Idonext Blog

We are still blown away to see "our baby" so enthusiastically presented! 

We tried to come up with the most simple and time-saving solution and you just need to know these 3 Golden Rules:

1. Send your e-mail to memaail@gmail.com@idonextmemail@gmail.com.com from the address you are registered at Idonext

2. The subject holds the date for all tasks in the e-mail. Various formats are valid, like "11/10/2010", "10.11.2010", "0" (for today), "2" (for in 2 days) or "3 weeks" (for in 3 weeks). An empty subject means "Someday". If the subject is empty then you can assign a date to each task separately by adding the "+"-shortcut at the end of each task’s text.

3. Each task is separated by a single line break and can contain tags and the "+"-shortcut. A double line break marks the end of the tasks’ list. Everything after that is ignored by Mail2Task (perfect for signatures!).

Some minutes after sending you will get an automatic confirmation e-mail stating the number of recognized tasks. Please check the pictures of this blog post to see some examples. Have much fun with that time-saver!

I think the "computer-user world" is devided into 2 groups: mouse-lovers and keyboard-lovers. The one group likes to point and click and the other group likes to hack text in a text-field as fast as possible. I count myself more to the keyboard group when I am on my Macbook. But once I am on my iPhone I am more then click/tap guy and hate text entries. 

So we designed Idonext to satisfy both groups and the date, time and tags input-fields can be overwritten just with some some magic characters during the title input. Here is a short overview of today’s shortcuts:

• #xyz means: add tag "xyz" to the task
• abc--xyz means: split the task into one called  "abc" and another one called "xyz"
• +2 weeks means: set the date due in 2 weeks from today on

Especially the last one (the "+") is really mighty and understands a lot of format and even real human language. Please keep in mind that the plus does not necessarily mean "add" but is just a magic char. Here are just some examples which should give you an idea. Try it for yourself!

• +t = today
• +today
• +tomorrow
• +1 = tomorrow (a digit stands for days)
• +1 day = tomorrow
• +5 weeks
• +06/28/10 
• +28.06.10
• +28.08.2010
• +06/28/10 10:00-11:40
• +06/28/10 1000-1140
• +2 1000-1140 = in 2 days at 10:00

You can also combine tag and date/time shortcuts, but the date/time shortcut should be always the last. Like in "Meeting Steve #meetings +2 weeks 9:00-11:00". 

As you see, we take the efficiency business really serious! Save time wherever, whenever you can.

We love to give you just the features that you really need and to keep all the small, time-consuming extra-features away from you. So we thought about if we should add projects, subfolders, markers, "important"-, "very important"-, "super-extra important!"-flags and finally decidedagainst all that. That’s just too confusing and too many options often lead to using no options at all. Even the thinking about "What option should I take?" is inefficient and wastes your valuable time.

Instead, we decided on just one organizing-feature: Tagging. With tags YOU alone decide about the way you organize your things. It can be very precise or very general. 

Just as an example, here is how I am using tags at Idonext: 
Since I put most stuff at first into Someday, my Someday folder gets crowded very soon. So I tag a lot, but always just one tag per thing to avoid a messy appeal on my screen. What worked well for me is to add a digit to a tag which weights a tag about it’s priority. 

For example:

• bug1 - means very heavy bug, needs to be fixed ASAP
• bug2 - not so bad, but needs to be fixed in the next release
• bug3 - not really a bug, maybe just something I don’t really like how it reacts

Using #urgent or a project name as tag works also great. And the best on tags is that they are automatically shared with friends if you assign them a thing with a tag attached.

Happy tagging!

I sometimes wake up at night having my head full of ideas. So I’m starting up Idonext and want to enter my thoughts as fast as possible into Idonext before I already forgot most of them. Especially for these kind of situations we added a small, but very convenient feature to Idonext called Quickentry. 

For Quickentry you enter your tasks seperated with two following hyphens into the standard input box, select your day and tags and click "Save". Idonext splits this one task into several tasks which you then can one by one drag onto its designated day. 

Quickentry is besides the hash-tag for tagging my favourite time-saving feature at Idonext! Try it!

P.S.: Quickentry is also great for follow-ups of meetings or Christmas shopping lists!