Michael Linenberger's Blog

New owners and developers are in place for Toodledo as of a few months ago, and I recently had a long phone conversation with them. I am encouraged.

As you may know, Toodledo is the other non-Microsoft task management software I recommend for use with my advanced MYN task management system (along with Todoist). Toodledo is probably the most feature-rich task software available, and like Todoist, it works on all platforms. It’s not as simple as Todoist, and not (yet) kept as up-to-date, but for raw power, nothing beats it.

New Owners Already Turning it Around

However, about three years ago, Toodledo was bought by a new company that ultimately stopped supporting the product. Many users complained that help requests were going completely unanswered. Well, the new owners who came on a few months ago tell me they’ve turned that around. They say they’ve caught up on all help requests and are now working on new software releases again.

So if you were a Toodledo user who lost faith in their support, give them a try again. Of course, only time will tell if they are in it for the long haul, but so far they are moving in the right direction.

Why Toodledo?

Again, Toodledo is the other non-Microsoft task management software I recommend for use with my advanced MYN task management system (along with Todoist). Toodledo is probably the most feature-rich task software available, and it’s very customizable. It’s the only one that has a true start date field, which is critical. I highly recommend it for power users who use MYN. I have a video course on using Toodledo with MYN at the link below.

Go to MYN-Toodledo Video Course

I’ve just created a new free video about the optional “New Outlook” preview that is a part of the Outlook for Mac subscription desktop app. I created that video to add to the Toodledo video course, but it’s really useful for any Mac Outlook user to watch. Go to my MYN Toodledo course overview page and scroll down to free Video 26b.

Some Background

In October 2020, Microsoft added an optional New Outlook mode to it’s subscription Outlook for Mac 365. It’s essentially a preview of the next version of Outlook for Mac. You access it by selecting a button in the upper right corner, as shown here:

I am very pleased to announce the guest post below by reader Charles Olsen about Todoist. You may recall that Charles wrote a few guest posts about Things over the last year, and this one is even better!

The Todoist app suite is a set of to-do list management apps that run on virtually all platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and the web. It’s one of the most popular to-do list apps out there. Charles Olsen has spent a lot of time and effort developing ways to use 1MTD and MYN within those Todoist apps. Charles’s guest post below shows you how you can do this yourself.

This notice from Microsoft:

“September 3, 2020: We will soon roll out the new tasks experience in Outlook on the web as we move from preview to general availability. With this change, we will remove the preview opt-in toggle; this means the classic tasks experience will no longer be available.”

I am still curious about what’s going to happen with future releases of Desktop Outlook, which is now the only way to see the older, and more powerful, legacy Tasks system in Outlook. We’ll see how that plays out.

Michael

Yey! Microsoft finally did it. They’ve added a Create a Task command to their Outlook iOS App. This is a critical app feature I like to see in all apps that my 1MTD and MYN readers use.

If you have a subscription to Office 365 (now called Microsoft 365), and you have been regularly updating your desktop Outlook app, then here’s a recent change you might care about: the ability to turn off yellow highlighting of flagged mail in the Inbox has been fixed.

If you are new to 1MTD and MYN, or if you have drifted away from it, here is a 4-minute video that will help refresh your understanding of the urgency zone concept, and how urgency zones work in both systems.

And for a downloadable 1-page PDF summary of this entire video, a “Cheat Sheet,” go to this link.

I’ve just created a cheat sheet for 1MTD and MYN users who need a review or introduction to the system basics. Mostly, it shows how the Urgency Zones work in a quick overview.

You can download a free printable PDF of this cheat sheet at this link.

Also, the brand new free 4-min video I just made walks you through all the points on this cheat sheet, so you might want to watch that too.

Michael

The Things 3 app set is a set of to-do list management apps that run on the Mac and iOS devices. Reader Charles Olsen has spent a lot of time and effort developing ways to use 1MTD and MYN within those Things 3 apps. He published a guest post on this topic some time back, and now has a new guest post that improves his approach, and I’ve published it below.

Take a read and I think you will see that not only is Charles an excellent writer, but what he’s come up with as a way to implement 1MTD and MYN is very nicely done! In my mind, this might now be the easiest way to implement MYN if you own a Mac. If you like this, give Charles a big “thank you” shout out in the comments section below.

Michael

Yesterday I happened to notice that in the most recent version of the iOS Gmail app, Google has added the Add to Tasks menu item, allowing you to move an email into Google Tasks. This was absolutely needed and I am delighted to see it!

I am nearly done creating my new Google Tasks and 1MTD video course, so that feature addition was a nice project-wrap present to me, and to all of you, too, if you use Gmail and Google Tasks on an iPhone or iPad.