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To Do: Make To-Do ListTrying to get organized with Web-based task managers.

By Chip BrantleyPosted Tuesday, June 30, 2009, at 9:59 AM ET

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Todoist
Similar to Ta-da List but with more options—like setting deadlines, viewing your tasks by date or all at once. It also allows you to make sublists. So, for example, if you have a project called "Move to Alabama" and a task within it called "Hire movers," you can add even more detailed information like, "Call Albert at Brownian Moving Company about the quote" and "Check to make sure 18-wheeler can get down the street."

Todoist is smartly designed, with projects in a narrow column on the left side of the screen and tasks in the center. But there's no iPhone app, and the mobile interface is so small that I kept having to expand the screen. And while the service integrates with Gmail—as e-mails come in, you can delegate them to a list on Todoist—if you want e-mail reminders, you have to shell out $3 a month. True, that's not a whole lot of money, but it's still $36 more a year than many other task managers expect you to pay.

Minimalism: 7
Completeness: 7
Compatibility: 6
Total: 20 (out of 30)

Vitalist
With a darker palette and better page design, Vitalist amounts to an aesthetically superior version of Toodledo. As with Toodledo, Vitalist was both more and less than what I wanted. More, because I wasn't planning to take advantage of its many features—collaboration tools, keyboard shortcuts, a built-in tickler file. Less, because I was going to have to pay $5 per month (or $50 per year) to start more than five lists.

Minimalism: 6
Completeness: 8
Compatibility: 7
Total: 21 (out of 30)

Remember the Milk
Remember the Milk has two particularly inventive features: There's an iPhone app that can pick up your location and suggest nearby chores, and there's an option to display the RTM task box within your Gmail account.

But ultimately I found RTM more conducive to slacking off than to getting things done. With its acres of white space and intuitive flow from one action to the next (plus a charming cow logo), RTM made me long for more tasks just so I could enter more information into the system. I spent hours clicking around the application, setting up new lists and task tags. In reviews of RTM, I'd read about this pitfall of its clean and thoughtful design: It can (and, in my case, did) lead to a severe case of organization as procrastination.

Minimalism: 9
Completeness: 10
Compatibility: 10
Total: 29 (out of 30)

Gmail
While I was adding RTM to Gmail, I discovered Google's task manager—one of the more recent offerings from the experimental Gmail Labs. Like all things Google, its design is extremely simple: just a box in the right-hand corner of your browser.

Immediately I began creating different lists ("New Birmingham Accounts" and "Book PR") and adding items. Switching between lists is an easy, two-click operation, and you can just drag-and-drop to move items around. You can also add short notes and due dates.

Best of all, whenever a new e-mail comes into your inbox, you can click "Add to Tasks," and it will show up immediately as a new to-do item. While certain other apps offered a similar feature, Gmail Tasks is the only program that lets you see your lists in the same browser page as your e-mail. With all my information in one place, I was—to my great amazement—able to start weaning myself off those once-crucial reminder e-mails and clear out my inbox. Just this one improvement—a first step toward that Zen-like state called "inbox zero"—has made me more productive (or at least feel that way). Chalk another one up for Google: Gmail Tasks is what works best for me.

Minimalism: 10
Completeness: 10
Compatibility: 10
Total: 30 (out of 30)