Do you know anybody who is not busy? A lot of my friends are programmers like me, and always juggling multiple tasks and priorities. Rather than keeping all my TODO things in my head, I have experimented with several alternatives over the last few years. The basic idea is the same that David Allen outlines in Getting Things Done (affliate link), that you should have a dependable system to store and retrieve your tasks. Here’s what works for me right now:

I split my tasks into 2 categories

• Time sensitive and/or Recurring Events: This incudes meetings, appointments, birthday/anniversary reminders. I use Microsoft Outlook in the office, and GMail Calendar for personal stuff. My Gmail calendar is synced with my IPhone. Using the Google Calendar Sync utility, I keep the Outlook and GMail Calendar in sync, so all my commitments are available to me in Outlook as well as on my IPhone all the time.
• One Time tasks: This can vary from anything like picking up the drycleaning to buying stationary, or perhaps checking out a new technology framework in spare time. I use Google Tasks to store my tasks under different lists. I have lists for the items to do for my blog, things to do for the Dallas C# SIG, project ideas that I might want to pursue later, groceries to pick up and so on. The tasks can also be accessed from my IPhone using gmail.com/tasks.

And that’s it. Between Google calendar and Google Tasks, I am able to keep track of all my tasks.

I want to mention two other online tools that help me organize my online information significantly. Both of these are available in the form of JavaScript bookmarklets and always live in the bookmarks bar on my browser.

• Evernote: This is permanent catalog for information that I want to access later. I organize information using appropriate tags. Evernote also has native Windows, Mac, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile and IPhone apps.
• Instapaper: I use this as a temporary store for links that I want to go through when I have more time on my hands.