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To-do list posts

Filed under: Productivity, Social Software

Muse Wedding 2.0 keeps you organized

Muse Wedding
Muse Wedding has recently changed almost everything about its format, and it is for the better. The formerly ho-hum wedding to-do list program is now a full-fledged information and community site full of good stuff. All of the new features will be live today for new users.

Muse Wedding is basically one of those big, thick wedding planning binders on the web. You can enter whatever you need to get done into your task list and check it off as it gets done. You can create a budget and add what you have spent. You can even see it in a pie chart!

You can visit the Idea Book to see what other users have posted or post your own ideas for others to see. You can create a profile so like-minded users can find you for brainstorming sessions or idea swapping.

I used Muse Wedding for some of my own wedding planning before the redesign and community features were available. What I liked the most is that I made my own task list and wasn't tied to the traditional ideas of what needed to be done 6 months before the wedding, 5 months before the wedding and on and on.

Muse still offers that flexibility, now with a nice looking site design, and plenty of planning and community features. And even if the person planning the wedding isn't quite as web savvy as you, our DLS readers, each page has clear explanations of what you can do with each command.

Filed under: Business, Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Office, Productivity, Apple, Freeware, Beta

Taskpaper - dead simple task management

TaskpaperWith the vast number of task management applications that are available, particularly for the Mac, you'd think that every possible feature has been done in a to-do list program. But maybe that's part of the problem. These programs are so feature-rich, that they end up getting in the way of actually getting things done, which is their purpose in the first place.

Jesse Grosjean thinks so, which is why his Hog Bay Software company has released a "work in progress" (notice the absence fo the word "beta"?) version of a new app called Taskpaper. The idea of Taskpaper is to boil down the job of task management to the most basic list making functionality, and make it work with plain text files. This makes it both dead simple to use, and totally flexible, since plain text can be used wherever and however you like.

Right at the top of the page, you'll see a quote from The David: "For the most part, the applications that are specifically designed for project organizing are way too complex, with too much horsepower to really be functional for 98 percent of what most people need to manage."

It seems Taskpaper might well be onto something here. If you're looking for something similar to Taskpaper, but web based, there's always Backpack by 37 Signals.

Filed under: Business, Developer, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Freeware

What To Do Next - local web app

What To Do NextLifehacker brings us a nugget from Davo, one of their avid readers, called What To Do Next. The idea behind the little application is extremely simple; it's written in javascript, and therefore will run on any platform. All it does is act as a front-end to a list of tasks that you would like to accomplish. Clicking on the button for one of the tasks starts a ten minute countdown timer (the time is configurable), after which an alarm sounds. The idea here is that ten minutes is short enough to feel approachable, so you may find that you can get started on a task that otherwise felt too large to tackle. Once the alarm goes off, if you're feeling like you're making good progress, just continue. But if you feel stuck or like you're spinning your wheels, the alarm is your escape - just choose a different task from your list and get to work.

I really enjoy the idea behind this application, but don't need yet another task manager to maintain. But that's okay, since really all I need is a 10 minute countdown timer and the resolve to actually tackle some of the items on my ever-growing task list in Outlook. But downloading and installing What To Do Next takes mere seconds, and if you don't have a to-do list, or aren't particularly fond of the one you're using, this might be a nice alternative.

Note that the source file containing the actual list of tasks is well laid-out and easy to follow, but if you're averse to editing text configuration files, you might want to give this one a pass.

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