BELLS AND WHISTLES: MAXING OUT POPULAR TO-DO LIST APPS

EVERNOTE:

We all know that Evernote is essentially a cross-platform digital notebook, but it can also be used for project note-taking, organizing, and archiving. Try attaching various mediums—audio, links, photos, text—to your to-do lists, and don’t miss out on integrating checklists into each note within your notebook.

People like Google Keep for its simplicity: It’s like a digital bulletin board. Setting alerts by location helps with one of life’s biggest challenges: the grocery list. If you create a shopping list for, say, Target, anytime you are at or near the store, Google Keep will send an alertwith the list of items you need to pick up. Bonus: It syncs with Google Home.

Visually appealing, Trello allows you to create boards for different to-do lists, and within each board you can create multiple lists. Each list has a movable card that can be augmented with checklists or due dates. Trello’s special power: It can be integrated with endless other productivity tools, from Google calendar to Evernote to Slack.

A lot of people say their lives were changed when Wunderlist introduced shared lists and the ability to assign tasks to people—which, several significant others say, is a relationship-saver. Friends have been known to use the app to share lists like talking points for their next phone call or planning who should bring what on a camping trip.

The intuitive app makes it easy to create lists by areas of your life—work, family, friends, etc. Go through your lists in the morning and mark to-dos you want to accomplish “Today” or “This Evening.” Designating a to-do as such will put the items in a separate “Today” list. Calendar events display with your to-dos, giving an outline of your schedule.

GOOGLE KEEP: TRELLO: WUNDERLIST: THINGS 3:

Empty your human brain into your digital brain “Your brain did not evolve to remember, remind and prioritize beyond about four things,” Mr. Allen said. “Your head is for having ideas but not for holding them. So get all the ideas out, not just part of them. Otherwise, you won’t trust your head and you won’t trust your list.”

The Things 3 app is uniquely set up in this regard: The app, a complete overhaul of which was released last spring, has an “Inbox” specifically designed for a brain dump.

Put any idea or task into the Inbox—or even direct Siri to put a thought in the Inbox—and leave the item there. When you’re ready to get organized, mouse-click each Inbox idea or task and drag it to the specific list where it belongs, or schedule a time to complete the task. Detail the whole task “Most people’s to-do lists don’t work very well,” Mr. Allen said, because they don’t specify an action to be taken for each item. He recommends putting actionable items into your app—input “Make a reservation at The Cheesecake Factory for Mom’s birthday,” rather than something that requires even 10 seconds of analysis, such as “Mom’s Birthday.”

Trello, an app that allows users to drag-and- drop digital cards onto various vertical boards, makes it easy to visualize every one of your to-dos at a glance and make sure each is actionable. But the onus is on you to do so. Write down when and where you’re going to complete the task E.J. Masicampo, an associate professor of psychology at Wake Forest and co-author of a paper exuberantly titled “Consider It Done!: Plan Making Can Eliminate the Cognitive Effects of Unfulfilled Goals,” says one of the biggest to-do list mistakes people make is failing to commit to a time frame to accomplish each of the tasks on their lists.

“If your strategy is to go to the list and pick something to do,” he said, “eventually your list becomes a graveyard of things that you never felt like doing.”

Apps can help with this better than pen and paper. Santiago Merea, CEO of Raised Real, a San Franciscobased meal delivery service for babies, says one of his favorite features on Google Keep is the ability to have it send him to-do list reminders according to his location—pushing alerts when his phone reaches a certain address. For example, when he