Mark and I are founding partners in a bouncing baby company. Mark lives in Berlin, DE, and I live in Washington, DC, US. We are a virtual team. We need cool tools. One of the tools we have embraced is Toodledo, a deceptively simple online to-do list.
Under the hood, Toodledo is a very sophisticated tool, indeed. It offers collaborative sharing with others, a $14.95/yr premium with the pro account. Worth every penny.
Although signing up is free, you won’t be blown away unless you upgrade to the pro account which offers some really cool stuff.
Calendar – Full access to the calendar will give you a visual representation of when your tasks are due. Also, it allows you to integrate your calendar directly with Google Calendar through the Google Calendar API — it shows up as an “Other Calendar.” Very sweet.
Stats – These graphs will help you keep track of your progress and identify where you might want to focus your attention in the future. I have not had a chance — or been online long enough — to really enjoy this yet.
Scheduler – The Scheduler is useful for when you are feeling indecisive or don’t have the energy or motivation to be as productive as you could be. All you need to do is specify how much time you have available to work and Toodledo will tell you what to do. This could very well be a very cool tool. I have lots of problems with decision-making, and if you’re stuck, you can hand your decision-making over to Toodledo, telling it how much time you have free — like an hour — and it will recommend your next steps for that hour. I have yet to use it but it looks cool.
Collaboration – A Pro Account allows you to privately share your to-do list with other users. This is the reason why Mark and I choose this tool, actually. Mark did a lot of research on this — exploring 25 to-do and task lists. Here’s a comparison graph, which is pretty realistic.
Neither Mark nor I could quite get into Remember the Milk, although I would easily recommend it as a very cool, hip, and sophisticated tool that offers collaboration as well.
Both Toodledo and Remember the Milk are deceptively simple. They are powerful tools. In fact, Toodledo has some of the most amazing UI implementation of AJAX. Really, you just click and write. All text fields are clickable. If you see some text and you control it or have authority to edit it, then you just click and write, without ever having to go to an editor’s page. Amazing and elegant. It really feels just like a downloadable client application.
So, I can task Mark with things and Mark can task things to me; although, It is a little complicated and can be a pain. You have to click into “Sharing” and then scroll down and click on the name of the person you are sharing with, and then task them there on their page.
One way I would handle this is to allow me to input all of my to-dos on my own page and then have a pull-down menu with a selection of the people I collaborate with. What I can’t do is take a task I have assigned to myself and then decide to assign it to Mark. What I think I need to do is to make a new task that is assigned to Mark as opposed to simple re-assigning the task.
That said, Mark and I are only half-a-week in. I just wanted to give kudos to Toodledo because in a world that has become very very virtual, there aren’t nearly enough amazing tools that allow virtual teams to really be productive.
Mark and I are using Google Apps for Your Domain for corporate Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk, but for everything else, we need to find the right tools. Maybe as we move forward, we will need to develop the perfect tool for virtual teams, for asynchronous collaboration. For online project management and calendar-sharing. I would love to have a full solution. Is Basecamp really that amazing? It seems pretty expensive to me, to do what I want to do. Does anyone have any experience?
Anyway, I have created a new category called “Virtual Teams” so I will go out of my way trying to find all of the collaboration, project management, BD, prospecting, and tasking tools I can find. I have a feeling that as our staff grows, everything will just become more complex.
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Toodledo is a great tool. However, I feel that the interface can be improved as right now it is very cluttered.