40Tech

Some Mac task management apps allow you to use a keystroke to create a task from an Apple Mail message, and then have that task link back to the Mail message. This is particularly handy if, like me, many of your tasks originate from Mail messages. If you’re a Toodledo user, you can do this as well, although it will require you to purchase a third-party Mail plugin.

No sooner do we write about how to spruce up Toodledo with User Styles, than Toodledo goes out and spruces itself up with a new user interface. Earlier today, the interface was rolled out. The bad news? The interface conflicts with the user style I was using, and probably others as well. The good news? The default user interface is pretty nice on its own.

I love Toodledo. Ever since I crowned it my task manager of choice over a year ago, it has remained as one of the main tools in my productivity arsenal. Read our prior review for a look at why it stands as such a strong task management app for geeks. One shortcoming of Toodledo, and a factor that keeps many people from using it, is the user interface. To put it bluntly, it’s ugly. But it doesn’t have to be. With very little effort, you can turn Toodledo into a visually appealing productivity tool.

Producteev won me over a while back with the smooth way they integrate into your already established workflow. The pretty helped too — pretty is a necessity for me when looking at a task list — but it was the Google Calendar integration, and the ability to interact with and create tasks from email, IM, and more that clinched it for me. As a Gmail user, I have access to a nifty widget, and Google Apps users get even tighter integration.

Enough about me and my Google services, though! We’re here to talk about you — and did you know that Producteev has just launched an Outlook plugin that let’s you single-click emails directly to tasks? And that’s not all… they’ve also announced a two-way sync with Google Tasks, and have some native apps on the way! You like? Read on for details!

We like useful tech here at 40Tech, and spend a fair amount of time talking about productivity related apps. We’ve written more than a few posts talking about ways we’ve used tech to make our busy lives a little more sane, and a little while back, we asked people to show us their own workflows. We wanted to see how our readers integrate tech into their daily lives to keep them productive. We received some comments on the post, some notes on Twitter and Facebook, and even had a few email conversations with folks, and have decided to feature a couple of the more involved methods.

Today’s feature, by freelance graphics and web designer Chase Mann, involves a GTD process that includes Evernote, Outlook, Microsoft’s OneNote, and a few other choice bits of technology:

With all the various productivity apps floating around on the internet, it can become hard to filter through them all and pick one which suits your needs. In addition, with the rise of numerous paid apps, it can be difficult to determine whether one is right for your uses. Astrid, however, has made a name for itself among the prominent Android blogs. It is well-respected as one of the best task list apps available for Android users, and to boot, it’s free! So what makes Astrid so popular? Aside from the price point, the simple answer is: it works, and works well.

If you can find an app in the iPhone app store, chances are that you can find an equivalent app for your Android device.  Sometimes, though, an official app isn’t available, so you have to look a bit harder.  That’s the case if you’re a user of Toodledo, a task manager that we’ve raved about before here at 40Tech.  Fortunately, Android developers are a resourceful bunch, and, as a result, third party alternatives have sprung up that bring Toodledo to your Android device. Two of the best are Ultimate To Do List and Got To Do.

If you want to set a reminder for yourself, you could do it the hard way by manually adding a reminder to your calendar.  You could also do it the easy way, by using FollowUpThen.  FollowUpThen is a service that allows you to schedule follow-up reminders by simply adding a special email address to the TO:,CC:, or BCC: line of an email message.  This makes it particularly handy as a tool for getting reminders to follow-up with your email recipient, but it also can be used to set normal reminders.

If you have read 40Tech over the past year, you may have discovered my minor obsession with productivity apps and methods. It’s a journey that began with my first post here: GTD in Evernote with Only One Notebook (posted a year and a week ago ), and continued through reviews of Action Method Online and on into my latest experiment, Producteev 2. I have really been enjoying Producteev, and have been using it exclusively for some time now — so I decided it was time to attempt a full GTD implementation, and see how it would work. After some trial and error, I’m satisfied. Check out a walkthrough of my method for GTD in Producteev, below.

Just last week, Producteev announced on their Posterous blog that their software now has the power to act as a virtual assistant, of sorts. Producteev has embraced the power of “natural language”, allowing users to actually tell the system (via email, IM, browser extension, and more) to do things like create or update a task and assign it to a specific person with a level 5 priority and a Friday due date. Producteev now also allows you to reply to reminder messages to change the status of a task, and to retrieve tasks by query. Read on for more.