Those of you who use Mark Forster's Do It Tomorrow system of time management may be looking for a good app to bring DIT to the  iPhone or iPod Touch. Others may be using an app already, but find it lacking for their needs and the specific contours of the DIT system. Perhaps some are considering a move to DIT, but wonder if there is good software support on their iPhone or iPod.

For the free-time-challenged, below is a rundown of the good and bad points of using DIT on Momo Notes.

The Good:
Tasks can be scheduled and rescheduled by editing the date and time
Smart lists allow you to view pre-scheduled tasks by day or week
Tags allow the tracking of tasks by projects and categories
Tags also facilitate diagnosis of task completion and backlogs

The Bad:
Scheduling repeated tasks can get, well, repetitive
Scheduling each and every task takes time and energy
Momo is at base a notes app, not a scheduling app

Still interested? Follow the more detailed discussion below.

The details of Do It Tomorrow are outside the scope of this post, and for a full explanation you will want to read Forster's book, information on which you can find through the link at the top of the page. Here, for the sake of clarity, I will only provide the most basic information on DIT.

The basics of the system consist of daily to do lists, which Forster calls will do lists because everything on the list should be done that day. The tasks on the daily will do list are also the only things that should be done that day. Anything new that comes up during the day, unless it's an actual emergency, goes on the next day's will do list,; hence the title. Forster advocates this method as a way to organize work without the chaos and stress of trying to deal with an endlessly expanding workload.

I've found the system makes sense for me, and was using a paper planner to implement it when I bought an iPod Touch to listen to audiobooks. I quickly discovered its other uses, including taking notes. Hooked on jotting  down passing thoughts and maintaining a list of books I wanted to check out, I wanted a more powerful memo-taking app and unwittingly downloaded what, in my opinion, is the killer app for Do It Tomorrow on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Momo Notes for the iPhone/iPod Touch is a simple yet full-featured note-taking app from developer MK HQ. In addition to the usual tag and synchronization functionalities (the latter through the momolog website, which offers very quick synch), Momo also offers smart lists and the ability to change the date of a note.

Smart lists work much like smart playlists on iTunes, a rules-based filter providing a dynamically updated list. Just as one can specify tracks rated higher than four stars and/or purchased within the last week for a smart playlist, a smart list can have conditions like notes tagged "urgent" and "MK HQ account" that were created within the past two days. Such a smart list might be named #MKurgent. There are quite a few rules available for the creation of of these lists, one of Momo's best features.

By now the reader may have an inkling of how Momo Notes works to implement DIT on the iPhone/iPod. Let me illustrate further with an example and pictures.

Let's say I have a number of tasks I need to do. I need to drop my worn shoes off to get the soles replaced, catch up on four issues of magazines that piled up in my mailbox, and write up a proposal. I fire up Momo Notes on my iTouch...

And write each task up as a separate note. (This makes the management of tasks more modular, as we will shortly see..) I tag each task/note appropriately, maybe "shoes," "fashion," "repairs," or "errand" or some combination of those for dropping off the shoes. Obviously the tags can be as detailed or as general as one's needs dictate and can come in handy for review, as we will see later. The task is also tagged "willdo," my tag for everything that goes on a daily will-do list.

Some tasks, like the backlogged magazines, are similar repeated tasks. I might decide to read one issue a day and maybe take special notes of Issue 267 because it pertains to my line of work. Again, each task is a separate note, tagged willdo plus relevant tags such as perhaps "magazines," "currentevents," and maybe "backlog," if you want to track backlogs for diagnostic purposes.

The proposal project probably needs to be broken up into different tasks, such as "Call Khalil re budget for kce event," "Write outline for event proposal," "Write opening for event proposal" and so on. In addition to the usual tags and the willdo tag, I tag every task in that project with an identifying project tag, such as "kceevent" and "kceproposal." Again, the tags are as detailed or simple as they need to be.

If these are all today's tasks, then I'm already set, but I may want to schedule some of these tasks on different days. For instance I might not want to read all four issues on the same day but read one a day for the next four days, or one every Monday. Momo makes this easy by letting the user edit not only the content but the date of the memo. I can choose to edit the note, tap the date, and simply switch the date of each task note to the day I will actually do the task. This is an advantage of treating each task as a separate note--each can be given a different date, and that date can be changed easily.

So now I have a set of tasks, whether independent or part of a larger project. They are all scheduled for the correct date. What next? In a given day or week, how do I survey my will-do lists and the tasks I decided to finish in that time?

This is where smart lists come in. They come with a number of possible options, including what tags to include, what tasks to exclude, and what dates to include or exclude. I simply customize two smart lists for today's will-do list and this week's will-do list.

For the #today smart list (the hash is not required, but it's a useful way to distinguish these lists from static tags), I set the rules that the tag is "willdo," and the date is today. I set the list to match all rules. For #thisweek it's much the same, except the date range is this week instead today. Depending on your needs you can do this month, this year etc., although I've found that a week is about the maximum I need. I'll explain the #unfinished tag shortly, though by this point you can pretty much guess what it's for and even what its rules look like.

Now that the smart lists are set up, I can touch the #today tag to get a list of tasks I allocated to today, and #thisweek to look at what my task load and schedule look like this week. Since Momo by default only shows the first line in the preview, I get a clean view of the main headings. Maybe I noted down details of the task, such as a phone number to call, in the body of the task note, in which case I can just touch the note to see the detail.

So what happens when the tasks are done? There are two main ways. The first is to simply erase the note--which is another advantage of having one task per one note. The second is to add a tag, such as "done." You might want to do the former for mundane tasks that won't need a review, and the latter for tasks whose completion you might want to keep track of. In the latter case, you might want to exclude notes tagged "done" from the #today and #thisweek smart lists (by setting "tag is not done") if you want to view only unfinished tasks. You could also set up separate smart lists for, say, tasks finished this day or this week.

What if I finish a day without going through my whole will do list? That's what the #unfinished smart tag is for. The rules are "Tag is willdo" and "Memo in the last 30 days." If you use the tagging method for managing finished tasks, you will also need to add a rule like "Tag is not done." This way you can keep track of unfinished tasks which you can reschedule, give up on, delegate (in which case keeping track of the delegation is another task) and so on.

Finally, I can track projects and diagnose time usage using the static tags. By touching "kceevent", for instance, I can see all the tasks relating to the KCE event, what I have to do for that event, and when I will work on them. I can also use tags like "errands" or "backlog" to help me diagnose how much time I spend on errands or how big a problem backlogs are. For the latter purpose, tagging tasks "done" may be preferable to erasing them. It all depends on what you need.

Of course, while Momo works quite well to implement the DIT system on the iPhone or iPod Touch, it is not perfect. For one thing, writing up and scheduling the tasks can be a monotonous (or is that momotonous?) task, especially if you have a lot of repetition for a number of days. If a note could be scheduled for a range of days, or could be easily duplicated and reused, Momo would dramatically improve its support of DIT. If it further came hooked to an alarm, system, I would not need another time management application as long as I lived.

For me, personally, these limitations are not serious. I don't schedule really repetitive tasks ("eat" "sleep" "check e-mail"), Forster's example in his book notwithstanding, and I rather like to spend the time thinking about when to perform a task and then doing the scheduling. It connects me to the task on some level, and makes the choice of doing the task and when to do it more meaningful to me.

Of course your mileage may vary, and it's important to recognize that Momo is in its present form a note-taking app (a usage I still use it avidly for), and not a full-fledged scheduling app. All these are important considerations in deciding whether or not it is the right app to implement DIT for you, according to your own needs and preferences.

Overall I've found the simple yet robust Momo Notes more than adequate as a Do It Tomorrow system scheduler. On the recommendation of my friend lhovamp, fellow Momo user who got me hooked on the app, I've provided my way of using DIT on Momo Notes. I hope this helps anyone who is searching for a good DIT app, and helps them make the best choice according to their needs and tastes. Any feedback, information, and suggestions are much appreciated.