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To Do: Build things that people actually use

There’s a bunch of buzz today around Dabble’s (yay Canada) new Facebook To-Do list application which boasts a bevy of good features and a typically web-20-attractive UI. Investor Kedrosky points out the social aspect of it (the ability to assign stuff to others and prompt them to get things done), while TC has a good roundup, in which Arrington expresses a “tepid” reaction.

And “tepid” is the reaction that I’d agree with. Not out of some objection to the Facebook walled garden or outsourced social-net model, but more to the core concept of online To-Do lists themselves. I think I speak for the vast majority of people when I say that unless your a professional PM, To-Do lists are ad-hoc affairs, with scrawled notes jotted at inopportune moments, collected in a miscellany of crumpled papers. I’ve tried using online tools before (TaDa List) but have found that usage drops off rapidly after a brief period of initial enthusiasm as the tool just doesn’t support real-world use cases. I always end up with paper to-do lists jotted down on the go that are out of sync with the web to-do list that in itself becomes a chore to update. IMHO, a good moleskine is a better option.

So - I’m not bothering with online to-do lists until there’s a really good mobile/web option that I can access on my phone, and online.

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