New users need to create an account before they can start adding things that they want to do in the next three years. The form where you add your “things” suggests things that other users of the service have added to their list. That’s nice as it can be inspirational. In the end, it comes down to what you really want to achieve and do in those three years.

A Top 101 things to do page offers additional suggestions on what you could do in the next 1001 days. Popular suggestions include donating blood, kissing in the rain, getting married or to not eat fast food for a month.

Tasks range from easily doable like donating blood or going on a cruise to hard to predict things like falling in love or, graduating from college or watching a meteor shower.

The top 10 things that users of the service want done in 1001 days?

1. Donate blood
2. Write a letter to myself to open in 10 years
3. Sleep under the stars
4. Get a tattoo
5. Leave an inspirational note inside a book for someone to find
6. Kiss in the rain
7. Don’t complain about anything for a week
8. Answer the “50 Questions That Will Free Your Mind”
9. Fall in love
10. Watch the sunrise and sunset in the same day

The service distinguishes between a things to do list and a someday list with the latter being more of a queued to do list while the former containing the tasks that you really want to achieve in that time frame.

Day Zero offers more suggestions and inspirations than what has already been mentioned. The Feature List offers lists that contain handpicked ideas, interesting locations or places, and even a list of what you probably do not want to do (but should). The latter list contains interesting challenges like not using the Internet for a week, not eating out for a month or not to complain for a whole week.

If that was not enough, there is also the idea finder. The idea finder displays two goals giving you a choice what you’d rather want to do. Each suggestion, even both, can be added to the things to do list, someday list or the done list.

Once you are done adding tasks to the things and someday list you can move around tasks between both lists or mark tasks as started and done.

You can also set tasks to be private in case you do not want your user name and full name to appear on the task page on the site.

The service lacks an option to print out your lists on paper. While it is possible to use the browser’s print option, it is not the best suited for this kind of task list.

You can start your own things to do list over at the Day Zero website. Which tasks would you put on your list?

Getting Things GNOME is a GNOME tool that takes the task list to the next level. GTG allows for tag-able task, add sub tasks, includes a plugin systems (with plenty of included plugins),  and more. And in this Ghacks.net article, I am going to show you how to install and use this helpful tool.

Installation

As you have come to expect, the installation of GTG is very straight forward. For just about any distribution that includes the GNOME desktop you can install with these easy steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software utility.
2. Search for “gtg” (no quotes).
3. Select Getting Things GNOME for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

Once installed you will find GTG in the Applications > Office menu.

Usage

When you first fire up GTG you will see the main pane pre-populated with some very helpful tasks (see Figure 1). As you can see there is a primary task (Getting Started with GTG) with six sub-tasks. If you right click any of these tasks you can choose to:

• Add a subtask.
• Edit the task.
• Schedule the task.
• Mark as done.
• Dismiss.
• Delete.
• Add a tag.

If you select Add a tag a new window will open where you can add your tag. You can add as may tags as you like (separated by commas) as well as apply those tags to subtags.

Quickadd

Right under the menu bar you will see a text area where you can quickly enter a task. All you have to do is enter the task and then hit enter. You can also quick add a task with tags by entering a task with a syntax like:

task tag:tag1,tag2,tag3

The above will add a task called “task” with tags “tag1″, “tag2″, and “tag3″.

You can also include due dates with the quick add. For this, the syntax is:

task due:date

You could even include both tags and due date with:

task tag:tag1,tag2,tag3 due:date

Plugins

As I said, GTG has a number of plugins included. You will find:

• Tomboy/Gnote
• Notification area
• Closed task remover
• Hello World
• Send task via email
• Remember the Milk
• Import from JSON
• Evolution

Figure 2

There are also a number of plugins that are listed, but are still in development and are not usable. To enable a plugin click Edit > Preferences > Plugins. You will notice that some of the plugins, when enabled, will add menu entries to GTG. One such plugin is the Evolution plugin. When you enable this you will find a new menu entry called Plugins. Click that menu and you will see an entry Synchronize with Evolution. Also, the Notification area plugin will add an icon to your notification area. That new icon allows you to quickly add a new task by instantly opening up a new task window (see Figure 2).

Final thoughts

And there you have it…another task manager tool that does a fine job of integrating into the GNOME desktop. Although this tool isn’t going to change the way you work, it will actually make your life a little bit easier.

Linux, of course, has no shortage of tools to keep track of your tasks. In fact, one might say Linux has too many todo list tools. So I thought I would show off a few of the lesser known tools so you might expand your own repertoire. I will even show you an ncurses based todo list tool for those of you who prefer to not bog yourself down with GUI tools. Enough said. We all have too much to do, so let’s get on with the tools.

Figure 1

tudu

I have to show this one off first. The tudu tool is the ncurses based to do list that will make any Alpine/Nano lover happy as a clam. This tool is very simple to use. You can install it with a command like apt-get install tudu , or you can find it in your Add/Remove Software tool. Once installed, you use the tool from a terminal window and issue the command tudu. When you open the tool you will see a single task that you can delete and then start adding your own. You add/edit tasks with commands.

tudu has a very unique command structure. The more handy commands are:

• f – Set the prioroity of a task.
• h – Move the cursor one level out in the tree hierarchy.
• l – Move the cursor one level in in the tree heirarchy.
• j – Move to the next task.
• k – Move to the previous task.
• J – Move to one position down.
• K – Move to one position up.
• m – Mark a task done.
• dd – Delete a task.
• o – Add a new task.
• t – Set the priority of a task

You can lean many more commands from the man page for tudu. Now let’s go back to GUI.

Figure 1

Tasks

It doesn’t get much more simple than the tasks tool. You will find this in your Add/Remove Software tool (and most likely it will be labeled tasks-hildon). What you can do with this tool is simple: You add and remove tasks. Oddly enough, it doesn’t have all the “bells and whistles” that tudu has, but it will be easier for many to use. There are some quirks involved with this tool.

Although you are able to create Categories, the only way to do so is after you have created a task. To create a task you enter the text in the New task… text are and hit Enter. Once you have done that double-click on the task you created to open up the task properties. Within the task properties you can click the Category drop-down and select New Group. This will allow you to create a new Category. There is one problem. As of this writing, as soon as you create the new group, Tasks will segfault and close. You can open it back up and everything you just created will still be there.

Outside of that odd segfaulting, Tasks is a nice little application. You can prioritize your tasks, give them deadlines, and even add links and notes.

Other task tools to consider

Of course you can’t think about todo/task tools without looking at your integrated groupware tools. Both Kontact and Evolution have outstanding task tools. You can even look at the Thunderbird plugin Sunbird which has a good tasks tool. There are so many of these tools to choose from. So if you’re looking to keep your tasks organized in Linux, you might need a todo list to help you decide with todo list to choose!

The portable software program can be used by a system user or administrator to configure tasks that need to be run once a day. The program is easier to use than the Windows Task Scheduler which is one of its greatest strengths.

Each task consists at least of a command and arguments. It is for instance possible to run the Firefox web browser by pointing the command to the firefox.exe on the computer system. The argument could be to open an url with the web browser right away.

That’s a basic example. Once A Day can basically execute any executable program in Windows and pass arguments to it.

The state of the window can be configured in the program as well as a wait until the program finished to execute.

Experienced computer users can perform these tasks with the Windows Task Scheduler as well but Karen’s Once A Day presents everything in one window making it somewhat easier to configure.

The software program can be downloaded from Karen’s website. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

The beauty of this app is that it is simple on the surface, but once you think about it and see some advanced options (there aren’t a lot) you realize that this is more than an app created in 3 minutes to satisfy the armada of New Years resolution people. There are actually two types of goals available, positive and negative. Fulfilling a negative goal will give you a negative score, while a positive will give you a positive score. You can also fulfill (or tick) a goal more than once a day. For the goal “Write posts” you can award yourself with as many ticks as the posts you write for example.

The picture is further shaded by the fact that you can add a weight to each goal, so publishing 2 posts a day (two ticks) would raise your points, but drinking even one can of Coke could decrease it by much more, it’s all up to you. There are a few more features in there, but in simplicity lies the key here, just set up your goals, visit it once a day and keep ticking. After a while you can see how you’re doing, getting a higher score for me is motivation to drop that Coke can!

You can add and edit tasks as you would in the desktop version, you can also use your touch powers to mark a taks complete with the touch of a button. In fact, you can do nearly anything you can do normally, and always having your tasks with you is a great advantage.

You can now also add Remember the Milk to your Home Screen by visiting you’re the RTM iPhone website, tapping the plus sign, and adding it from there. You will see the nice, shiny and cute cow right there on the screen, awesome.