(2007-11-14) Swartz To Do List

Aaron Swartz on what it takes to provide decent To-Do List software. Some interesting ideas.

But most people also have tasks in their project management software (fix this bug), various calendar-style events (lunch with Jon, catch plane), and a vast quantity of email (answer Jon’s question, fix the frobnitz and report back to Bob, etc.) Yet no one seems to have dared to integrate their software with a calendar, email client, or even bug tracking software. Since it’s unlikely anyone writing productivity software is also going to write an email client, a calendar, and a bug tracker (although it would be nice), I’ll settle for having support for plugins that import tasks and events from these various other apps. It has to be very simple to upload your whole life to your todo app.

Psychologically, it’s easy to ignore a long todo list. In fact, long todo lists are depressing and make you want to look away. But a simple suggestion about one particular thing to do next is much harder to dismiss.

Commenters push Remember The Milk, noting some nice features.

Where is this going to run? If an ASP doesn't deliver what you want today, do you run it on your Home Server?