Organising Your Life [Part 2] Choosing The Best Tool

This post is part 2 in my series on getting yourself organised in 2015. You can view the first post here.

Choosing the best tool for you:

The tool you use to get yourself organised is not really a top priority. For many people a paper note book with a number of lists written down is enough. For others an expensive digital task management application is their preferred choice. There are many advantages and disadvantages for each tool, and choosing a tool is something that will largely be trial and error. It can take many months to settle on a tool you are happy with and along with that comes a great deal of experimentation. As long as that experimentation does not get in the way of you getting your work done, then feel free to experiment. Finding the right tool for you is an important step towards getting yourself organised and stress free. 

In this post I want to introduce you to what I regard as one of the best digital applications on the market today. This application is Todoist.

Todoist is a free, multi-platform application that is easy to pick up and understand and will work on all your digital devices such as smart phone, laptop and tablet. As you get used to using Todoist, you can upgrade to the premium version for about $30.00 per year. The premium version gives you more features, but to begin with you do not really need these features. My advice would be to stick with the free version until Todoist becomes a part of your everyday life. 

Todoist has a beautiful user interface and is easy to add tasks, projects and due dates. It is easy to see what you have to do today, tomorrow and the next seven days and the synchronisation between your devices is quick.

There are many other productivity applications available. One of which is Wunderlist, which is also free, but very few make it as easy to capture and process tasks as Todoist does. 

To test out Todoist, take the list you made of your routine tasks in part 1 and add them into Todoist. What I suggest you do is as follows:

1. Go to Todoist.com on you computer
2. Create an account
3. Once you have created an account and are in the Todoist interface click on "Add project" and name it "Daily Routines". Then add a second project and call this one "Weekly Routines" and then finally another project, "Monthly Routines".
4. Now begin adding tasks into the "Daily Routines" project from the routines list you made earlier. 
5. Now do the same with your "Weekly routines" and "Monthly Routines" 
6. Once you have all your routines in your projects, start adding dates. In your "Daily Routines" project you can add the date "ev day" as these tasks are tasks you have to do everyday. If some of your daily routine tasks happen every day except weekends for example, you can type "ev mon, tue, wed, thu, fri" ("ev" standing for "every")
7. Once you have filled in recurring dates to your daily routines project, move on to your weekly routines and do the same for this project and the same for your monthly routines project. 

Over the next few days or weeks you will fine yourself adding and subtracting items from these projects, Don't worry about that, that is perfectly normal it does take a few weeks to get things exactly how you want them. 

One final point. I would strongly recommend that if you have time you take a look at some of the videos the guys at Todoist have made and put on YouTube. They are excellently produced and very instructive. 

Now it is just left for you to download Todoist and have a good play. 

Please note: I am not paid by Todoist or any subsiduary of Doist. I only recommend Todoist as I have tested most of the productivity apps out there and in my own humble opinion Todoist is the best option for most people. There are of course many other alternatives out there some expensive, some free. The choice is yours.