Projects and Areas of Focus in Toodledo

[clango]

It's time to optimize further my system.

That's said, I'd like to ask how do you practically manage your Projects list and your Areas of Focus in Toodledo.

And ...how do you manage in toodledo your other altitudes of perspective?

And if you used before Toodledo, but you faced a restriction in these kind of management, to which software did you migrate?

And did you feel free of limitation now?

 

[PeterW]

And if you used before Toodledo, but you faced a restriction in these kind of management, to which software did you migrate?

And did you feel free of limitation now?

I am a former user of Toodledo. I had a PRO subscription to their web version for desktop use and I synced it with Appigo's Todo app on iOS (never liked the Toodledo iOS app, very clunky). When I left Toodledo, I used Appigo's own web desktop version for a while but eventually left that too and went to OmniFocus (Mac desktop and iOS).

Toodledo was never specifically designed for GTD. The owner/developer created it for his own personal use and was able to monetize it by offering subscriptions. Ongoing development was done primarily on the basis of what he found "interesting" rather than on what users were asking for. I found that frustrating.

The two problems you raise are what most GTD followers struggle with, i.e. Projects and Areas of Focus. Toodledo just isn't designed to cater for this well at all.

The way I set up Toodledo was to use folders as my main GTD buckets, e.g. Today, Waiting-for, Someday/Any day, etc. As there was no specific inbox, I had to create a view showing items assigned to 'No folder' as my inbox.

Given that I was using folders in this way, projects had to be parent tasks with sub-tasks as the various steps in each project. This caused a problem in that when project sub-tasks are viewed outside of their hierarchy (i.e. in a specific folder), you can't see the parent task so you can't see its relationship to the parent or other sub-tasks (as they may be in a different folder/bucket) so it made project control difficult.

I also tried using Tags as my GTD buckets and switched Folders to be projects. From memory this introduced other problems, e.g. you have to be careful using tags because they are free-form entry (i.e. not a validated/defined list) so you can inadvertently create two that are almost identical.

It seemed that no matter which way I tried using Toodledo for GTD, there was always a significant compromise. And because it was so flexible, I was always tempted to keep tweaking the system to see if I could make it work better, which of course was a waste of time.

In the end I realised that it was never going to get better - the developer introduced what I considered zany new features from time-to-time that absolutely no-one in the user forums had asked for yet he ignored countless repeated requests for basic improvements. After pestering him about this on more than several occasions following an update, his eventual reason (as mentioned above) was that he developed features based on what he found was "interesting" (e.g. trying out a new coding method, or a new technology). It just wasn't a normal commercial product and didn't ever seem that it would be.

OmniFocus is the polar opposite - carefully developed with GTD in mind, every feature highly considered for its worth and value to the user community, very powerful yet a simple intuitive interface with some flexibility in viewing the data, and well-supported by professionals who care about what they do. It's refreshing.

 

[Gnopps]

I like Toodle do a lot as a task manager and use it for all my private tasks (where I don't adhere to GTD).

However for my work tasks where I work with GTD I was never able to get it to fit right. I used sub-tasks as projects and that worked decently but I missed not having sequential actions.

 

[OF user]

The other possibility is to look up Proximo's toodledo setup. You might like the way he did it and his setup is pretty well known. He no longer uses toodledo because he was tired of fooling with it, but if you google "proximo toodledo gtd setup" you'll find it and you might like it.

 

[Arun]

Great thing about toodledo is that it provides lots of options you have 1. Folders, 2. Goals, and 3. Tags which you can use as per your suitability.
You can use Folder for Project List
You can use Goals -
LIFELONG GOALS - For 20k feet and 50k feet (note 20k feet - Areas of focus and 50k feet are never ending)
Example - 20k ft - Area of Health [Current], 20k ft - Area of Finance [Current]
LONG-TERM GOALS - For 40k feet
SHORT-TERM GOALS - For 30k feet

I do quick and dirty brainstorming (mindmap style) for all my projects, area of focus and altitudes of perspective on piece of paper
I use Microsoft word document - outline view options (I find it to be a good outlining s/w) and get all action items from mind map from paper. Then I copy-paste it from word document to toodledo task. I know it might look like lengthy (long cut) way to do. But next time I have to re-visit to do brainstorming on my projects, area of focus and altitudes of perspective, I take the print out of word doc and and carry out brainstorming on top of it, I don't have to rethink of those thing which I had already captured. My mind gets free to assimilate new ideas and thoughts.

I use toodledo for everything except for projects. I now use asana for projects, reason being all my office employees are managing their projects on asana and it becomes easier and collaborative to do project review with them every week on asana, earlier I was using google tasks to manage projects which I found it to be very good and suitable for me.

if you don't have constrains, I recommend you to use toodledo for projects too.

 

[TesTeq]

I use toodledo for everything except for projects. I now use asana for projects, reason being all my office employees are managing their projects on asana and it becomes easier and collaborative to do project review with them every week on asana, earlier I was using google tasks to manage projects which I found it to be very good and suitable for me.

if you don't have constrains, I recommend you to use toodledo for projects too.

Let me understand the last statement. Now you use Asana because of the work setup but previously you were using google tasks to manage projects even though there were no team collaboration constraints. It means that toodledo project handling isn't as good and reliable as it should be.

 

[bcmyers2112]

I used to use Toodledo. After trying multiple kludges I found the easiest thing to do was to simply create a context called Projects and stop trying to link them to next actions. That's how I discovered that I didn't really need the linkages which for me were always more bother than benefit, no matter what software I tried.

I never bothered trying to link next actions or projects to AOFs because I never saw the value (and still don't).

I left Toodledo for Evernote because I greatly disliked some changes they made to the iOS app several years ago. I think the Toodledo iOS app is much better today, but I have no desire to migrate to another tool yet again.

If you really like Toodledo, there's no reason to switch to Evernote, BTW. They're quite different. I happen to like Evernote a lot but it's not a traditional list management tool, and not everyone can get past that.

 

[clango]

At the moment I set up Toodledo with Goals - for the altitude.

Then I have only 3 folders: Action, Project and Tickler.

A task in the Project folder is the title of the project.

Each project will have a Notes attached, to list the steps or could have some subtasks to determine the following steps.

I'm seeing which is more convenient for me. And for you? What would you recommend?

Al the moment I realize I cannot see the attached notes in the iPhone if I append them on the website.

Then I have all the @context as usual