The other day I was discussing with my friend about organising todo lists. His daily routine begins with a todo list organised into sections of the day. He creates these lists the day before and at the start of the week. On month-end, he reviews items he did or did not accomplish and plans accordingly for the future months.

My preference on the other hand is towards ubiquitous capture. According to this Lifehacker article, which is where I got the idea in the first place,

Ubiquitous capture—that is, the ability to snag any thought or idea any time and any where it happens to crop up—is a key component to nearly every productivity philosophy.

This way, anytime I think of something interesting to do or a solution for a problem, I immediately note it down, no matter how trivial the idea may be; the thinking can come later.

I also prefer my notes to be purely text; I have no need for multimedia in my notes and prefer to dictate my own format for my notes. As such, I end up with one text file for urgent todo, one for not-so-urgent todo, one for things to do if bored (currently at 62 items with only about 10 of them completed). Whenever I think of something I’ll immediately add it to one of these 3 lists.

He’s a user of Evernote, a popular note-taking application for text and multimedia synced to the cloud so it’s accessible from your phone or computer. He loves how he can attach pictures, links and organise his notes into categorised notebooks. He has a table in an Evernote note he uses for his weekly todo lists among others.

I use Simplenote, a simple text-only note-taking application synced to the cloud so it’s accessible from your phone or computer. It’s what I’ve always been looking for, a quick solution for text-only note-taking and accessible from both my phone and computer; in fact I am writing this post in Simplenote for Android. I use the official client on my Android and ResophNotes on Windows; you can find a suitable client here.

Compared to Evernote, I think Simplenote is lighter and tries less to be a one-size-fits-all: it syncs text files with a sleek interface and does it well. Evernote has a free tier but Simplenote is all free. The only thing that might be worrying for both apps is that they are the ones holding your data. I would prefer to roll my own solution one day if I ever get my own server.

Usually I use simple Markdown syntax in my notes such as that for lines and lists; ResophNotes has a function to render Markdown as HTML. Besides the 3 todo lists I mentioned above, I also have a anime to-watch list, movie to-watch list, the occasional to-buy list, an expense record, blog posts-in-progress etc.

What about you, dear reader? How do you organise your todo lists and/or notes?