This article was published on June 8, 2011

Sandglaz: Fully customized to-do lists in your browser


Sandglaz: Fully customized to-do lists in your browser

I’m terrible about trying to use apps to manage my time. Normally everything I try gets about a day of use and then I give up on it. It’s either too invasive, too demanding or otherwise just ineffective because of limitations. When I got sent the pitch for Sandglaz I didn’t think that things would be any different. I was pleasantly surprised.

First off, the Sandglaz team understands that everybody works a little bit differently. According to Nada Aldahleh from the team:

We recognize that most people don’t manage their time down to the minute, to the hour or even to the day. On the contrary, most of us know to some degree what we want to do this week, and to a much lesser degree what we want to do in a month or a year. Of course we all have appointments and meetings with specific times, but most of our work does not obey a strict schedule.

It’s with that fact in mind that the Sandglaz interface works differently. It’s a web-based app that you can sign up for or sign in with your Google account. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see a tutorial with 4 boxes:

By default, those 4 boxes are broken by important versus unimportant and now versus later. Of course, if you have a system that works better for you, you can label them however you want. You can also add more boxes if you need them, up to 9 in a 3 by 3 grid.

Checkboxes strike out completed items, and you can drag and drop an item from one box to another. If you want to delete something, just select it and erase the text. Adding a new task takes nothing more than just clicking in an empty area. If you need to set a specific date or time, there’s an arrow that appears by all tasks when you have them highlighted so that you can do just that.

It’s a bit more in depth than what we saw in Strike, and probably friendlier than any interface that we’ve used before. The team has put some heavy thought into the mobile version of the site, too, giving a touch-friendly interface that works equally as well as the desktop browser version.

In short, the entire thing is set up to be akin to something you’d build yourself, because you practically can. It’s become a pinned Chrome tab for me for the past couple of days, and I wanted to make sure that you knew about it. The site is still in beta, but it is public. So go sign up and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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