To-do lists

I suppose it's never too early to start making to-do lists. I'm only half-kidding. My older son JD was reading Frog and Toad Together yesterday. In one of the stories, Toad decides to make a list of all the things he's going to do that day. So JD (without any prompting from me or my wife) decided to make his own list of "things to do today":

• Wake up
• Get dressed
• Have breakfast
• Put on church clothes
• Go to church
• Have lunch
• Take off church clothes
• Have quiet time
• Play with AJ
• Eat dinner
• Clean up
• Watch a show
• Brush teeth
• Get into PJs
• Read books
• Go to bed

As JD did these things throughout the day, he'd cross them off his list (just like Toad). I make plenty of lists too. I actually haven't found a personal organizational scheme that I really like yet. I had a day-planner for a while but I couldn't stand transferring entries from one day to the next by hand. I've read some of David Allen's work (Getting Things Done) but managing whole-life to-do lists becoming unwieldy without proper software support. The current system I'm using is GooToDo. It's a pretty cool little Web-based tool that I would highly recommend to others. It's not perfect by any means but it's convenient for scheduling to-do's in the future (but not seeing them now) and prioritizing taks for a particular day. Also, you can email tasks to yourself and have them show up on a particular day. The main thing that it's not good at is managing what David Allen refers to as "someday/maybe" items (items that don't have a specific target completion date but things that you want to remind yourself of and not lose track of). Also, the tool is only useful if you're online. I haven't figured out a great way to use it offline.

The time management quest continues. There's a big part of me that wishes, however, that my list of "things to do today"was as simple as JD's.