Tame your task list with Wunderlist, a free cross-platform organiser

What You’ll Need:

>> Wunderlist
>> 30 Minutes

Difficulty: Easy

We lead such hectic lives that it’s all too easy to forget an important job until it’s too late. Whether it’s picking up the kids’ new school uniforms, booking the dog into kennels or checking your car insurance, almost every job has a due date and a priority. Each of these little tasks contributes to a much bigger chore: keeping them all in order.

The Mac is well endowed when it comes to task managers, with Things and The Hit List having dominated the platform. But newcomer Wunderlist looks set to make serious inroads thanks to three top features.

Wunderlist helps keep things in perspective, with deadlines and so on.

First, Wunderlist works across all popular platforms. We’ll be using the Mac app here, but there are matching releases for Windows-based PCs, the iPhone, iPad and Android devices. So, if you learn how to use it on one platform you’ll know what to do wherever else you encounter it.

Second, by passing your data across the developer’s servers, each client can update all of the others as long as they’re all logged in to the same account. So, if you remember a job while waiting for the train you can quickly tap it into your iPhone, safe in the knowledge that by the time you get home or to work it’ll be waiting on your Mac.

Third, and best of all, each of these handy apps is free – and so is the app-to-app synchronisation. Rival taskmaster Things also synchronises your desktop and iPhone or iPad versions for free, but only over your local network, while The Hit List extends this to over-the-internet syncing with its iPhone app, but as a premium service charged on a monthly or annual basis.

Here we’ll show you how to sign up for a free Wunderlist account and use the desktop app to create a list of tasks, setting a deadline where appropriate and prioritising jobs.

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Set up and use Wunderlist

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  1. Download and Register

  Wunderlist is a free download from the Mac App Store. Click Register and enter an email address and password of choice. You use these same credentials to log in to the client or the online edition at wunderlist.com.

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  2. Create a List

  Wunderlist sets up a catch-all list for all of your jobs (called Inbox). Create a new one by clicking the Add list button at the foot of the sidebar and give it an appropriate name – ours is ‘Holiday’. The number to the right indicates how many incomplete tasks it contains.

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  3, Add Your First Tasks

  Click the input box in the app’s main body and type a headline for your task. You don’t need to enter too many details here as we’ll go on to add short notes later, so just brain-dump every task you can think of.

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  4. Explain Yourself

  Hover your mouse above a task and three icons will pop up at the end of its bar. Click the notepad icon to add further notes for tasks that need them. Click Save and Close to add the notes to the task’s record and its entry in the list of jobs will be stamped by the note icon.

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  5. Set Some Deadlines

  Hover over another task and click the clock icon to choose a deadline date. Wunderlist will email you on that morning to remind you what needs doing. You can also set deadlines at the point when you create your tasks by clicking the clock to the left of the input box.

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  6. Prioritise Important Jobs

  Click the star on the left of each task to mark it as important. It’ll gain a red flag and move to the top of the list. To promote an already flagged task back to the top of the list after another one has pushed it lower, unflag and re-flag it to shoot it back into the first slot.

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  7. Add a Task by Email

  Send an email from the address you registered your account with to me@wunder list.com. Put the list to which you’d like to add your task in the subject line and the title of the task in the email. Add several tasks to the list by including them on separate lines within the email.

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  8. Tick Off a Task

  Once you’ve completed a task, click the box to the left of it to mark it as finished and it’ll move down into a list of recently done jobs. These will be retired over time, but you can refer back to them by clicking the tick on the toolbar footer.

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  Quick Tip

  Download the iPhone or iPad apps and log in with your Wunderlist credentials to sync tasks across devices. If they don’t seem to be updating, check that you have Wi-Fi or 3G coverage and use the toolbar’s synchronise button to force a check.

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