Tudutu (to-do too)

Maybe it’s just me, but 3 months was about as long as it took before I couldn’t keep up with GTD any more.

I’m trying to work out what the problem with GTD is. I really believe it is the way to get organized. I just can’t keep it up though. And from what I see, not many other people can keep it up neither.

To do GTD, there’s an awful lot of things you need to do. That’s not that the worst thing though. The real problem I see is keeping up with it. I suffered the same problem when trying to use the Franklin and then the Covey system. The problem is that you actually need to keep reorganizing yourself. With Franklin systems, you do that on a daily basis as you move tasks from one page to another, reprioritizing as you go. With Covey, the focus was on the Weekly Compass, where you decided what was important in your life and arranged to do that for the week. GTD is more flexible, and so fits better, but to keep up with it you need to 1. put things in your inboxes and empty them every day, 2. add things to your lists as you go, and 3. have a weekly review to go over your projects. And as I have 5 kids to look after and a full-time job, I just don’t get around to doing that. It just isn’t worth it for me. I’d rather relax and enjoy the moment than just keep getting organized.

Another problem is that any system out of necessity focuses much more on the system than actually getting things done. I spend much more time buying nice planners and creating fancy lists than I actually do doing the things I should be doing. I procrastinate because I don’t want to get the things done which I need to do. But then again, I sit in my office chair all day just waiting for a new e-mail to arrive because I’m bored with what I’m currently doing.

So I think the answer is to have a system which automatically tells me what I should be doing, and sends me mails to remind me.

RememberTheMilk.com is becoming quite a popular to-do list manager. And they’ve got partners everywhere. You can now use RememberTheMilk from your Google Calendar, IM Program, and with your cellphone via SMS. You can get widgets, gadgets, and modules for it. It really is the kitchen sink of to-do lists.

The interface is very sleek. You can create a list, add tags, locate the tasks, add due-dates, and everything. It’s very appealing.

Because it is such a dandy product, I would really like to use their to-do lists. In fact, I was thinking about partnering with them. There’s only one problem though - I just can’t use it.

Now, I’m sure there are lots of other people who like it, but I don’t quite think it suits me. Despite their incredible skills in interface design and marketing I don’t think they understand what being organized is all about. (I think it suffers from the same problem as ta-da list in that respect.) It’s simply a list management tool. It isn’t ever really going to be better than a paper list. It’s still quicker to write things and find them again on a piece of paper than it is to use my cell-phone or laptop to look up anything. (Another score for diyplanner.com. ) And to be frank, it just doesn’t fit with GTD, which still seems to be by far the best time-management process I’ve ever seen.

Another thing I learnt from RememberTheMilk is that it is very easy to confuse a user. I tried to enter a task with a due date. But when you click the “add task” button, you only get the option to enter the description of the task. You have to save it, then add a due date later. I found that really confusing. Plus there was no calendar widget to find a date with. I wanted to add a task for this weekend, but as I had no idea what date it was this coming Saturday, I tried to enter “weekend” in the due-date field (as I had been prompted to do). Unfortunately “weekend” was a word which the super-dee-duper recognition system couldn’t recognize, and I got an error message. It’s amazing how quickly I gave up.

I thought it would be nice to use an API to communicate with it, but it doesn’t have that feature yet neither. Guess they’re busy integrating with other partners instead.

So lessons learned: 1. Creating widgets helps you get eyeballs, because that indirectly forms partnerships with other companies. 2. An application should do something which a quicker system can’t do as well.

Hi,

My name is Richard. I’m the creator of Tudutu, the system for organizing your life without being organized. I’m currently working on building it, and I don’t know quite how it is going to turn out. I was kind of hoping that you would help me.

This blog is supposed to be for three purposes:

1. To help you understand Tudutu,
2. To help me know what you want it to be
3. To help anyone else who wants to build a similar system in future.

I am actually building Tudutu for me. You see, I’m not very organized, but I want to be. I’ve got so much happening in my life, that I just miss most things that I need to or want to do. I have read all kinds of good books about personal organization and time-management to improve myself, but they just don’t work for me. I start implementing what I learn, and usually within 2 weeks, I’m back to being just as unorganized as before. There’s always something to stop me. And usually, the cause of it is the complexity of the system I’m trying to follow.
A bit about me now. I’m a computer programmer by profession. I got myself a decent physics degree at university, but as I was finishing, it was the beginning of the Internet boom, and computer programming jobs were paying a lot more than science jobs. The Internet was much more interesting to me that quantum mechanics, so I got a job programming instead. I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years now.

Being a scientist at heart, I hope I’m not just a geeky programmer. I see computers as doing a job for me that I can’t be bothered to do for myself. I think that we should be able to have them do loads more for us than they currently do. I want to help change that. At least for me, anyway.

Tudutu is my attempt to help improve my life by helping me do the things that I need to, without my having to worry about them any more. In case you were wondering, the name “Tudutu” doesn’t originate from some cool African word or anything like that. It is just messed-up English, forced on me by domain-name squatters. Tudutu just means “To-do too”.

Why “to-do too?” My idea is that most of the stuff I have to do is already being done by someone else. And actually, those other people probably are keeping a to-do list with things on it that I’d also like to do, but I just don’t know about them yet. I thought, “what if I could find out what I need to do from other people’s to-do list?” I wouldn’t need reminding if I needed to get my tax form in, take my car for a service, make appointments for my kids to have jabs for some strange new disease, or whatever. Once one person like me knew they had to do it, I would know too.

Of course, to make that happen in a way which improves my life, I need quite a complex system. But instead of that complex system being something that I need to do, I want my computer to do it. Despite its complex nature, my system also has to be really easy for me to use. I don’t want to have to be worrying about how to get my life organized using the system instead of actually getting things done. So that’s my goal - build a user-friendly life-management system which will organize my life for me. Sounds simple, huh?

Creating software for a living has taught me something important though — I really don’t know everything in advance. The best way to create software is known in the trade as being “agile”. So I need your help. I would like you to take part and be a user of Tudutu, because if you are, you can help me make it better for both of us. So please feel free to leave comments on this blog, take part in the Tudutu forum, and even send me mail. (Actually, I plan to use Tudutu to replace my e-mail system, so by the time you read this, e-mail may no longer be a great idea.) Whatever method you choose, I’ll be glad to hear from you.

Oh, and while I’m building it, I figure it might be useful to someone else who wants to build a website like this to be able to read about how I’ve done it. Not all the details, but at least the interesting stuff. So I’m going to use this blog as an online diary for how I started Tudutu. It’ll hopefully end up being a journal of how to start up an internet business, or something like that.

So please, help me create Tudutu to be the kind of tool that actually makes a difference to both our lives. It might well be worth it.