Have you thought about how most of us manage our daily to-do lists? Answer the following question honestly and the results may surprise you.

1. How do you manage your own to-do list?
2. How do you request/assign tasks to others?
3. How do you see what is already on your collegues’ to-do list?
4. How do you get notified when a task that you are waiting on is completed?

According to our not so scientific poll, most people manage their own to-do list by using a text editor like Notepad. Requesting and assigning tasks to others typically happens over email, and there is no way to look at what is on other collegues’ to-do lists or follow and be automatically notified when a task’s status changes.

This surprised us, so we dug a bit deeper into it and sure enough, no main-stream collaboration tools we use within businesses today support effective management of things as basic as a to-do list. Microsoft outlook and Lotus notes provides basic self task management, but try sharing tasks with colleagues or learn what is already on a colleague’s task list and you are stumped!  There is no concept of a collaborative to-do list and simple task life-cycle flow in these tool-sets; which makes sense, as these tool-sets were never designed for teams, specifically teams spread across geographies.

A collaborative to-do list is a  personal to-do list that you and your coworkers can easily access, add tasks to, assign simple due dates (like today, tommorow, sometime this week), edit/comment/reassign and be notified when task status is changed. This simple collaborative to-do list attached to a project along with a project to-do list pool becomes even more powerful as anyone in the team can pick up tasks from this pool and assign it to themselves or one of the project members.

MangoApps’s collaborative to-do list allows you to do all the above from a simple, intuitive interface, whether you are using the MangoApps web interface, desktop application or MangoApps mobile clients. MangoApps task updates are fully integrated with the MangoApps feeds engine so that colleagues interested in the status of a task can get updated in real-time without the need for a status meeting or a status email. MangoApps tasks enable true collaboration on day to day tasks, while building a cohesive, responsible and transparent team and company culture. Think of it as the ultimate shared to-do list.  Click here to learn all about MangoSpring’s collaborative to-do list.

It’s one thing to theorize about the best way to manage tasks and quite another to make it part of everyday workflow in real-life and improve daily productivity.  We are always looking for ways to improve the work flow and bring collaboration2.0 to everyday things we do. Let us know what you think of collaborative to-do list in MangoApps and how we can make it even more useful.