Universal To-Do List Data Portability Format

Last night I was putting some brain power into finding ways to better collaborate with clients, team members, and anyone else is do tasks for.

I’ve recently started to use Things, which I’ve fallen in love with, but there’s currently no way for others to add to my list. Basecamp, and Backpack allow for shared to-do lists, but they don’t let me organize all my to-dos in one master list in the way that I want to digest them.

We have syndication for blogs (rss), calendars (ics), etc. but, as far as I know, there’s no universal format for porting to-do lists from one application to another.

WHY NOT!?

If there were, anyone could make me a to-do list, send me the subscription link, and I could pull it into the to-do list reader of my choice (Things). No more entering and re-entering to-dos.

I really don’t see it even being that complicated. This is stripped down a bit of course, but a to-do feed could look something like this:

<list title="My To-Do List">

	<item>
		<status>incomplete</status></span>
		<description>Mail out invitations</description>
	</item>
	<item>
		<status>incomplete</status>
		<description>Throw killer party</description>

	</item>
	<item>
		<status>complete</status>
		<description>Make invitations</description>
	</item>
</list>

If anyone’s interested I say we look into this further and solve our to-do list woes.

Tags: Data, formats, portability