Blue Archipelago

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Good afternoon Saloners - it’s another sunny day here in Bristol and we just got home from visiting the new shopping centre: Cabot Circus - if you ever find yourself in the area check it out - it’s pretty impressive.

Last weekend Dew set the Weekly Geeks a challenge to get caught up and I was glad of the chance to see where I was with challenges and write up a couple of reviews.

For some time now I’ve been trying to find a method to help me stay organised — both at work and at home — I’ve tried a few websites, paper to do lists etc but have never really settled on anything. This week I started the search again — looking for something that would work with my iPhone — and I discovered Toodledo. Toodledo is so easy to use — and will sync with Outlook (even if you’re on an exchange), your iPhone (or any mobile that can access the internet) and Firefox among others — meaning you can access your to do list from where ever you are. But what does this have to do with organising your reading?

How to organise your reading with Toodledo

Organise your challenges

Toodledo uses Getting Things Done principles to help you get organised — and allows you to assign your tasks to short-term, long-term and lifelong goals.

Here’s how I’m using it to organise my reading:

• Create a lifelong goal — …to widen my reading experiences
• Create a long-term goal — …to read 75 books in 2008
• Create a short-term goal — …to complete the Classics Challenge
• Create a task — …read Great Expectations by the end of September

Each goal is a sub-set of the one above — you can assign as many tasks to a goal as you like, ie I would list 6 tasks for the Classics Challenge goal — one for each book I have to read.

I then go on to create a short-term goal for each of my challenges — and voila — I can see at a glance which books I plan to read when and why I’m reading them!

Build a wishlist

You can assign an end date to a task — but you can choose not to — this means you can use Toodledo to create a wish list of books you’d like to read. Simply create a long-term goal called wishlist — and then every time you come across a book you’d like to read create a task with no end date and assign it to the wishlist goal. The tasks have a note area so you can even record which book blogger recommended the book to you (something I always forget!). When you are headed out to the store you can simply print the list out and take it with you - or call it up on your iPhone.

How much does it cost?

Nothing - well for the basic version anyway that let’s you do everything I’ve talked about above. You can upgrade to the Pro version for just $14.95 a year which let’s you see some funky bar graphs of your achievements and also stores your completed tasks.

I’m hoping that Toodledo could be the answer I’ve been searching for - here’s the link if you’d like to take a look yourself.

So how do you organise your reading? Do you have any tips to share? Post them in the comments if you do; I’d love to hear them — Happy Sunday

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