Lists are an amazing organizational tool because they produce no friction.  Write a word on a piece of paper and you have a list.  Adding and removing items is just as easy.  This is important because organizational tools must be accessed asynchronously with everyday life.  Life being as busy at it is, organizational steps that are even slightly troublesome to carry out will often go undone.

How do you make a better organizational tool than a list?  Adding features generally adds friction, and since the list is already fully functional,  the first trade-off made to add a single feature is probably not worth it.  Unless you do it exactly right.

This is why until lately I’ve simply used text files for my lists.  There are tons of applications out there for keeping organized, but none of them seem to offer features that balance out the additional effort to use them. Backpack from 37signals outdoes the text file.  The software is expressive, flexible, and simple.  Through legendary attention to detail, sweating the small stuff, and resisting the urge to unnecessarily complicate, their software matches the usefulness of the mighty text file.

This software has been around for awhile, though, and until now I have never used it regularly.  What changed?  Now, after all the work put into being as good as a text file, now there is a way in which it is better: access on my iPhone via Satchel.  Satchel is dead simple, nicely organized, and easy to use.  Now that I can access my lists from more places than I could with a plain text file, I have reason to change to Backpack.

Backpack has a free version, and Satchel is $9.99 on the iPhone app store.  Give them a try!