Empowered Productivity

I used Outlook to run my life for almost a decade, and the majority of the training I do is still using Outlook as the support tool.  I am a fan and think it is a very powerful PIM (personal information manager) that can easily handle the complexity of your life.  The one shortcoming is if you need to share calendars or other information, you need to be running an Exchange server and this doesn’t make sense for everyone (however you can sync your Outlook calendar with Google and share it that way).

A question I get a lot is how to sync Tasks in Outlook with an iPhone.  I found an article online with detailed instructions for doing this and got permission to repost it here.  It comes from Daniel B. Curran’s excellent how-to blog.  Below are his instructions.  I hope this helps.  If you try this and run into any snags, I’d love to hear about it.  And incidentally, I’m using To-Do (the app he mentions) to sync Tasks with iCal and I am VERY happy with it – well worth the $10 in my opinion.  You can read about my experience with that here.)

Here is Daniel’s Post:

Let’s start with how you can sync your Microsoft Outlook Tasks to your iPhone for free.

I have read several articles about how to do this but I found the process to be convoluted. Let me make it very simple.

Step 1. Set up a free account at Toodledo.com The direct link for a new account is right here.

That should have taken you about 15 seconds. Let’s move on to step 2.

Step 2. Close Outlook, download Chromatic Dragon’s Toodledo Sync Application and install it.

Almost done! The sync application will want your Toodledo ID number. Leave it open on the tab that wants the ID number.

Step 3. Log into Toodledo and from the menu on the left select Account Settings. On that page you will see your Unique ID, simply copy and paste it into the sync program that you left open.

On the Synchronization tab you can change your Automatic Synchronization to whatever works for you. I don’t add tasks very often so once every 60 minutes is fine for me. To close the Options window select File -> Close. You will see a green checkmark icon in your tool tray. Right click it and hit Manual Sync.

Outlook is now synchronized to ToodleDo.

Ready for the iPhone part?

Ok, 2 ways to do this. The Free Way and the $10.00 way.

The free way? Toodledo now has an iPhone optimized version of their powerful, easy to use task manager. Just point your iPhone webbrowser to http://www.toodledo.com/slim and book mark it to your iPhone Home Screen. (Hit the + and select Home Screen, I renamed mine to “Tasks”)

Now you have the tasks that were in Outlook right there on Your iPhone screen!

Make a change on your iPhone and it will sync back to Outlook!

There is also a third party iPhone / iPod touch application that will synchronize with Toodledo and allow you to work offline. This application is called Todo and is available from Appigo on the iTunes App Store for about $10 but to be honest I don’t see the advantage of paying for it.

Do this for me, use the free way I described. I have the Todo software and will write another post later about the differences and let you know if it’s worth the $10.

UPDATE: ToodleDo has released an application to the iTunes store for $3.99 Check out Sync Tasks: ToodleDo Free Link vs. the ToDo $10 application.