iPhone to-do app with item queueing?

September 5, 2012 2:37 PM

Is there any to-do app for the iPhone that lets you place to-do items in a queue?

I often have to-do items I want to keep track of that are related to each other in some way, like a list of 15-minute jobs to do around the house, or, this week, several larger projects, each about an afternoon's worth of work, that I hope to get done before the end of the weekend.

These are all the kinds of things that don't have a specific deadline, and may not get done on any given day. I don't need to see all of these things in my to-do list. What I'd love is to be able to group these kinds of items, in a queue, so that I would see only the next item in the queue, and a new item would appear when I checked it off.

For instance, this week I have three projects to do around the house: organize homeschool materials; inventory the kids' clothes and mine and make a shopping list; clean out and organize my closet. In that order. When I have spent my afternoon organizing the homeschool stuff, I'd like to be able to check it off my to-do list, and immediately have "inventory clothes & make shopping list" appear on the next day. But I don't want to see items farther down in the queue until it's their turn.

I am currently using Appigo Todo, but will buy a new app if it provides this function and works well otherwise. Alternately, if there is a way to do this in Todo that I haven't figured out, I'd love to hear about that as well.

posted by not that girl to work & money (7 answers total)

I'm not 100% clear if you want them to appear one per day or one at a time, but after wayy too much agonizing over Todo apps I recently bought Things, which I have been mostly satisfied with, and which takes care of the former scenario.

The "Today, Next, Someday" flow sounds like it may be what you're after.
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism at 2:45 PM on September 5, 2012

How could I not have been clear? *sigh* It's the one-at-a-time one: show task A until it's done, then show task B.
posted by not that girl at 2:52 PM on September 5, 2012

"do this next" does this. It's definitely not a robust app, but it accomplishes exactly this feature (and nothing more).
posted by samthemander at 4:07 PM on September 5, 2012

Wunderlist might do this for you.
posted by redfishbluefish at 5:35 PM on September 5, 2012

OmniFocus can do this. It's not cheap and takes some time to learn, but it's very powerful. If you set up a sequential project (items are available only when the previous one is done), OR set it to show only the next action for each project, it will do what you describe.
posted by brianogilvie at 5:58 PM on September 5, 2012

P.S. OmniFocus also syncs with the Mac version. I use the Mac for most planning, and switch between the Mac and my other devices while doing. But you could do everything on the phone if you wanted.
posted by brianogilvie at 6:01 PM on September 5, 2012

Thanks, folks, this is helpful.
posted by not that girl at 10:14 AM on September 6, 2012