…lies in the organization of the non-obvious.

I’m not quite sure what Marcus Aurelius meant by that.  It sounds good, though, don’t you think?  I may wonder about that on some future Wondering Wednesday, but today is Thankful Thursday.   And so. . .

I am thankful today that technology has provided us with so many ways to help us organize the obvious and the non-obvious.  Maybe too many, but that’s a separate issue.

I have a lot of To Do lists.  And I keep looking for the perfect tool to manage them.  So, right now, a big item on my To Do lists is to merge them all into one master list.  I haven’t quite accomplished that yet, because each of the tools I use has different strengths, and picking one has been difficult.

It probably doesn’t matter which one I pick.  I really just need to choose one and use it with obsessive-compulsion.  I’ll work on that.

In the meantime, I thought you might want to take a look at some of the candidates and see if there’s anything here that would work for you.

The most recent find is Remember the Milk–an online To Do list that will email you reminders of tasks.   I haven’t done much experimentation with it, but it looks straightforward and relatively easy.  You have to sign up for a free account, however, and your list resides on their server.  I’m not quite sure I like that.  Just how private will it be?

On the other hand, I can carry a list in my pocket on a PDA or a smartphone.  I have to say that I don’t much care for the Task List in my Blackberry.  The one in my Palm Pilot is/was much more versatile.  Easier to view, to sort, to print, to reschedule tasks and to categorize them.  Plus, the Palm reminder alarms are more insistent than the Blackberry, and they stay on the screen.  The Blackberry lacks most of that functionality.  It will activate a brief alarm, but if you’re not near it at the time, the notification will have disappeared.  The next time you pick it up, you’ll have no idea.  It makes the Blackberry task list nearly worthless.

An organization tool that is a lot of fun–and takes significant disk space and memory to run–is The Personal Brain.  You can link all kinds of documents and ideas and websites together in multiple configurations.  This makes it possible to organize your tasks and thoughts in more than one way.  You can look at things according to project or according to which things you can accomplish at your computer or according to almost any other hierarchy you want to take the time to try.  On the downside, I haven’t figured out how to print lists of any kind, it’s a bit time-consuming to set it up, and it does take a lot of hardware resources to run smoothly.  But it’s fun  to see everything you’ve entered float around as you rearrange the connections, and it’s kind of cool to say “Let me just check my Brain.”

Another free program that I’ve found to be useful is Stickies.  It’s like having electronic sticky post-it type notes.  I used to list a lot of items in a sticky until my friend Carole mentioned that she creates one sticky per task so the notes are all over the monitor.  It’s very satisfying to close them as the tasks are completed.  The link above is for the PC version, but I’m fairly sure there’s something similar for Mac users.

All of those tools have some value.  And, of course, you can always use a pencil and paper or a Word document (outlines can be useful to organize a To Do list in Word).  The one tool to which I find myself returning most often is one I can’t really show you.  I developed it myself in Microsoft Access, and while it still needs work, it has many of the features I like.  It lets me organize by broad categories with increasing granularity through projects and sub-projects down to actual tasks.  I can set due dates and priorities and print various lists.  It doesn’t buzz at me, though, when something is looming.  Someday, I’ll see if I can’t add that to it.

Meanwhile, I think I should probably actually do something instead of spending all my time making lists.

But remind me sometime to talk about the progress bars we set up a few months ago.  They were an amazing productivity tool!

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(Update for the email subscribers:  We’re still trying to figure out why the emails aren’t going out every day.  I am posting every day, and you should get two links the day after a skipped post.  You can always find it on the website if you’re wondering.  My continued apologies for the currently inexplicable.  I think it’s gremlins.)