By Mike Pnematicatos, CEO and Chief Architect, Merlin Software for Vacation Ownership

I am sure we all keep them – To-Do Lists. My first recollection of To-Do Lists was when I was in school and would prepare a study schedule ahead of the exams. That was some time ago. Since then, To-Do Lists have been a significant part of my life.

I find that I need to have the big picture written down and prioritised before I can get down to work and action the items on my To-Do List, one by one. If I haven’t got the big picture written down, there is an agitation within me that prevents me from focussing on a task as my mind constantly tells me something else that needs to be done and that must not be forgotten. However, once it’s on paper, my mind is calmed. It won’t be overlooked.

There are many ways to keep these lists, from paper and pen to voice notes and different apps. I have tried them all. In the end, I always come back to paper and pen. I keep a little black book and start the week by writing down all the items on my To-Do List on a clean page. I then order or prioritise the list and get to work, crossing the things off one by one as I work my way through them.

But as we all know, the emails, calls, or chats that constantly come in result in new items being added to the list. So every day or three, the list gets re-written on a fresh, clean page, and the process starts again. The big picture is in the list, and the list is prioritised, and work can commence with a calm mind, uncluttered with things to do that must be remembered. The little black book is my memory.

“But surely this re-writing consumes a lot of time, and you could use an app to keep your lists.” I hear you say.

You are right. But I have tried many apps, and after an initial flurry of activity and enthusiasm, I have ditched the apps and returned to my trusty little black book. There are two reasons for this. 

First, it is easier to add an item to the list in the book than in the app. So maybe these apps need to be simplified such that items can be quickly added?

I used to use a mini voice recorder, and this was amazing. It was purchased in Orlando on one of my trips to the USA many years back and served me well until the advent of smartphones with voice note features. I stopped using my mini voice recorder and tried the phone voice notes app, but it wasn’t the same. The mini voice note recorder was missing or lost, so I was back with the little black book. 

The second is that remembering comes from repetition and the best way to repeat things is to re-write them. I find the re-writing process important as it reminds me once again of each item and its importance and allows for the correct prioritisation.

So there you have it: To-Do Lists and their place in my life.

Now, if you thought that was the end of this article, sorry to disappoint 😊

Having used many of the To-Do List and Project Management apps available and finding most of them wanting, I decided that maybe we needed to build one ourselves. One that is simple and quick to use. One that allows you to review and remember your tasks without re-writing them. One that allows for fast re-ordering.

From my analysis and experience using many of the To-Do List and Project Management apps available, especially those designed for teams, I concluded that they all had far too many features that made them clumsy to use for the average user like me. They all serve a market where these neat features and complexity are required. However, there are many more users in that market who don’t need all those features.

So what are the minimum features that most of us need? First, I think we need to be able to:

• Easily create a task and add it to our to-do list;
• Easily read and re-order tasks;
• Estimate the time to complete that each task will require;
• Identify repetitive tasks that need to be completed daily or weekly;
• Identify deadline tasks that must be completed by a specific date.

I also realised that there was one feature that none of these project management and to-do list apps offered. And that was the ability to let your manager and colleagues know what you were working on at that moment, how long you had spent working on it and when it would be completed.

That was the one reason we stopped using these apps. It was because we only discovered if something was done or not after the deadline was reached. So there was no way of knowing, without asking, if the task was being worked on and would be completed on time.

And so the journey began. We had the foundation for building To-Do Lists in our software already. Our developers use the Tasks module in Merlin, and their Tasks are ordered in front of them. So they know precisely what they need to work on each minute of the day, and we know what they are working on too. 

We built the beta version of the Merlin To-Do List and called it Merlin’s Work from Home for reasons that will become apparent. It is a simple but effective To-Do List management tool that allows us to see what we are busy with and what is next on our schedules. We are all using this at Merlin, and it is particularly effective for us as we all work remotely (hence the Work from Home title). The next iteration is to turn this into a mobile app and take it to market.

“And what about the little black book?” I hear you ask. Well, it still sits on my desk beside my keyboard, but now it does not hold the entire To-Do List, and it does not get re-written every so often. Instead, I use it to quickly jot down things as they come in via emails, calls and chats. They go into my Merlin To-Do List at the end of the day if I haven’t already dealt with them.

Let me know your ideas for To-Do Lists and if you use an App which one it is, what features you use, and what you don’t. And if you are interested in trialling Merlin’s Work from Home in your business, let’s chat.