Having tried every to-do list, calendar, note-taking, task-managing tool out there, I had almost given up on flashy AJAX tools that were supposed to make you more productivity and accepted that there was no solution to my lack of potential productivity. It’s not that I’m a slacker and don’t do much work, it’s that I hadn’t found a working way to note down the tasks I intend to complete — as they came to me — for the next hour, six, or day, and as a result ended up doing a lot less than I intended to in a given period of time. And then I met NowDoThis.
Created by Jakob Lodwick of Vimeo fame (and currently music honcho of The Normative Music Company), NowDoThis is the simplest thing you will ever see, let alone the simplest productivity app out there. It shows a given task (i.e. “buy milk”), a “done.” button, and “edit list”. Clicking on edit list brings you a simple textbox where you add, or edit, your tasks in the order that you intend to complete them, line-by-line. Save the list, and NowDoThis flashes you each task, one by one, which disappear as you mark each one as they’re done, hence acting as a boss telling you to do things.
Having used it for the last couple of weeks, I can tell you this: it works. These days, I use basically any or all of my Internet time to work on my startup, Nincha. Before, I’d have a mental to-do list of six things I plan to complete for the day, and I’d barely end up getting through one of them, having forgot the other three and being carried away with the first one. Now with NowDoThis, I write them down before I start, add as more come to me, and just follow it through, one by one. At the end of five days out of seven, I’m able to get to the very satisfactory “all done.”, which gives me so much pleasure that I’m actually able to get on with other ‘normal’ things in life without feeling the guilt or weight of having five remaining tasks in my head.
An extremely helpful tip to anyone who intends to use NowDoThis, is to put it in your Firefox Sidebar (pictured right). Here are the steps, as taken from the NowDoThis blog:
- Bookmark NowDoThis.
- Choose “Organize Bookmarks” from the “Bookmarks” menu.
- Select the NowDoThis bookmark.
- Click “More”.
- Select “Load this bookmark in sidebar.”
Extra tip: place that bookmark in your bookmarks toolbar, so you don’t have to scroll through your bookmarks list every time you want to load it. To do this, choose “Organized Bookmarks” and drag it to your toolbar.
There are some things I have to review which feel almost too good to let anyone else know about. NowDoThis is, sadly, one of them, but I think I’m inlined to share it with others given the productivity increase it has brought in me.
