Productivity for Professors: Part Four, To-Do Lists

This is the fourth posting in a series of 7 blog postings, in which I explain some of the productivity tools that I use (or have used) and would recommend to university faculty members.

These are the other items in the series:
Email | Calendar | Collaborative Editing | To-Do Lists | Blogging for Professors | Reading Blogs | Exercise and Nutrition

PART 4: To-Do Lists

Topics in this Part:
4.a. How to use Toodledo for to-do lists
4.b. How to make the most of Your Amazon Wishlists

4.a. How to Use Toodledo for To-Do Lists

Toodledo is a free service that is designed to help you take control of your to-do lists. I used to use Google calendar and email only for my to-do lists. Sometimes this was not enough though to really stay on top of my tasks. For example, I discussed in Part One of this series that I typically keep my important tasks in email inbox until done with them. However, what about tasks that don't have an email associated with them? I also discussed in Part Two how I use my Google calendar to track tasks that are coming up. But do I want every little phone call on my Google calendar? Then, for a while I was using Dashboard to keep sticky notes with to-do items on it, but I found that because Dashboard is so passive on my machine, I wasn't "seeing" the messages that I'd left for myself. Here is an example of how a Dashboard sticky note looks:

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I spend most of my time in email and in a browser, so a tool that integrated with one of these would be ideal.

The solution: Toodledo. Here is a screenshot of Toodledo in action:

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With Toodledo, you can change the order of the tasks by priority, date, folder, etc. You can share tasks between users, and see a history of your tasks. You can also set up alerts. And finally, most gloriously, you can synchronize your Toodledo list with your Google calendar with a single click.

I still use Dashboard, but it's more for long-term ideas or sticky notes that I want to store for a long time to think about.

4.a. How to Make the Most of Your Amazon Wishlists

Our library here at Elon takes faculty book orders via email. I find that it is helpful to keep two Amazon.com wishlists: one for books that I need to order, and one for books that I have ordered.

ASIDE: I suppose you could create a wishlist (bibliography) for your course, and make it public and then link to it from your course web site. This would be an interesting replacement for the long lists of books that many professors put on their syllabi but that no students actually would click on. (You could also accomplish this same thing by using an Amazon Listmania list as well.)

To make an Amazon wishlist:

1. Log in to Amazon and navigate to the "Wish List" area.


2. Choose to "create a new wishlist"


3. The list will be created as "private" by default, and it will be named "New Wish List" by default. To change this name, click on "Edit List Information". I changed my lists to be called "Elon, Wanted" and "Elon, Ordered". I add books to the Wanted list, and then periodically send them to the library for ordering. At that point, I move them onto the "Ordered" list.


4. Why do I bother with an "Ordered" list? Couple of reasons: (1) sometimes I forget that I already ordered a book for the library (2) Sometimes I have a slow weekend, and I want to see "what books did I think a year ago that I would want to read, and did I read them yet?"


5. To move books from one list to another, just click "Move/Copy" next to the book you want to move. You'll be presented with a list of your wishlists and the ability to choose multiple books and move them all at once.