When I first purchased my iPhone, I was a week away from travelling to Bulgaria. Long flights are a bitch for a guy with A.D.D, and I always stress out about bringing enough stuff to keep my little brain busy while I’m in the air. I found that this time I could have taken my iPhone, camera and a sketchbook, and wouldn’t have needed to lug the other 300 pounds of crap along that I never used. In fact, it was the iPhone that kept me entertained 50% of the time. Most of that time was spent scrounging the outer reaches of the App Store wasteland looking for that one little productivity app which I hoped would be the solution to my organization and task-based problems.
Three weeks had passed, I was back from the trip and after countless hours of searching, I never did find The One. In fact, nearly a year later I was still searching and downloading, trying and testing, and failing. My browsing for this one particular White Whale had decreased to a bi-weekly and then monthly affair, but I continued to be disappointed.
Then after downloading and trying about 30 different list, task, and to-do type apps with no success, I stumbled upon “2do”. It was too good to be true!
“2do” has almost everything I was looking for in an organization/productivity app. It has customizable Calendars so you can organize your projects, tasks and checklists by type (personal, work, home improvement, or whatever), and they can be named, color coded, and you can add as many as you need, but in the paid version only. There is a free ‘lite’ version but you are limited to 3 calendars and other options are also limited.
Features that really made me do a little happy dance are the options you can utilize within the calendars. For example, Notes are my most frquently used because I can jot down the details of a project so I don’t forget. Another is an option to add a photo for reference. You can also schedule reminders and have it send an email to you, or an alarm, an instant message, and so on. You can set your Task up as a Task, a Checklist, or a Project, where you can actually group a bunch of tasks and checklists within it.
The list goes on and on. I was even happy with the Lite version until I found myself with the need for several Calendars to keep my insane list of things to do better organized. I also needed the Sync functionality so I don’t have to worry about losing my data. I can simply Sync everything to my desktop Mac and no worries!
If you have so many things to do that you need software to help you get your shit together, then I would recommend that you check out “2do”. I think you’ll sleep better if you do!
When I’m working on a project and need some kind of image or graphic, I rarely can find an acceptible specimen to work with. I search every dark corner of the web and my own libraries for something workable, but it always ends in me doing my own illustration of the subject matter. Usually I spend less time doing an illustration than the time I spent searching. Here’s another one of those items that I needed today – an iPhone 5.
