We were thrilled to be invited to Beijing as an international partner of Evernote China for the launch of their partner website, The Yinxiang Biji Trunk last week.

December 1st was a very exciting day both for Evenote and for Any To Do. Ken Gullicksen Evernote’s COO presented a keynote at the www.cyzone.cn conference to launch the Yinxiang Biji Trunk and to introduce Evernote China’s partner applications which are now showcased on the Trunk, including Any To Do!

Following the keynote, Evernote held a press event together with 5 of their partners which were showcased on the Trunk to introduce these to around 30 journalists from publications such as CNET, Harvard Business Review and 21cbh.

In a theatrical display from Evernote’s General Manager, Amy Gu, apps were pulled from Evernote’s Trunk and announced to the room full of journalists! Here is Any To Do’s placque.

After the conference we were able to speak in more detail about Any To Do with journalists from Tencent and ModermWeekly. They were very intrigued by our small gift which was a miniature hurl with the Any To Do Beaver logo. The Irish national game of hurling was new to the journalists and they were interested to hear that Founder, Anthony, played hurling to a national level a few years ago!

Last weekend marked our launch of Any To Do as an official partner of Evernote and Yinxiang Biji and we will be continuing to develop and support Any To Do to make our integration with Evernote richer in the coming year.

We would love to hear your stories about how you use Any To Do with Evernote & Yinxiang Biji! Post your comments below or email us at hello@anytodo.com.
 

We were delighted to be a part of the second annual Trunk Conference where lots of exciting announcements were made about Evernote’s plans for the coming year. Any To Do was showcased at the Idea Paint developer’s lounge alongside some awesome new apps including Kustom Note (kustomnote.com) and Uber Conference (uberconference.com) where we had a chance to demonstrate Any To Do to lots of Evernote enthusiasts. Thanks to you all for your great feedback!

During the keynote speech by Phil Libin, some exciting enhancements to Evernote were announced including:
 
- An all new Evernote Trunk! Evernote have updated their Trunk which showcases their partner apps to make it easier for users to find apps they love. They have categorised the apps into 6 categories and have updated the layout to be more user friendly. Check out Evernote’s new Trunk here.
 
- Evernote for Business . Yeah! I am sure this will excite lots of Evernote enthusiasts that Evernote will soon be launching a dedicated service for Business customers which will be fantastic for small and medium sized businesses and which Evernote themselves use to manage their fast growing business. More on this on another post soon.
 
- Do you love Moleskine notebooks? We do here at Keane and Able, and we were thrilled to hear that Moleskine and Evernote have teamed up to launch an Evernote Moleskine notebook! Using specially made stickers you can take a photo which will save directly into a specific Evernote notebook! More on the Evernote/Moleskine notebook in action coming soon…

The Evernote ambassadors were out in force at the Trunk Conference and hosted a number of sessions for Evernote users. Excitingly, the first Evernote Ambassador book, Integrate: Evernote written by Joshua Zerkel and Lindsey Holmes and which features Any To Do, was launched at the ETC with an e-book signing by Penultimate! You can get your copy of Integrate: Evernote here. Read all about the fantastic apps which integrate with Evernote. Any To Do is detailed on page 10.
 
 
And on to the more important details.. the delicious food and great after party The people of Evernote are renowned for their love of great food (it’s not a coincidence that one of their own apps is Evernote Food!) and the Trunk Conference lived up to all expectations. Aside from the amazing breakfast spread, lunch was served by the well know eatery, Delica in a bento box.. check out the super special sushi in some lucky attendee’s bento boxes! Before the after party kicked off, dinner arrived in the form of San Fran’s Food Trucks!

 
A concept that hasn’t reached the shores of Europe yet (hopefully will soon though!), Food Trucks are literally just that, yummy food made and delivered from a truck..take a look at the picture to get a better idea. The Curry Up ‘curry in a burrito’ was amazing!! The
Trunk Conference after party was kicked off by the excellent Beso Negro band, a mix of gypsy and jazz. And lastly.. to round off the food extravaganza were lots of sweet afters including delicious cupcakes!
 

Please note, in order to use this feature you will need to sync Any To Do with Evernote. It’s free to set up an Evernote account so if you don’t have one yet you can sign up here at www.evernote.com!

Scenario… you’re at your desk and think of something you need to remember.

Solution: Rather than reaching for your iPhone/iPad you can send an email with your To-Do that will go straight into Any To Do!. Your To-Do will go directly into the notebook and quadrant required.

Evernote provides all accounts with an email address, if you don’t know what your Evernote email address is, take a look in the Account Summary section in Settings

In the ‘To’ field of the email, add your Evernote email address.

In the ‘Subject’ field, write the To-Do title followed by the name of the Notebook/List you want the To-Do to be added to using an ‘@’ symbol to identify the Notebook/List, for example: ‘Remember to buy travel insurance @Vacation’. The To-Do ‘Remember to buy travel insurance’ will be added to your Notebook/List called ‘Vacation’.

In the ‘Subject’ field, add the tags for the quadrant which the To-Do should be added to using ‘#’s before each tag, for example: ‘#urgent #notimportant’ Remember to add the anytodo tag! #anytodo

Note: If you don’t add the ‘#’s your To-Do will be saved in the ‘Not Urgent’ ‘Not Important’ quadrant by default.

Lastly, if you want to add further detail to the To-Do, just add this to the main body of the email. Notes in the body of your email will be seen in the Notes field in Any To Do, for example ‘Compare single trip to annual insurance worldwide for trips to Japan and UK’.

Click send, sync Any To Do with Evernote and your To-Do will appear in your app, Simple!

For those of you who use Any To Do without syncing to Evernote, the Notes field function has not changed. However if you use Evernote to manage your To-Dos online and/or sync your iPhone and iPad Any To Do apps you will notice a change to the way the Notes field appears.

In order to preserve any formatting on Any To Do a new setting is now automatically set when you sign in to Evernote or when you update your app if you are synced with Evernote already. This setting defaults to your notes only being editable on Evernote and read-only on Any To Do. This setting ensures that any note formatting on your Notes in Evernote is preserved when you view and edit To-Dos from Any To Do.

However, if you would prefer to edit your To-Do notes from Any To Do as was previously possible, then simply navigate to the Evernote settings screen and switch ‘Enable To-Do note editing to ‘On’. Please note however that if you ‘Enable To-Do editing’ in Any To Do, any Notes which have formatted notes on Evernote and are edited on Any To Do will revert to plain text.

The new update on the Notes field is a workaround to ensure your Note formatting is preserved on Evernote for all you Evernote super users out there however we are working on a better solution for working with Notes on Evernote.

If you have any feedback, suggestions or comments we would love to hear from you!

So whose idea was this method of categorizing tasks?!

The method of categorizing tasks depending on their urgency or importance is attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and as such is commonly known as the Eisenhower Matrix or the Eisenhower Method (Wikipedia Link - http://j.mp/zSN4Jt)

President Eisenhower reportedly used this method of thinking to make critical decisions when he was a General during war time by asking himself 2 questions:

1. Is this task or question Urgent? – does it have time pressure?

2. Is this task or question Important? – how does this relate to your objectives?

By answering these two questions all tasks can be plotted on a 4 square Eisenhower Matrix.

Eisenhower’s famous quote “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important” perfectly sums up this way of thinking and planning.

This organizational method is now very popular around the world and is used by huge numbers of people to ensure they are focusing on the right things from their Eisenhower Matrix.

How does Any To Do fit in?
Any To Do has made it super simple to build the Eisenhower matrix into your day to day life to keep track of your priorities and ensure you focus on the important.

How does Any To Do help?

As an iPad and iPhone app, Any To Do is the perfect constant reminder that you need to make sure you always know what you need to work on.

Just click on your Any To Do app and check out those important and urgent tasks (or if you’re planning correctly, your important and not urgent tasks ) and bingo! – you’re immediately clear about what you need to start work on! What could be simpler?!

So, thank you President Eisenhower for leaving your legacy of your Eisenhower Matrix which is now known and used throughout the world as one of the most effective time management techniques to help you stay focused on the important.

If you’d like to check out some further reading, here are a few links that you can take a look at while having a cuppa.

Understanding the Eisenhower Matrix - http://www.infobarrel.com/Understanding_the_Eisenhower_Matrix

What is the Eisenhower Matrix? - http://timegt.com/2010/07/14/what-is-the-eisenhower-matrix/

The Eisenhower Method - http://thousandinsights.wordpress.com/articles/on-productivity/the-eisenhower-method/

Originator of the urgency/importance matrix – http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=180075

For those of you who missed our last blog, ‘To email or not to email ‘, I was discussing the potential productivity benefits from turning off the auto respond on my email and instead only checking emails at 12 noon and 4pm. A very different concept to most people’s (including my own!) constant checking of emails. You can read the full article here: (http://anytodo.com/2011/12/05/to-email-or-not-to-email/)

So, what are the learnings from last week’s exercise?

Here’s a summary:

1. Firstly, nothing terrible happened even though to start with I constantly worried that something would, thinking that somehow because I was un-contactable for all of a few hours that I would miss THE most important email of my life and also miss the opportunity to respond to it. This did not happen.

2. As I was unable to do the activity that I would usually do when I got to my desk in the morning ( i.e.: check my emails) I was forced to actually think instead of do. Rather than blindly replying to emails and fire fighting every small issue that had come my way since I last checked my emails I was put in the situation where, staring at a blank screen, I had to ask the question ‘What do I need to do today? What is Urgent and Important?’. I then had to decide what my priorities for today were, and using Any To Do on my iPad (of course!) I was able to make a clear list of what my priorities were for the day. With this list in front of me and with no constant distractions and interruptions I was able to tackle those tasks straight away.

3. The third thing that happened. It actually felt good. To my amazement, by 12pm when I clicked on send and receive for the first time that morning, I had got through a big chunk of my To-Do list, much bigger than I would ever have got through before or that I had expected to get through. I was being incredibly more productive in just a few hours by making one small change. I felt good about it, I felt in control of what I was doing rather than auto responding to any email than pinged into my inbox.

4. When my emails arrived all at once, I had the realisation that many of them were completely irrelevant, for example e-zines (that I should have unsubscribed to a long time ago and which I immediately deleted when I received them), emails from my bank/mobile phone company telling me my bill was now available etc etc. I could delete these all at once instead of one at a time when they arrived in my inbox. This ‘batching’ of tasks is another concept which Tim Ferris discusses in his book ‘The 4 hour Work Week’ where he talks about the concept of batching all your admin tasks, for example, paying all your bills in one go once a month, so that you save time doing these ‘non value-add’ but essential tasks. As I found, this works very well for batch deleting emails! Instead of all these irrelevant emails interrupting my day, I was able to select all and delete them all in one go – fantastic.

So, in summary, this week’s productivity exercise has been incredibly interesting and far more rewarding and productivity-increasing than I had imagined. By taking away the stress of these constant distractions I was able to really focus on the task in hand and get those important and urgent tasks done. I even managed to get to some of my important but not urgent tasks kicked off which had been on my To-Do list for longer than they should have been. Remembering that the important but not urgent tasks are the ones which are really going to get you closer to your goals, this was a real breakthrough.

So, goodbye auto send and receive emails! I’ll most definitely be continuing with this change .. I may even give the ‘once a day’ email checking a go. Go on, be brave, give it a go – it works!

But, have you ever considered how unproductive this is?!

Very easily an entire few hours can be consumed with responding to (probably not urgent not important) emails and requests from colleagues and friends rather than focusing on what the most important tasks of the day are.

Recently Atos, the French technology company, announced its plans to soon eradicate internal emails altogether within their company and replace these with collaborative and social media tools including an Atos Wiki, which allows all employees to communicate by contributing or modifying online content, and Office Communicator, the company’s online chat system which allows video conferencing, and file and application sharing. Atos has already reduced the number of internal emails by 20 percent in six months.

Thierry Breton has not sent an email in the three years since he became chairman and CEO of Atos in November 2008.
He says “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in February. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”

It is an interesting concept and one which Time Ferriss elaborates on in his bestselling book ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’.

Tim recommends reducing the number of times you check email to twice a day initially, at 12 noon and 4pm, thus ensuring that you capture the majority of important mails and respond to those if necessary (noting that often the issue will already be resolved by the time he checks the email). An auto responder informs colleagues at what times he will be checking his emails. Twice a day should then be stretched to once and day. Tim Ferriss apparently only checks his emails once a week and claims that there has never been an issue which was a result of this reduction of email checking. He says problems seem to disappear without you as the bottleneck and often nothing is ever that urgent.

It is quite easy to agree with both Thierry and Tim as the constant interruption of emails on Outlook bing in front of me and that annoying little window appears at the bottom of my screen in its own distracting way. So I’m going to take a leap of faith and give it a go – I’m going to turn my emails OFF and only check them at 12 noon and 4pm. I think the hardest part is going to be my withdrawal symptoms from not being constantly ‘online’ but I am going to give it a go for one week and track how my productivity fairs. I have the feeling I’m going to get a lot more done.. but check back in a week’s time and I’ll let you know how I get on!

Why don’t you give it a go too and let me know how survive?! I’ll post your interesting stories here next week, just drop me an email at hello@anytodo.com.

Good luck!

The answer is surprisingly ‘Yes’.

Let me explain how..

Achieving your goals first needs to be preceded with one important step – Deciding what those goals are. I know this might seem ridiculously simple as to not even bother noting, however surprisingly, this first step is often one which is missed out and which is key to the whole ‘Achieving your goals’ process – you need to know what those goals are before you can even begin to plan how to achieve them!

One of my favourite quotes I came across recently is ‘Goals without actions are just Dreams’

I’ll repeat that as I think it’s worthy of repeating ‘Goals without actions are just Dreams’

It’s a simple statement but one that I think hits home. So often people dream about owning a beautiful house or owning their own company or running a marathon. But if you have no actions to get yourself closer to those dreams, that is how they will stay – as Dreams.

On the other hand however, if you start to plan how you might make that dream a reality, even baby steps at a time, ( like start walking to work to going for a run at the weekend….(a few more actions)..to signing up to the New York Marathon … you get the picture!), then those dreams can start to become goals and you can focus your time and energy on taking those actions seriously so that you can own that beautiful house and can start that company.

So how does Any To Do fit in?

Time management is key to focusing your time and energy on those goals. No one has the time to do everything, your time always need to be prioritized, and some things get pushed to the side when everyday crises happen. That’s life. But in order to prevent those actions towards your goals being pushed to one side (they are your goals after all so they are Important!) it’s necessary to prioritise all those To-Dos in your life and make sure that you get those important ones done first so that if push comes to shove you’ve already got the important ones out of the way and the unimportant ones can wait.

And this is how Any To Do fits in. With Any To Do you can prioritize all those To-Dos, the personal ones, the business ones, the ‘any other’ type ones and you know exactly in one quick glance what you need to get on with first. You can start first on those important To-Dos that are the actions which will bring you closer to your goals, so you make sure that instead of taking the DVD back to the store and replying to all those emails you first make a start on that Market research you’ve been putting off which will tell you if that business idea you have might just work…

The effects are truly amazing. Give it a go and see how you get on.

Because remember, ‘Goals without actions are just Dreams’

We have now configured Evernote sync to sync unlimited numbers of To-Dos. We had never imagined that users would want to sync hundreds of To-Dos but it is fantastic to see that Any To Do users are utilizing the application for professional and project management purposes! We are going to open a post on the ‘Ideas Section’ of Get Satisfaction where users can add their own posts to tell everyone how they use Any To Do. This will also help us to add great new capabilities to Any To Do.

Another great new feature is that users can now sync their To-Do Notes from Evernote to Any To Do and subsequently sync their To-Do Notes between their iPhone and iPad!

A further capability which users have requested and which has now been added is the syncing of completed To-Dos between the iPhone, iPad and Evernote so completed To-Dos are now ticked as complete on both your iPhone, iPad and Evernote account! (both Basic and Premium)

We hope the improvements will make you even more productive!

p.s. Look out more fantastic improvements very soon!

From the initial thought of ‘wouldn’t it be a clever idea to be able to do your lists on an iPhone app’ to the launch of Any To Do on the app store on Wednesday 14th September 2011, it’s been a roller coaster ride and a half. There’s been many late nights, many cups of tea, a serious number of skype calls (thank you Skype) and I have no idea how many emails between all the people involved in Any To Do to get it to be the great app that it is.

The simplest of things such as ‘where do you put the New To-Do’ button?’ to ‘What colours should we use?’ (hope you like our chosen colour teal btw, we’d never heard of the colour teal before now either) to the brainwave idea to use a Beaver for our app icon (the most organised and precise animal in the animal kingdom – genius!) – there have been so so many things to think about, it’s crazy. But we kept going, and I’m very glad we did. We’ve had amazing feedback from our users since we launched Any To Do and we’re thrilled that you guys are loving the app as much as we do.

We’ve also had a little help from our friends, especially on the translation of the app – thanks Stefano for your excellent Italian translation and Ruth for your perfect Spanish. One of our users has even started the translation of the app into German – thanks Momo! More languages will be on their way soon…so watch this space.

Suggestions and feedback has come flooding in and we’re making sure all of these get considered for future updates. Take a look at a few of our user’s comments on our press page.