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Recommended Todo web app: Vitalist

I’ve been looking for a good application to manage todo lists — or Getting Things Done (GTD) as it’s called these days. I have been using Remember The Milk but found it annoying. Yesterday I discovered Vitalist and, well, I was blown away. It’s as though they had found a way to read my mind, searched through all the junk, collected any thought I ever had about The Perfect Todo Application, and then went ahead and materialized the whole thing in the form of a sleek web app, adding some brilliant ideas in the process. Brilliant.

So what’s the big deal about a todo app? For starters, It has a simple and effective workflow concept behind it: New todos usually go into the Inbox. Adding a todo is quick and painless. It can be done using the app, or you can send in the item by email. So for example if you’re somewhere listening to the radio, and you hear a song you’d like to download later, you can use your phone to send in an item that says ‘download that song’ — and it’ll show up in you Inbox. Neat, huh?

The next step is to catalog the items in the Inbox. Here you have several options:

• Contexts: Catalog items by the context they should be performed in. For example, create a @Phone context that includes all items that require making a phone call. Then, when you’re at a phone, you can quickly look these up.
• Projects: Just a simple grouping of items into projects. Contexts and Projects are orthogonal: Any item can belong to both a project and a context.
• Waiting: Items that you delegate to someone else go into the ‘Waiting’ state until that person gets back to you.
• Someday: Stuff you want to do someday but not right now. Vitalist will remind you every once in a while about these.
• Reference: Little bits of information you want to store somewhere. For example, when I order heating gas for my apartment they give me a confirmation number for the order. I never know where to put it. Now I can just tap the number into my phone and email it to my Inbox. The next time I’m at a computer, I’ll move the item into the Reference list for keeps.

After GMail, this is definitely my ‘best web app around’.