I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which came recommended as a book on writing over a period of months by several random people on the internet. I’m only a few chapters in, but it seems good so far; one of the things she suggests (like everyone else who has written a book on writing) is to do it every day, no matter what. So here is mine for today.
I’ve been thinking a lot today about to-do apps. This is partly because it’s now getting to be the time in the semester when I have a million things piling up and seemingly very little time to actually do them. Of course, when I write them all down, that’s not actually true. One of the first steps I take when I’m feeling overwhelemed is to write down everything that needs to be done. Today, that entailed all school activities until the end of the semester: grading, writing assignments, giving exams, and so on.
Usually my to-dos are scrawled on 8 different notepads in three different places—a system I’m not at all opposed to. I also use a few different to-do applications on my phone: 2Do and Swipes. (I have also used OmniFocus, and today downloaded and quickly deleted Wunderlist, Todoist, and Any.do.)
Here are the things I want in a to-do app:
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The ability to schedule tasks to start later. What I want is to be able to put a whole bunch of things in and not see any of them until I need to. (2Do is perfect for this.) In my case, I want to put in a bunch of deadlines for grading homework assignments, and not see them until I actually get the homework assignments in from students.
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A badge icon that displays only things I can do right now. This is something that Swipes is pretty good at: if I have a task set to start at 7:00 pm (usually the case with my “clean the litter box” task), I don’t want a red badge staring at me all day.
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Location-awareness. This is something that a lot of to-do apps seem to have, sort of. In a perfect world, I want the app to remind me at 7:00 to clean the litter box, but only if I’m at home. Often I’m out of the house at 7:00, but I don’t want to see the red badge of shame if I can’t deal with it.
You know, I thought there were more things than this, but that might actually be all. 2Do is pretty great, but the second point is killer for me: I used to have a recurring task to clean the litter box, but that damn red badge would stare at me all day long. I want the badge there to remind me to do something, but not if I can’t actually do it!
(Aside: from this post, it seems like the only tasks I ever have are to grade homeworks and clean the litter box. Come to think of it, that’s not too far from the truth. But, these are two tasks where checklist-style to-do apps seem to fail me, and so they’re always the first things I try with a new app.)
We’re now at that critical point in the semester where it seems like we just had midterms, but now all of a sudden we’re staring into the face of final projects, exams, and all of their attendant grading. Plus what is one of the most useless weeks of teaching: the week after Thanksgiving before exams. But that’s a topic for another day…my 15 minutes are up.