Help tracking daily repeated tasks easily?
March 23, 2011 2:22 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking for an app I can use for checking the same things off every day. I use iPhone and have Windows.

I use Toodledo for my normal to-do lists, but I haven't been able to get this to work with that or any other to-do list manager I've found.

Say there are ten things I need to do every day: take a vitamin, plan my next day, make my bed, etc.-- trivial things like that. I want something where these items keep appearing every day, and I can view a whole week's items in a grid or something, and I can edit previous days' items.

I want to use this specifically for building habits, so I can see if I've been doing it successfully for long enough. Then, if it's been working for me well enough, I stop updating that and add something else to track every day instead.

I'm looking for an iPhone app together with a web interface, with extra points if there's an offline Windows desktop client.

The best thing I've thought of so far is simply using an Excel spreadsheet, but it's kind of unwieldy when it comes to syncing between my iPhone and my computer (I use Spreadsheet for iPhone, which requires you to e-mail a copy of a spreadsheet to yourself if you want to use it on your computer, as far as I can tell, instead of syncing somewhere). Any suggestions to improve that would work too.
posted by dubadubowbow to Computers & Internet (14 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Remember the Milk?
posted by empath at 2:26 PM on March 23, 2011


Try the app "Put Things Off". I think it'll let you designate tasks as daily recurrences to create an automatically renewing series of lists.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 2:34 PM on March 23, 2011




er, wrong link. Here's Time Flies for iPhone.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 2:42 PM on March 23, 2011


Best answer: Mrs Binaryape uses Joes Goals for this sort of thing but it's a website not an app.

http://www.joesgoals.com/
posted by BinaryApe at 2:43 PM on March 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: I saw Joe's Goals ages ago and couldn't find it again or remember enough about it to ask-- I was hoping it had an app attached to it. Other than that, that's exactly what I'm looking for.
posted by dubadubowbow at 2:46 PM on March 23, 2011


Daily Tracker is an excellent app for this, with very good reporting (graphical on the device or text-based export) and flexible auto or manual syncing with your Google Docs account.
posted by kalapierson at 3:35 PM on March 23, 2011


The description for Due App says it is great for repetitive task, like the ones you describe. It looks fairly polished. However it does not have a desktop client or a web interface.
posted by oxford blue at 4:17 PM on March 23, 2011


Best answer: I use Toodledo also. I assume you've already tried the iPhone app? I have an Android phone, and while there are third-party Toodledo apps for that, I just use the "slim website" at http://www.toodledo.com/slim/

Or do you mean that you aren't able to schedule daily tasks with the app? Through the Toodledo website (slim or regular) I'm able to set up tasks that repeat daily. You just click on the "repeat" column and set it for daily. Unless I'm misreading your question and you are having some other issue with the daily repeating.
posted by LaurenIpsum at 4:49 PM on March 23, 2011


I use Time Flies, and it's the best and most simple apps for what you describe. I say this as someone who also uses Remember the Milk as my to-do list, and Wunderlist for well, lists.

With Time Flies, I check off all the "usually categorised as mindless" things that I need to remember to do daily - take a pill, water my plants, feed the fish, etc etc etc. I like it because it's super simple and adding a task takes about 10 seconds. Checking it off takes 2 seconds.
posted by shazzam! at 5:25 PM on March 23, 2011


Sciral Consistency has an iPhone app and a Windows client, but no web interface.
posted by Pigpen at 7:27 PM on March 23, 2011 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Have you heard about Health Month? We've got a whole Metafilter team over there. I've been using it for two months and it's been freakishly helpful at developing good habits for the same sort of things you're working on. Basically, you set up rules for each of those tasks ("Take a vitamin 7 days a week" for example); then every day you check in and say whether you did each thing. If you screw up enough, you lose a life point. You earn points and healing fruit by doing good things. There's some interesting data visualizations as well, and the with every new month the site will recommend tweaks to your rules to solidify your habits. I know it sounds silly, but it WORKS. The key factor is the social aspect. The MeFi team are amazing at encouraging each other on our team wall. You should check it out. (You can play 3 rules for free. We're setting up for the April game right now.)
posted by web-goddess at 4:32 PM on March 24, 2011


I use UltraList on my iPhone for exactly these kinds of daily routine activity lists.

It doesn't have a web interface or Windows, unfortunately, but maybe it would still be useful to you.
posted by StrawberryPie at 9:05 PM on March 24, 2011


Response by poster: Thanks for the answers everybody! I figured out how to set up what I wanted on Toodledo, but I found it helpful to look at all of those apps and sites. Thanks!
posted by dubadubowbow at 2:48 PM on March 28, 2011


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