In many cases in my own life I find that I am either productive or comfortable. By this I don’t mean that I have to sleep on the floor after a productive day, what I mean is that many times you need to trade your personal freedom to work productively according to GTD and other task management theories.

The reason is mostly scheduling. I have three projects and I could schedule each subtask for a day next week but I won’t. The reason for this is that if I don’t complete my schedule on a given day I’ll feel bad, and the whole project will suffer overall.

If you have projects which do not have a very strict deadline I would advise against scheduling them daily because it will cause you discomfort. Writing a to-do list for the week is fine, or doing 4 day to do list is perhaps even better, this way if you don’t complete a task you can bump it to next time.

The advantage of scheduling flexibly like this is that you can make use of your personal highs and lows. When you feel you don’t want to work just don’t, take the time to relax, and when you do feel like it, you will be able to complete twice as much.

The obvious drawback is that this method is not for those who can not discipline themselves. If you are looking for a cheap way to bump your tasks and not do anything then this is not for you, you will only get set back more.

If you are a blogger and need to keep track of some of your post ideas, but don’t really like writing drafts, let me show you a great way to store some notes. If you follow this tutorial, all you will really need is to be comfortable with writing notes in a text editor. In addition, if you are familiar with CSS you can do anything you like to your list, but this is not needed.

We will be modifying your index.php file, the one governing your admin, not the website itself. This file can be found in the wp-admin folder, simply named index.php. Download it and make sure to make a backup copy. Open up the file with a text editor, I prefer Notepad++, and search for the following line:

<p><?php _e(’Use these links to get started:’); ?></p>

You may notice, that this is the first line of your admin dashboard, so let’s put a to-do list above this. Now there are two ways you can go about this. You can either put the list right here, or you can write it in another file, and tell the page to call that file. Writing it here is fine, but you don’t want to go through all this code whenever you want to edit the list right? So let’s place it in a different file, to make it easily editable. Above the line we just searched for, type the following.

?php include(”todo.php”); ?>

This will tell your browser to load the contents of the file “todo.php” right here. All we have to do is create a new file, name it “todo.php”, edit it in whatever way we want, and upload it to the same folder that “index.php” is found in. First of all, create a new simple text document and save it, naming it todo.php naturally. Now we need to write the list, in the following form.

<ul>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 2</li>
<li>List item 3</li>
</ul>

Save the file and upload it, you should have a nice little list of things to do on your dashboard. It could be useful to jot down some long term things if you don’t feel comfortable editing this list all the time. If you think that rearranging and touching the list takes a long time try some of the advanced features of Notepad++, it can upload files directly to where you want it to, but more on this soon, in another article.

This article is part of the Wordpress customization series, with more to come, like skinning the admin interface, so be on the lookout for new parts. If you would like me to cover anything specific don’t be afraid to suggest.

Online list services can be found by the gallon. There are only a few though which stand out from the crowd, and for me, one of those is Gubb. Don’t expect a Remember the Milk like complexity, it’s just a simple jot-down-your-thoughts application, with a few very helpful tools.

Upon registration, the friendly interface gives you the option to choose from some pre-fabricated lists which will immediately be shown on the main page for you. Apart from these, creating new lists is very easy, just choose new list from the top menu, name it, describe it, choose a color, and start adding items.

You can add a description to all list items, give them a due date and rate them according to their priority and so on. You can also move them between lists, so integrating lists will be a cinch. I find that the rearrange feature of Gubb is one of the best. It’s simple drag and drop, but works effortlessly and gives you the freedom you need to put items anywhere.

Once you’ve created your list, you can click on the top-right menu and choose from a multitude of options. You can print, share, email, text message the list, add items by email, copy the list, get a feed for the list and so on. These are some very useful options, especially sharing and emailing, you can use them to create tasks lists or a shopping itinerary for yourself.

Another great feature is the way the main page itself can be manipulated. You can drag and drop whole lists like you did with items, you can even take lists off the main page (they will still be available). You can easily change the text size of the lists, and the best part, you can change the layout of the main page to make it 1, 2, 3 or 4 columns. This is useful if you have a lot of lists, you may want to see them side by side.

Overall Gubb is a powerful application if you have basic list needs only. I don’t really see any shortcomings, since I think it’s meant to be a simple for creating lists without hassle. If you need powerful task management go to Remember the Milk or Todoist, otherwise Gubb is a favorite of mine, which I still use quite a lot.

This post was included in the test version of Hack Your Day Magazine a few days ago, and is an example of recommended online services which will not, or which will be featured later on the blog. Get your subscriptions here!