a few times. For those of you who couldn’t give a crap about my past implementations, and are interested in how I’m using Toodledo in my new system, welcome to the fray.

The basics: Toodledo is an online “to-do list manager” that has some very strong GTD-esque features and options, is free (though it offers upgraded accounts – one with file storage), has a great mobile/iPhone interface, and a very slick and usable online interface. There is a third-party iPhone app in the app store that syncs tasks with Toodledo, but it’s about as feature-poor as could be, and I’ve avoided it.

Why Toodledo? I did consider Remember the Milk (RTM) and a few others in my search for an online component to my GTD system, but Toodledo was the clear winner. First, I’m only interested in those to-do managers that sync well with Jott. I’ve found myself doing massive core dumps in the car over Jott, and all of those items either end up in my Toodledo inbox, or in my Evernote notebok. RTM made the cut there, but was light on text message interfacing compared to Toodledo, and lacked the GTD context assignment parameters that come with Toodledo. The mobile interfaces were a push, as far as I was concerned.

Why digital? What happened to the Moleskine? If you didn’t read this post explaining my reasons for changing the system, or this post talking about the new role of my Moleskine, go do that first.

Read on for specifics on my new system.

The trick with Toodledo is to employ contexts as you might expect, use folders as projects, and get really good with the ‘n’ key. If you’re setting this up for the first time, I’d suggest you spend a few minutes in the GTD forum over at Toodledo, as there are plenty of suggestions on GTD implementation out there that don’t match mine exactly. Here are the contexts in my setup:

• .Waiting For
• .Inbox; theoretically, any new task without a context should end up here. It hasn’t worked that way so far, though. Only new tasks entered on the mobile interface or on the web get this default label. Anything coming in from Jott, for instance, ends up with a “No Context” attached to it. Gotta watch for that.
• @People/Calls
• @Office
• @Errands
• @Plant; not literally a plant, but the “manufacturing plant” that I’m visiting all the time with work.
• @Home
• @Web; for anything I can do on the web, regardless of what machine I’m on
• @Mac; for anything I must do on one of my Macs
• @Dell; for anything I must do on my work laptop

There is a folder for each project, and that’s it. I’ve seen some hybrid solutions out there – people using projects to separate contexts and sub-categorize real contexts, but it’s a little too kludgey for me. During your weekly review, you’ll notice that the folder view not only gives you a full list of all the folders, but it shows you a quick listing of how many tasks exist against that project. Never was there a quicker way to find out what you’ve been ignoring…just look for the zeros!

The view selections are outstanding, allowing you to filter by project, context, task status, etc. Toodledo even offers saved custom searches; one of the hacks suggested by the Toodledo guys regarding my Jott problem was to create a custom “inbox” search that included everything in the .inbox context AND in the “no context” context. I haven’t done this yet, but it’s on a list.

I would say, at the moment, that I do about 70% of my task entry on an actual computer, with the other 30% coming from activity either on the mobile version of the site or from my Jott phone calls. It’s amazing how many tasks you can get updated in the system during a horrible meeting.

Learn the ‘n’ key. It’s a hot key for adding a new task on Toodledo, and it’ll save you lots of time…especially if you get good at naming your projects something that’s easily remembered. Imagine ‘n’, tab, ‘j (or whatever letter for the project/folder you’re assigning), tab, ‘another letter for a goal’, return. That’s it.

Don’t forget about goals – something included on Toodledo. Runway, 10,000, 40,000…long-term, short-term, and subsidiaries are all there. Assigning goals to an individual task is a fantastic way of seeing just how much activity you’ve been doing at the runway level to meet your 30,000 foot goals in life. And they’ve even got charts that will let you see, visually, where you’re spending your time.

This is beginning to sound like an advertisement for Toodledo, and that’s okay. So far, I’ve been absolutely impressed with the site’s performance, and its feature set. If you’re inclined to try your GTD system online or on the computer, you owe it to yourself to have a gander at what they’re doing over at Toodledo.