For years, I’ve used a 5×7 piece of paper folded in quarters to keep track of my personal to-do list and weekly shopping lists. As Lifehacker recently commented:
There’s a reason there’s still so much paper around in this hyper-connected, everything-online age: the stuff is cheap, portable, compatible with all your applications, and everyone masters the interface by the time they’re out of the first grade.
Notwithstanding its simplicity, my piece of paper lasts about 2-3 weeks before it becomes so tattered and full of cross-outs that I need to start over.
Here are more of my paper-related issues:
- Data entry: from week to week, I add new items, but I forget to cross off items like cat litter…so now I’ve got enough cat litter for a litter of cats
- Data reuse: at the end of my piece of paper’s useful life, I re-copy 75% of the list I started with (not unlike my to-do list, but that’s a story for another day)
- Multiple lists: invariably my wife or I find a recipe we want to try on the weekend so I end up creating a completely separate shopping list and juggling between two lists at the store
- Sharing: to further complicate matters, we have a weekend home, so my wife and I will split shopping duties as we need to stock two places with purchases from different stores…
Even though I’m someone who is generally slow to change (and I certainly wouldn’t classify myself as a Web 2.0 techie)…I have to think there must be a web-based solution out there that not only addresses the paper-related issues but also provides even more value (like the ability to automagically add ingredients from recipes into my shopping list or proactively reminding me when I need to re-stock an item or the fact that the cat litter I usually buy is on sale, etc.).
So far, I’ve tried Backpack, Remember the Milk, Cozi and several other web based list makers – only to conclude that while they address some of my data entry, reuse and sharing issues – they’ve primarily replicated paper on the web. I’ve found that the effort required to keep them up-to-date, send to mobile, set recurring reminders, share with my wife, etc. takes more time than my current paper-based solution. Personally, I also find the blank slate nature of many of the new solutions to be off-putting…give me some guidance, a little structure or even better, anticipate my needs.
It’s these ideas – guidance, structure and proactively making the web useful – for tasks as simple as shopping lists that we’re focused on as a company and with the product we’re building.
I am so with you. I have been using a paper notebook for years now and find myself re-creating lists more then actually getting stuff done. I also tried basecamp once, and found myself not knowing where exactly to begin. A big blank slate, as you said above. So I only used it for like a week and went back to paper. A better solution would be welcomed.
I agree that structure is key for making this useful. In fact, structure would be one major advance over the ever so generic paper.
For instance, a solution focusing on a shopping list rather than a generic to-do or life organizer, stands a better chance to really deliver on the “better than paper” promise. I’m not sure it’s possible to deliver that on a generic stance at all.
Continuing that example, instead of starting with a blank slate you would start with an initial shopping list template (perhaps created from your real shopping history); since shopping is usually recurring, you would reuse the template for next week’s shopping, and you would “carry over” items that you have not purchased yet (surely this beats copying the items not struck out from the old piece of paper).
And of course, this can be extended to other means of getting initial content on your list – check any of “cat owner”, “child 0-2″, “redsox fan” boxes and you’ll get a list of items you might find useful on your template.
This, I guess, could also be extended to the generic world – if you get a wide enough variety of prepared to-do list templates to cover useful situations (weekly shopping; hosting a barbeque on Sunday; back to school; going to a field trip with the kids; starting a web-based startup). If you apply specific structure to each of these life-areas, you get a more usable product.