Nozbe Initial Reactions, and an easy Email Template

I tried and started using Nozbe today, after playing around with it a bit yesterday. So far, I like it enough to pay the $7 for my first month, and give it a go. If it works well, I might have found myself a new ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) compatible application.

The first thing I needed to do was get everything out of my “old” system, and into Nozbe. After hunting around for a while, I couldn’t find anything in the application that resembled an import feature. So, I decided to make my own quick and dirty one that leveraged Nozbe’s, very flexible, email inbox. You can email tasks to yourself using a simple, plain text format that lets you specify a bunch of parameters. I copied the list of supported parameters below from the Nozbe blog.

1. Name of your action
2. D – stands for “Date”
3. T – stands for “Time needed”
4. @ – stands for the context
5. P – stands for the project
6. N – is to mark this as my “Next Action”

There was a catch, though. I had to import more than 100 tasks, and typing (even copying/pasting) them into an email one at a time would be very time consuming. Since I love Microsoft Excel, I exported my task list from Outlook, and made myself a quick, Excel template to massage the tasks into the right format.

Here’s my Super-Simple, Nozbe To Do List Converter Template. Basically, you enter your action items in column C, and fill out the other parameters as you wish for each action. The formula in each row crunches everything into a Nozbe compatible format. You just copy column A, paste it into an email, and send it to your Nobe Inbox—pretty simple.

It just saved me a few hours. Let me know if it works for you, too.