Helping You Get Stuff Done: We Review To-Do List Apps

by | Friday, August 16, 2013 | 14 Productivity

When you're working as a team or in a virtual office, sharing to do lists can be done with a variety of online apps.

When you’re working as a team or in a virtual office, sharing to do lists can be done with a variety of online apps.

We talked last time about the benefits of keeping to-do lists and how to-do lists should not be static; how they should be used in conjunction with your work to help you achieve your goals. With this in mind, we have reviewed some of the best to-do apps that will help you to actually achieve your goals.

To Do’s for Teams

For a sole-trader, the pen and paper to-do list is usually quite sufficient. However, if you work in a team environment, it’s often necessary to share your to-do’s with your co-workers, which can be a rather tricky undertaking if you happen to operate a virtual business.

So in the ultimate homage to To-Do Lists, we’ve put together a list of some of the best to-do list apps available right now:

  1. Mavenlink: The number-one app in the Google Marketplace, Mavenlink allows you to collaborate with team members, share Google docs, communicate with clients and team members, synch tasks and milestones with Google Calendar and Google Tasks, and track tasks, deadlines and milestones. Mavenlink is free and integrates seamlessly with Google Apps, Quickbooks, Paypal and Microsoft Office 2013.
  2. Do by Salesforce: Part of the Google Apps Marketplace, Do is a free task management system that can be used for any project—large, small, medium, at the home or at work. Based on the popular ManyMoon projects app and the number-one cloud CRM system Salesforce, Do does team collaboration and project management extremely well. Do also integrates nicely with Gmail and other Google apps.
  3. Zoho Projects: Also free from the Google Apps Marketplace, Zoho Projects was developed by the Zoho Corporation — the guys behind the suite of cloud-based productivity programs that includes invoicing, CRM software and word processing applications. Zoho Projects allows collaboration between team members, time tracking, and also integrates with the Zoho and Google suite of apps.
  4. Trello: This is maybe the sleekest looking project management app on the market, developed by New York-based software company, Fog Creek Software who are best known for their project management system, FogBugz. Trello is a lot like Pinterest, in that rather than creating a list of to-dos, you create a board of to-dos that can be assigned to other team members and organised into stages. Trello almost feels like a social networking app; by allowing you to attach photos, Trello takes the drudgery out of to-do lists. Best of all, it’s free—always has been and always will be.
  5. LeaderTask: If you want to spend some serious cold, hard cash, then there’s LeaderTask. LeaderTask is highly customisable and integrates with anything and everything your need it to, which is probably the only thing that makes this app a standout over the other free to-do apps on the market. If you’re looking to go the more traditional software-buying route, then LeaderTask is for you. Once you buy the software, it’s yours to use now and forever, and includes free upgrades to new versions for a year and technical support. Where other free apps are susceptible to bugs and changes at the developers’ discretion with very little technical support, LeaderTask is not. That aside, however, LeaderTask includes all the features you would expect from a project management application: team collaboration, time tracking and project management.

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Remember: to get the most out of a to-do list, it should almost be like a living thing. In choosing your to-do app, you need to find one that integrates well with your existing software and systems so that you’re able to update it easily and be your most productive self — and ultimately, tick those to-dos off your list.