Many of you Zoho users might be using Zoho Planner to keep a note of your to-dos. Let's see how to go about from scratch creating to-do lists.

First would be to translate all those things to be done that you have on your mind as a list of to-dos in Zoho Planner. Here's what mine looks like.

To better organize the above list, let me move the personal to-dos out to another list.

Let's now put the more immediate to-dos first.

And to give extra importance to the must-do items, let's mark them in bold (Zoho Planner allows text to be formatted).

And the last item in the list is one which would require more than one day of work. Let's put a due date and set a reminder so that you don't lose track of it.

There, hope you like it better now :) As you can see, you can prioritize your to-dos in various ways using Zoho Planner.

• Have separate lists for official and personal tasks
• Re-order the list so that the urgent ones are at the top
• Mark the important to-dos in bold
• Set due dates and reminders for tasks that take more than one day to complete

Do you have any tips of how to organize to-dos? Please share them in the comments.

Zoho Planner is undergoing an infrastructure upgrade on Saturday, December 8, 2007 between 17:30 PST and 22:30 PST (5 hours). During this time, access to your Zoho Planner accounts will not be available and the reminder emails will be delayed. We apologize for any inconvenience that this might cause.

Matthew Moran at ITTtoolbox finds Zoho Planner so useful that he first had a blog post titled, "The Joy of ZOHO Planner - shared todo lists, tasks, and collaboration...". He then followed it up with a cool video showing how he uses Zoho Planner. From his post,

I have also been playing around a lot with ZOHO's suite of applications. I'll be covering these in more detail over the next few weeks. Suffice to say, their documents are more full-featured and have a better interface than google - hands down.

Zoho Planner allows us [Matt & his wife Laura] to have our own tasks page or pages. We can then share a page or pages of tasks with someone else - giving them read only or read/write access to the page.

I setup a page called Laura's Shared Tasks and one called Matt's Shared Tasks. I gave Laura read/write access to both.

Laura can then add tasks, appointments, and notes to my page and to her page. I can see them, I can add tasks, and I can add notes. It does a couple of things. First, she and I both have a place to add tasks to the other person - and notes with greater detail if needed.

Second, we can see the tasks we've added in context of other tasks and appointments they (the other person) has due. It helps us know two things - one that the other person has the tasks on their list and two that our tasks to them are not the only things they must do.

And here is Matt's nice video where he explains Zoho in general followed by a tutorial on how he emails tasks (to-dos) & notes to his Zoho Planner account.

Thanks, Matt! Now, to the readers of this blog - do tell us how you are using Zoho Planner.

With the latest Zoho Planner update, you can now chat to each of your shared users. On clicking a page you can see the list of shared users with status (either online/offline). Now you can chat with the person who is available for chat.

We have also added RSS feeds for your shared pages. You can find this feature in your planner settings page. Subscribe to the RSS feeds and get notified on the changes done by the shared users in your page.

Do give a try and send your feedbacks to feedback at zohoplanner dot com.

We recently announced the availability of REST APIs for Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show. Today, we have added REST API for Zoho Planner as well. The functionality & working of this API is similar to those of Writer/Sheet/Show. The Zoho Planner API allows you to get, create, update ToDo lists and do a lot more as well, all from inside your web application. Check out the new Zoho Planner API. If you need help in building a mashup using our API, do write to us at feedback(at)zohoplanner.com.

Zoho Planner offers some formatting options. You can put these options to good use while making your To-Dos lists and Notes. Say for example, you can use Bold text for highlighting a particular To Do to convey that it is more important to you than others.

The help page for knowing the various formatting options can be accessed by clicking on the 'Text Formatting' link at the bottom-left of your Zoho Planner page. Also, this Zoho Wiki page helps illustrate the various options as well.

One common question we receive from our Zoho Planner users,

It is difficult for me to see my to-dos for the day as my to-dos are typically present across multiple pages. How can I view them all in a single page?

You can actually see your to-dos across pages applying some pre-built filters that Zoho Planner offers. On the left panel, click on "To do's overview" -> "All my to do's". In the page that opens, on the top-right you will see a combo box. Choose the appropriate option there and this will list all your to-dos across pages.

Bonus tip : For making an offline copy of your to-dos, use your browser's 'Print' option for printing the page.

Here's one oft repeated feedback mail that we receive from Zoho Planner users :

I keep getting a reminder mail from Zoho Planner though the Appointment (or Task or Reminder) has long passed. How can I stop this?

Well, Zoho Planner offers recurring reminder options for your 'To Dos', 'Appointments' and 'Reminders'. Screenshots below of the options offered.

Though we set the reminder option to 'once' by default, users tend to set it to 'every n hours' or 'every n days'. Hence they end up getting the reminder emails repeatedly at their set frequency. So, if you don't want to get bombarded with the same reminder email(s) from Zoho Planner again and again, please exercise caution when setting your reminder option!

Login to your Zoho Planner account, revisit the To Dos / Reminders / Appointments sections of your Zoho Planner pages and edit/delete them as the case may be.

UPDATE : Stopping the reminder has been made easier. Each reminder email you receive will have a unique URL (HTML link) in it. Clicking on it will stop the reminder (you will see a message "The recurring reminder has been stopped" once you click on the URL, when logged in to Zoho Planner)