Six Free Online To Do List & Project Management Tools

Last month I shared my Six Strategies for Getting Your To Do List Done. This week I thought I'd point you to six online tools to help you take your task list strategizing even further. While I'm more of an old-fashioned pen and paper kinda gal, sometimes online lists can come in pretty handy. They can't get lost or destroyed by cat puke or spilled coffee, for one thing. And there are days when the built-in e-mail reminders that come with some of these programs are necessary for my survival.

Let's start with the three I sometimes use:

1. When you just need a basic To Do list, Google Calendar's built-in task list gets the job done. You can assign tasks to specific project lists, and set due dates that are automatically added to your calendar. If you need a reminder, however, you have to manually create an appointment on your calendar to send you a reminder.

2. Another simple list is Ta-da List by 37Signals. It has a super-simple interface that goes a couple of steps beyond the Google option with sharing options and RSS feeds. It doesn't have any reminders, so if you need help remembering to get stuff done, this might not be the one for you.

3. Remember the Milk, on the other hand, has about all of the options you could ask for. List organization can be as simple or as complex as you require, and it has apps to interface with your Google calendar, your iGoogle home page, your iPhone, Android or Blackberry, or even your offline desktop.

Here's three more that I haven't tried, but they look promising:

4. Todoist claims to be the best. Features include, but are not limited to, a built-in calendar, Gmail integration, hourly data backups and SSL encryption for sensitive data. The interface looks relatively simple and easy to organize.

5. ToodleDo promises ease of use, collaboration, reminders and customization, among other features. They even offer a handy chart to let you compare them to the competition.

6. ZoHo Planner appears to be a simple project management and collaboration package. One thing this one has that the others don't is the ability to add images and file attachments. If you're looking for a free and simple collaboration tool, this might be the one.

Altering My Natural Sleep Cycle (Without Losing Sleep Over It)

In my fantasy, I'm a morning person. I want to be the sort of person who gets up early and has super-productive mornings, freeing up the afternoons to work on whatever personal or home-related project I feel like working on and the evenings to just relax and chill with Matt, my day broken up into nice, orderly sections.

In reality, I sleep in late because I stay up late. It usually takes at least two cups of coffee and an hour poking around the internet before my brain can handle anything more strenuous than skimming Twitter and clicking links, and my work gets spread all throughout the day and evening, with occasional breaks to take care of other things that need my attention, or just recharge my batteries before diving back in, until I'm too worn out to keep going. There's nothing orderly about it.

This week, I've been making myself get up at nine AM. That sounds luxuriously late if you usually have to be at the office by eight, I know. But if you make your own schedule and have no particular reason to wake up by any certain time, trust me, it's early. Nine seems like a good compromise between my night-owlishness and my desire to give myself enough time to get things done earlier in the day and leave myself some chillaxin' time at the end of it.

Timely and relevant to this, yesterday Lifehacker ran an article on How to Reboot Your Sleep Cycle and Get the Rest You Deserve. It was full of good advice, albeit nothing really new to a sometimes-chronic insomniac who's already read all the advice there is about getting yourself to sleep.

Part of the advice was to experiment with earlier and earlier bed times until you start waking up before your alarm. Well, that's the problem, isn't it? I've always had problems with set bed times. As much as I love and need sleep, I hate going to bed early as much now as I did when I was a little kid. It's partly because going to bed before I'm truly sleepy tends to trigger my insomnia.

But a while back I read somewhere -- I'm pretty sure it was on Rules for Anchorites, but I can't find the post -- a discussion similar to this where someone suggested that night owls simply have a hard time relinquishing the day, and... yes. This. It's so hard to let go, to admit that I'm done with a day, that I've done all I can with it. It feels like defeat.

Even so, last night I thought I'd try Lifehacker's advice and make myself go to bed earlier. I've been averaging about seven hours of sleep all week, so I felt tired enough that I knew I could use the extra hour. But then I started reading a new book, and by the time I forced myself to put it down and go to bed it was already after one AM and I was facing another less-than-eight-hour night.

Then, this morning, I woke up before my alarm anyway. I lay there for a minute, not sure if I was truly awake and trying to will myself to get up, thinking how victorious it would feel to get up before my alarm went off. But I was still just on the cusp of wakefulness, and in the midst of my self-pep-talk I closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew my phone was vibrating (I use my phone's alarm on the silent setting, tucked into my pillow, so as not to wake Matt) and I was waking back up from a dream about a particularly odd episode of Castle involving an escaped killer baboon and a tornado (it was too much tornado and not enough Nathan Fillion for my liking; there was, however, just enough baboon to keep it weird).

So much for that.

But I refuse to give up just yet. Maybe if I keep forcing myself awake at nine, eventually the not-quite-enough sleep I've been getting will catch up with me, and my body will want to go to bed earlier. That's the theory, anyway. Of course, I can't recall any other time in my 37 years that it's ever worked out that way, but that's probably because after a week I'd usually give up and stop setting the alarm; or, when that wasn't an option, I'd always use the weekends to catch up on sleep and then have to start all over again on Mondays. This time, I'm going to do my best to stick with it. After all, I figure it's getting to be now or never, and I'm not ready to let go of that productive-morning-person fantasy just yet.

Why freelancing is so very right for me. Also, a cat update.

I think the very best thing about going freelance is exactly the reason why I've always wanted to go freelance: if I can't get focused, that's okay, because I make my own schedule. I'm not punching a clock, and I don't have to be productive during a set span of hours in the day. I can go do something else, and then get my work done when my brain is more settled--whether that settled time is at two in the afternoon or two in the morning. It's awesome. And it's also a very good thing, because today is an extremely unfocused day. My mind refuses to settle down and stop wandering. I started to get frustrated, because I have work to do, but then I remembered that there's no reason I can't simply wait to do it until tonight. My mind is almost always sharper in the evenings. I would probably do all of my work in the evenings anyway if that wasn't when Husband usually wants to hang out and watch movies. Or if I wasn't addicted to prime time television two-thirds of every year.

Anyway, here's a cat update: There's still no sign that anyone is out there missing Boudica, and I'm glad, because the longer she stays the more I would miss her if I had to give her back. She's still being a bit of a brat and pushing her limits, but she's starting to settle down and accept some of the house rules. Niblet has come out of hiding and started eating regularly again, and has even made up with Pete. Husband is having second thoughts about his second thoughts. In other words, it's all going as I predicted, and short of finding that elusive original owner to take her back, Boudica's staying put. She still tries to get outside (and made it this morning), but I'm pretty sure she just wants to hang out in the yard and isn't trying to run away. Even so, I don't trust her not to duck under the fence and take off, so she's strictly an indoor kitty as long as we can remember not to hold the patio door open too wide for too long. Maybe after she's been here a bit longer we'll try going out on a leash. Even if that doesn't work out, at least it should provide some amusing blog fodder.

Off kilter

I've always had a difficult time finding balance in my life. When things aren't going so well, I have this tendency to withdraw into myself and neglect things and, worse, relationships. When things are going well (read: I'm not a hormonally depressive loony), it's not much better. I seem to have two gears: completely scattered, or completely focused. In the first case, I'm forgetful about all kinds of things, and pretty much a giant flake. In the second, I'm focused on the things I need to get done, and I get them done...but I forget almost everything else. It's hard enough not letting that affect my marriage; remembering to stop what I'm doing and go pay attention to my husband once in a while, or to remember to do my share of the housework, or to pay the bills on time and keep track of the weekly budget, etc. Trying to remember that I have friends, in "real life" and online, and extended family who would probably like to hear from me is a struggle, at best.

It's been worse since I lost my job, and with it my insurance. My disordered sleep is going untreated now, and I'm not getting much in the way of quality sleep, which is exacerbating my ADD. And my OCD, and all of my other weird, borderline-Aspy quirks and neuroses. Not to mention that I'm not exactly bursting with energy right now. I have a lot on my plate, trying to find a job and/or clients, to demonstrate to the world that I'm an efficient and creative hard worker who someone should totally hire, because I do good work. And in all of that I lost sight of even trying to find balance between work and play and being social.

Which is all to say that it's a holiday weekend, and I'm taking the next few days off from my "job" to focus on the job of being a good wife, friend, sister, aunt and daughter. My new web site design is up and running, and everything else on my massive To Do list can wait a few days while I refocus my priorities and remind myself that there is a whole world that exists outside my head, and that I should interact with it once in a while. I don't think it'll "fix" anything. I used to think that this whole struggle for balance was just learning to be an adult and that it would get easier, come more naturally with age; but by now I'm pretty sure that it's just life, just the way I am, and it's always something I'm going to have to work on. But until I achieve that balance, taking a break once in a while to switch up my focus is the best I know how to do.

Lately

Yesterday, I finished the second draft of This Old Haunt and submitted it to the Round 1 beta readers. I'm a little worried, because it was too short to qualify as a novel to begin with, and the first round of edits saw a lot of words and sections being cut, leaving it even more firmly in novella territory. Hopefully on the next draft I'll find some threads that can be teased out into whole chapters and increase the wordcount without just adding filler. Otherwise, I guess I'd better start checking out the novella markets. Or consider self-pubbing this one.

I'm going to take a week off from fiction writing so I can focus on my various web design projects. Today, I'm attempting to learn how to do this, with the goal to implement the snazzy site redo I mocked up in GIMP. If I feel really ambitious, then next I'll start learning PHP so I can implement the whole thing in Wordpress. I'm feeling a little intimidated by all of that right now, though, so the plan to move everything over to WP has been downscaled from definite to tentative. Right now I'm shopping around for other, simpler free platforms (I'd happily just do everything in Blogger if they, like WP, offered the capability to create non-blog pages and have them all under one domain); but I might just give up on free and look for a cheaper web host instead.

Then again, I really should learn Wordpress, given its popularity, if I want to sell myself as a web designer, which I do. Yes, still. I figure, if I still love designing web pages as much as I love writing stories, and still wish I could do it professionally on the side, 10 years after I started doing it as a hobby, then it really is high time I quit whining about it and just made it happen. With all of the advances since I started 10 years ago, though, I feel like I'm starting from scratch. Thank goodness for all of the excellent free tutorials out there.

What else is going on? Earlier this week I scored a paid blogging gig at Lighting By Lux -- and hey, my first post, The Right (Light) Bulb, is already up. It's not going to get me off of unemployment any time soon, but it's extra grocery money, which is always nice, and professional experience to add to my resume, which is even nicer.

I feel like I've accomplished a lot this week already, which is a nice feeling, and one I haven't felt in too long. It's amazing how something simple like setting my alarm clock for a reasonably early hour can make me feel so capable and in control of my life. And having the laptop's portability and not having to worry about keeping Husband out of his office sure aren't hurting.

At some point today, though, I'm going to have to put the laptop down and get some housework done, since Uncle Joe is coming over tomorrow so he and Husband can show each other their guns. No, that is not a euphemism. Yes, we bought the gun that Husband was pining for, which was only fair, since he was a good sport about getting the laptop that he wasn't entirely convinced we needed. It's a slick-looking Springfield .45 mm with a comfortable grip, and I'm looking forward to firing it. Good thing it came with a one-year membership to the shop's firing range. Now we're just waiting for them to mail us our membership card so we can go get in some target practice. Yeehaw!

What else what else? Oh! I took my mom to see Star Trek for Mother's Day, and we loved it. We laughed, we cried, we both thought it was awesome, bad science and plotholes be damned. I went in with reservations, just hoping not to get pissed off by retconning and character assassination, so it was a very pleasant surprise to find that the retconning was handled in a way with which I was totally fine, and that these characters can be portrayed by other actors and still ring true, and I not only can't wait to see this movie again, but I can't wait for the next installment. Yay!

So that's what's up with me lately. Next week will see me taking some time off for car maintenance, yard maintenance, and helping my mom get her house ready to sell, among other things, but it will also see me getting back to work on The Hero Factor, and I think I know how to fix what was bugging me about that one, so revisions might not be quite as daunting as I feared they would be. Also, I'm almost finished knitting a case for the laptop, and if I can get my old hand-me-down sewing machine working, I'll finish it off with a padded liner and then post pictures. Meanwhile, I'm going to get back to work on that site redo.

Things filling my head

My mom's dog passed away the other day. Thursday, actually, but Mom had a busy weekend and only called to tell me about it yesterday. I'm pretty thoroughly bummed about it. Jake was a big sweetheart of a big, black dog, part black lab and part chow (and possibly part pit bull, though I kept telling my mom to stop telling people that last part because it tended to freak them out and we weren't really sure, anyway). He was approximately eight months old when he showed up in our front yard, during the last few months that I lived at home after the first time I yo-yo'd back after college. He was adorable, obviously not yet full-grown, and I didn't need to do much prompting to convince my mom to set some food out for him. She said, the first time, that it was just to make sure he was well-fed so he'd stay out of everybody's trash, but by the second day, she'd named him, and it was all over but the neutering and the collar-shopping. We found out a few years later that he'd actually belonged to a family down the street, but they'd pretty much turned him out and stopped taking care of him after he ceased to be tiny and easy/cheap to care for. Those people are right up there on my list with the people who abandoned Fizzgigg. But that's a rant for some other time.

Jake loved everybody, and everybody loved Jake; but he was a total mama's boy when it came down to it. When mom left, even for just an hour, he would mope around like nobody's business, and when he heard the garage door opening and signalling that she was home, he would stand at the door and howl and whine until she finally came inside, and then he would instantly be happy again. A couple of years after he adopted her, when she brought home a puppy named Bonnie, he taught her the same behavior; although, if it's possible, Bonnie adored Jake even more than she adored my mom. And now, I think, she misses him more than anybody else. He'd been around her entire life, and he was her best bud, and now, according to Mom, she is baffled, and keeps searching the house for him, and I just hope she gets to be okay, and this doesn't turn into a whole Where the Red Fern Grows tragedy.

But Jake had an excellent, entirely too spoiled and pampered life. He'd been going downhill for a while now, and it was getting hard to watch him try to get around on arthritic legs, obviously in pain but still determined to get up and come over to you for cuddles and ear scratches. It was his time, and I'm so thankful that it came before Mom had to have any part in that decision. Even so, I'm going to miss the hell out of that dog.

***

So, a little worn out from a day of crying and being sad, I got to bed at a decent hour last night. And then I proceeded to think up an entire plot for a mainstream romance novel. I don't remember all of it today, but I guess I should write down what I do remember, so I can flesh it out when I need something to work on down the road. One thing I remember is that the female protagonist's name is Rose, which seems all wrong for mainstream romance, where the heroines usually have masculine, or at least gender-neutral, names. But last night this character most definitely wanted to be called Rose, so we'll just go with that for the time being.

***

I slept too late this morning. I've been sleeping too late most mornings, lately, and that needs to stop, I think. I need to break it to my husband that I'm going to have to start setting an alarm for myself, which he hates, because it always wakes him up too, and then he has a hard time getting back to sleep. I've always been a proponent of getting as much sleep as your body needs, but my body tends to get greedy and can easily sleep for twelve to fourteen hours if something external doesn't wake it up. It might be fine to sleep till 11:30 if you tend to wake up at 2AM and stay up for several hours and get a lot of crap done before going back to bed, like Husband tends to do; but if you're me, and you just go to sleep and then stay that way until something wakes you up, and you realize you've slept for twelve hours and there goes half of your day, and now your entire schedule is thrown off and you don't know how you're going to get everything done, then that sort of thing just doesn't work.

And I'm still trying to figure out what does work. I've been out of a job for three months now. You'd think I'd have figured out a routine by now. But I haven't, in no small part because of my erratic circadian rhythms. Maybe I shouldn't stress out about it. Maybe I should just learn to go with it, and sleep when I'm sleepy and work when I'm awake and play and relax in the in-between times, and remember that it's not like I have to be anywhere at a certain time, anyway, and isn't this exactly why I've always wanted to be my own boss and set my own schedule? It is, in fact; and yet I can't get over years of social conditioning that make me feel like a loser if I'm not up and online, ready to work, by 9AM.

Also, there is a rep from a new temp agency trading voicemails with me, trying to set up a preliminary interview. I'm not optimistic; this is the fourth agency I've signed up with, and so far none of the others have had any work for me. But knowing that I'm on their roster, that they could call at eight in the morning with an assignment, makes me want to keep normal hours so I can be ready if they call.

I think it all boils down to that I'm still too hung up on other peoples' expectations to just relax and let myself be myself, with the quirky sleep schedule and the too many ideas and all of the other baggage that goes along with that.

And now I'm going to lay all of that aside, and go to the store. And then I'll come home, and maybe workout, or mow my lawn if the sun decides to come out for an hour or two; then I'll settle down to write, and remember that my sole client doesn't care what time of day I do my work, so long as I meet their deadlines. And I seriously doubt that anybody else really gives a damn, either, so maybe I should just cut myself a break and stop worrying about it all the time, and stop trying to be normal people, because I am not now, and I never have been.

***

Oh, and the other thing I was going to say is that soon--defined as "after I finish my assigned articles and my second draft and my sister's web site," which is probably not really that soon, so let's instead say soonish--I'm going to redo my site and move it all over to Wordpress, so I can dump my web server and stop paying their monthly fee. There are too many free options for hosting a pretty slam-bang personal site these days for me to keep paying for it. Instead of moving stuff, though, since that's always a PITA, I'll probably just scrap the whole shebang and start over. Whether that includes this blog, I haven't decided yet. It doesn't include my Livejournal, since that's mainly functioning as my beta-reader forum more than anything else. Everything else, though, it seems like it would be good to have all in one place, instead of scattered over several different platforms.

And that conclude's today's brain dump. Thank you for reading.