Making your lists and checking them twice
This will be a quick intro to an incredibly useful web based list-management site that helps you organise the lists of things in your life.
Ta-da List from 37signals does one thing and one thing very well - what does it do? It manage lists of your stuff of course!
If you read my earlier post on improving your productivity and have by now tracked down a copy of David Allen’s best selling book Getting Things Done : The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, you would be well aware that one of the key tenets to Allen’s ‘getting things done’ methodology involves capturing all of the stuff around you and getting it into a ‘trusted system’.
This ‘trusted system’ involves, among other things, a number of lists. Lists for your next actions, lists for your projects, context lists etc etc.
Lists are great if you feel you’re getting nowhere on a project or during your daily work and you just feel that you’re getting nothing done. Making a list of all of the tasks you do in a day is a great way of seeing where all your time went and that it wasn’t actually wasted. Of course you can use lists to track just about anything…
What is Ta-da List?
Ta-da list is a free application offered by the guys at 37signals.com makers of a suite of great web applications like Backpack (project management tool), Basecamp (information organiser) and Writeboard (online collaboration tool). Ta-da list is their simple online tool for managing your lists of stuff.
37signals boasts a simple 10 second sign-up process, requiring only very basic information such as an account name, email address and password to use for access to your lists. There’s no software to install and the whole system is web-based meaning that you can get at, and update, your lists wherever you have Internet access.
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be given your own web address where all your lists will live. Point your web browser at your unique address and just log-in with the details you nominated earlier.
Ta-da List is incredibly simple and so intuitive to use that to explain how to add new lists, add things to you lists or make changes would be a waste of time. Just log-in and what you need to do will become immediately apparent. This really is one of those apps that requires no instructions. Just dive in and get started. Of course, if you do need some help 37signals have kindly provided video tutorials and instructions accessible from the FAQs from within the application.
Moving forward…
Once you’ve had a little play with Ta-da List, you can explore some of it’s slightly more advanced features:
- Learn how to share your lists either Publicly, where shared lists can be seen by anyone, but only modified by you, or Privately where only those people whose email address you nominate will be able to access and edit the list.
- Subscribe to RSS feeds off your lists so you have easy access to them from your browser or RSS aggregator (Not clear on what RSS is? See the earlier tutorial - Firefox 103 - Live Bookmarks and a fleeting glimpse into RSS)
Ta-da List is a gorgeous application that just works, give it a try today and start getting more organised. I hope you find Ta-da List as useful as I have. Let me know what you think and if you like it tell your friends about it too.
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