my life and my doctrine

Next in this series about using a smartphone, is how I’m hoping to manage my todo lists.

After trying a number of different apps to manage tasks, to do lists etc, I’ve settled on three. ‘Three?’ I hear you ask. Why?

My goal was to find one for ministry that would basically be something that managed a nested list. I’ve gone with ColorNote, which can categorise notes by colour. I don’t use the text notes, only the checklist. Using the touchpad is easy to shuffle the order of items on a checklist and then tapping each will marked them done. I’ve got yellow for administration and staff meeting items, blue for longer term strategy, another colour for people to contact etc etc.

Since I’m keen to be able to ‘switch off’ when it’s my day off or on holidays, I figure that seeing my todo list wouldn’t help. The simplest way was to use a different app for home related stuff. And, there are better apps suited to that. I found To Do List, which has five built in categories – my tasks, @ work, I want it!, grocery and jotter. I’m only going to use ‘my tasks’ for jobs to do around the house and ‘grocery’ for a shopping list. A task is stored as a name, note and priority. A grocery item is stored as a name, price, quantity and priority. It can also simply add basic/regular grocery items.

Lastly, and this is the most exciting of my finds is EveryDay ToDo, which is more geared to regular reminders. I’m using this as my prayer diary. I can add items that occur daily, weekly or on a particular day a month. So, every day it will remind me to pray for Jo and the kids. Mondays is Bible study leaders from Evening Church, Tuesdays – Matthias staff and families, Wednesday – three mates from college, Thursday – particular CMS friends, Fridays – my extended family, Saturdays – Jo’s extended family. Then, I can also put in particular people that I want to pray for once a month.

I start the app on any given day and I’m reminded what to pray for based on the day of the week and the date in the month.