Toodledo.com is a free as well as pay for service that allows you to track all your stuff online from as simple as a basic todo list, to the more complex uses of the GTD (“Getting Things Done” a book by David Allen) principles, a system that helps people manage all the stuff from low level “eat breakfast” to “Become CEO” type tasks and goals in life.

I started looking for a better way to keep track of my todo lists.  I came from the Franklin Planner days of having a list that would contain all the important items I needed to do but did not have a set time to get done.  That system would have you prioritize each item with an A, B, or C depending on it’s importance for the day then you would take all the A items and number them 1, 2,3 and repeat the process with B and C items.  Those items you have left over at the end of the day you would forward, or write again on the next day.  When I used this system I was very effective in getting things done, and not loosing track of stuff I needed to accomplish.  This worked great until the Technical side of me, or the Geek in me took over.  I wanted to have all my stuff electronic as well as in my planner.  I moved to Palm and kept things in there for a while, but it lost it’s focus (or rather I lost my focus), then moved to Outlook.  Nothing seemed to work as well as the paper based system.
I thought there had to be a better way, then I stumbled upon this book I kept hearing other geeks talk about called “getting things done” or GTD. (I would see the #gtd hash in twitter and wonder what it was.)  I had recently found “Remember the Milk” a program that would work with my iPhone and liked it, but was looking for a free solution.  I figured that there had to be ome geek out there that has built a better mousetrap.

I found a program called Ultimate Todo’s and started using it.  It has the ability to sync with toodledo.com and of course being the geek that I am, I signed up.

I started to love the ability to sync my stuff so I didn’t have to keep my phone open to the todo app all the time.  while working with it I saw articles talking about how toodledo works well with the GTD principles and thought there is that GTD thing again.  Well I decided to check out the book and found it on Audible.com (I also signed up for that based on another well known geek Leo Laporte constantly recommending books for it and it’s services.) I saw that my monthly subscription credit was about due, and I waited a few days to order the book. Once I listened to it, I was hooked on the priciples.

One of the main themes is you have to have your stuff in a system that you can rely on and trust, so your brain can let go of trying to remember all the stuff.  You know what that stuff is. How many times have you seen or been listening to something and a word reminds you of something you forgot to do, or wanted to do, but you keep forgetting to do it.  That’s stuff that weighs on your mind when you forget to do it, because you feel that you should have remembered it.  That is a stress you don’t need.  and if you had everything captured in a system you could rely on and trust 100%, your brain would then be free to work on other things and not feel like it had to keep a hold and tab on the 1000′s of things you mean, said, or set out to do.

After I tried to “capture” all the “stuff” that I needed to get done, wanted to get done, or would like to do someday, I was finding that there was this great freedom in being able to write down in a reliable system something that just popped into mind that I needed to address but was not in a position (or “context”) to do anything about at the time.  Once I knew I had recorded this inforamation and felt “free” from trying to remember it.  I was hooked.

Then something very bad happened.  See my previous post (or rant) toodledo goes down hard… for more detail. Basically the service had a HUGE interruption and when I needed my “stuff” it was not available. GASP! What’s in there that I have forgotten, that I need to worry about. The trust in and relied upon system was gone! So now where is my proven trustable system?

Well if you read the other post, you will see I eventually realized that I was only missing 1 or two items, which I consiously remembered, and I had the rest backed up with the Ultimate Todo’s app on my iPhone. So really it was not as bad as I originally thought.

I know that the creator of toodledo feels horrible about the downtime, and is working on putting systems in place so that can never happen again.

Toodledo.com really is the best system online out there for iPhone users and GTD types. For the price (free) you can’t beat it. I paid for the premium package for two reasons. Reason #1 they don’t purge my stuff after a certain amount of time. I will be able to search my completed items, months or years later. Reason #2 I liked the program so much I thought I should support it.

Toodledo may have lost a bunch of customers that day, but I think they will gain new ones and even gain those back when they realize it truly is the best product out there for what they need.

Welcome back Toodledo.com I really did miss you while you were away!

Until the next time,

Thirteen

“So, here’s the story. A big storm went through the city where our datacenter is located. The datacenter decided to proactively switch to generators. During the switch, something got screwed up, and the power went off for a few minutes. As (bad) luck would have it, this caused our database to get corrupted. We are currently working to bring it back online and restored from the live backup. The crack team at Rackspace is on the job. Thanks Rackspace! Unfortunately, the database is so large, that it will take some time to transfer and verify all the data. Hopefuly not more than a few hours. We know that this is very bad, and we apologize for any inconvience that this will cause. Please check the forums when we are back online for a full report.

Update: Its obviously taking longer than we expected and we are really sorry for that.”

Now I understand there are problems, But this is my brain.  I have dumped all my todo’s and such into this service and for it to be of line more than 5 hours is really bad.

So I had tasks to complete and such in this system and there is not backup view of what might have been there for me to look at an manually make notes. It’s just complete inaccessable to me.

It appears as the network admin’s need to build a better mouse trap, as a catostrophic failure such as this is prompting me to ask for my money back and to look at other services like Rememberthemilk, etc.

I hope they get thier act together really quick.

Until the next time,

Thirteen

Update: Thursday morning. Now almost 12 hours after I first tried unsuccessfully to get to my brain dump todo list. On the website I see the following:

“Update #2: I know that our downtime is totally unacceptable. I am literally sick to my stomach about this whole thing. We have successfully restored all of the data up until June 10, 4am CST and we are working very hard to restore the remaining 12 hours of updates that happened before the servers crashed. Obviously, this has been a major event. We had multiple simultaneous errors happen that have made recovery slower than anticipated. Because our database is so large (many many many gigabytes), it just takes a long time to transfer and import the data. I know that many of you are upset, and all I can say is that I am deeply sorry. We are already starting to rethink our backup strategy so that recovery doesn’t take so long in the future.”

Apparently I have spent my money and invested my time in a system that is not acceptable.  Today I begin to look for other avenues.  Fortuneately for me, I have Utlimate ToDo’s on my iPhone and have a list that I updated earlier yesterday so I can review it.

I have been reading (listening to) GTD “Getting things Done” by David Allen. on audbile.com. He stresses you have to use a system that you can “trust”. Well this failure has now put me in a place of, I can’t trust toodledo.com. What’s funny is they advertise their system as one that works well with the GTD concepts.

Not very happy with them at the moment.

I decided to visit the official sites for both of these presidential canidates tonight and was surprised at what I found.

barackobama.com and johnmccain.com.

I first visited johnmccain.com and found a well structured website with advertisement like buttons for volunteering, contributions, etc. Also was an easily navigated place for Press releases, multimedia, speaches etc. It wasn’t hard to find out what John McCain wanted me to know about him and his goals and his positions on things.

Then I visited barackobama.com which has a nicely done front page with a video of Mr. Obama welcoming you to his site. But that was it! No other information besides what is contained in that video. There was a place for me to give my name, email, and zip code and maybe after giving that information I might have been directed to another site or page that gives more detail on Mr. Obama.

My surprise was that John McCain wanted everyone to know where he stands and what his goals are with out asking for anything in return. Barack Obama wants your information first before he shares anything other than an introductory video with you.

Now back to McCain’s site. I was looking specifically for something like twitter.com updates or some other social networking mini update on what the candidates are doing. McCain’s site does have a blog or a few area’s where bloging is taking place. there are incentives to post comments on some approved blogs but as far as social networking that was all I found. on Obama’s site, again I found nothing because I refuse to give my info when I have no idea what I am going to get in return.

Let me know what your thoughts are on the way the canidates are using technology. Please keep yoru comments to the technology and not any political point of view.

Until the next time,

Thirteen

Even the media is bussing about this release. I heard on a morning talk show (McIntyre in the Morning, locally here in Los Angeles on KABC 790 AM talk radio) that this release is a good thing for the community, it keeps the competion going for Microsoft to also release better products to compete in the market place for thier browser. Without Firefox, what incentive does Microsoft have to come out with more features or improve existing ones for thier consumers.

We all know how long it took Internet Explorer to get Tabs, I wonder what features Firefox 3 has that we will wait for Internet Explorer to get and how long we will wait for those features.

Get your download buttons ready! Zero hour is about here!

Until the next time,

Thirteen