The artist Pablo Picasso once said, “Action is the foundational key to all success.” It’s one of those quotations that when you ponder it, you will have to agree with its blatant truth. But if so many of us are of the same mind as Picasso, why do we regularly forget to take his advice? About 10 years…

Something that has sped the development of awesome web and desktop applications over the past 10+ years is the idea of a technology or set of technologies coming together in harmony in what is known as a framework. There are many popular technical programming frameworks out there today like .NET for Windows, Ruby on…

Remember the Milk has been a staple to-do list web app for many years now and has been known to be one of the best and even most reliable. It’s known for a clean simple interface and sometimes forgotten about power under the hood. Remember The Milk (RTM from here on out) can also be…

I’m a few days late, but with the new year upon us, I’ve decided to inaugurate a new Moleskine. The old one is… well, it’s not good. The binding is broken, pages are out, and it’s just about full anyway. Plus, I’ve got a saucy new Moleskine in fire engine red that’s eager to…

As far as I’m concerned, there is no better personal productivity tool than the humble to-do list. Just the ability to put down and visually scan everything you’ve got on your plate offers a huge benefit – as anyone who’s ever reached for a sheet of paper and started listing tasks when they were…

At the center of just about every personal productivity system are lists – GTD has it’s context lists, Pomodoro has it’s action inventory and daily to-do lists, todoodlist has, well, the todoodlist, and so on. But there are a lot of different kinds of lists besides your task or to-do list that can…

Everyone makes a task list (or “todo list”) at least now and again. Usually, we wait until we’re overwhelmed with stuff to do, and then we’ll sit down and list everything we need to get done in the next day or two. Then, one by one, we go through the items on our list, do…

Does this sound familiar? You’re slowly drifting off to sleep when you come up with a great line for the song or paper you’ve been working on all day. It’s such a great idea, in fact, that you just know you’ll remember it in the morning. Happy to have finally come up with the perfect…

Too much of today’s personal productivity is stuck in repeating the past A genuine increase in productivity means getting the same, or greater, output with less effort and a smaller use of resources. Yet most personal productivity software still relies on various ways to categorize old-fashioned to-do lists. That focuses on getting more done by improved…

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking for an online service to help me stay organized. My system at the moment is a patchwork of paper, desktop apps, and willpower that has worked well enough in the past but has begun to come apart at the seams as I take on a growing…

You’ve seen it before. Every checkmark only leaves two more unfinished tasks. Your to-do list has become an living organism, spawning more and more work while leaving you less and less time to finish. Is it possible to stop your to-do list, or will it just become an unstoppable blob of extra…

You can organize your todo lists any which way you like [house, work, fun etc] but how often are you categorizing them into importance and urgency? Sean Tierney suggests sorting your todos graphically on a scale for urgency vs importance – since tasks can sometimes parade as urgent when they really aren’t, and vise versa. Urgency…

I like to-do lists, but do you know what I like better? NOT-to-do lists! The less to do the better, so I’ll take this advice from 4-Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss. 9 things you can check off your list that do nothing but impede your business progress, productivity and pleasure in your personal life. 8. Do not…

The online organizer from the 37signals camp, Backpack, has just relaunched with some new features. They’re boasting a new UI that’s been built from scratch, and by the looks of things, it’s a welcome improvement. Other than being able to move anything anywhere and add dividers to pages, you can do searches and run it all…

Mark Shead at Productivity501 has separated his regular todo’s from his ‘actual’ todo list. He’s talking about your day to day items that might obscure what you’re trying to achieve with your todo list. “Habit” tasks tend to obscure the most important tasks that have to be done. The value of a habit, is measured over time–not…