I have to confess, I have an addiction. Instead of smoking or drinking, I buy books on writing. I haven’t even read all of them, but I can’t help myself. Now I find myself turning to Apple’s App store. Doing a little armchair psychology, I figured out that it’s a form of procrastination (no d’uh) and the books and apps are part of a delusional belief that they will not only make my life easier, but it will also magically get the job done. I know, I know, I’m working on it. The first step is acknowledgment.
My pain is your gain though because I’ve researched plenty of apps and just like so many other things in life, sometimes exactly what you need is already in your possession. You just have to understand what you have.
Case in point, Apple’s Reminders for the iPhone and iPad. I’ve surfed the App store and downloaded quite a few to-do apps. Some for free, some paid. Finally, I went back to Reminders, the built in app.
It’s not fancy, pretty simple in fact. Honestly that’s what I want my to-do app to be – easy. I don’t want to have to take a tutorial, I just want to get things done.
What I love most (yes, I’m releasing my inner fangirl) about Reminders is the view options. I can view my entire list or I can view it by day. You can set the reminder for a certain day and time or you can make it location based. The reminder will go off if you and your phone are near a certain address – that does put a drain on the battery though.
If you’re like me (and I’d like to think I’m not so neurotic that others can’t relate) then you will love looking at the Completed list. It shows completed tasks by day. Not that I’m ultra-competitive or anything, but I like trying to check off more to-do’s than previous days.
The reminders show up on my iPhone and iPad as banners and also sync with my iCal. I don’t particularly use iCal that much, although I do sync my Google calendar with my iCal. Unfortunately, I can’t sink my Google Tasks with my Reminders but I’ve found that it doesn’t make a difference because it does sync with my iCal tasks.
For those of you who need to do project management, you can create different lists and still view the to-do’s by date. For me, I create lists for my books and what needs to be done. So I can look at the big picture and then manage the tasks by putting them on my calendar.
Another plus, you can set your reminders verbally by using Siri on the iPhone.
I realize I probably have more than enough tools to run the world, all that’s left is to just go ahead and do the darn thing.
