Lee Semel

I don’t know about you, but I use a bunch of different online applications, each of which maintains its own To-Do list. These include project tasks in Basecamp, outstanding bugs in FogBugz and Request Tracker, people to contact in Highrise, unread emails in Gmail, a custom todo list on my Google Desktop, and other items to do in text files and on Post-It notes on my desk. Clearly, I’ve got a lot of tasks to do. And it would be helpful to see and manage all of those tasks in one place.

I hereby propose a new kind of feed, RSS-TODO. Any application that creates or manages a To-Do list would publish its to-do items as a feed. The format of the feed would be identical to regular RSS, with perhaps a tag in the header indicating that the feed contains To-Do items. To mark off a task as complete, an application would issue an HTTP request to the To-Do item’s permalink, with a special query string parameter, such as “?status=complete” or something similar. To add a task, a request could be made to the feed URL with a special query string parameter containing the description of the new task. The feed URLs themselves would have to be unique and hard to guess, so that you don’t end up with spam on your To-Do list.

The goal of all this is to get everything you have to do in one place. Applications such as Google Desktop would let you subscribe to your To-Do feeds the same way as they let you subscribe to an RSS feed, so you can see everything you have to do in a central location. Tasks could be displayed in one big list, or in separate folders depending on what feed they came from, just like in a blog reader. Getting all of your tasks together in one spot would make it really easy to see at a glance all of your outstanding items, and it’s no coincidence that this is a key principle of time-management systems such as Getting Things Done. It would also be neat if you could subscribe to your employee’s To-Do lists, to keep up on what they are doing and add items to them when you need to delegate work.

This would definitely be an improvement over having a million different online To-Do lists as well as paper lists cluttering up your desk.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under General, Internet & Tech Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.