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The Perfect List
My wife and I are very consistent in managing miscellaneous responsibilities around the house but the one area where we’re both fairly uneven with is the food shopping.
We keep a nice yellow notepad in the kitchen and casually jot down items that we intend on purchasing in due course but when it comes to either of us making that trip to the supermarket, neither of us have the infamous list with us, so we both leave behind items that we each wanted. Needless to say we’re not in sync all the time in that aspect.
I figured the commercials never lie and as the minimalistic and organizational freak that I am, I naturally ventured to find a iPhone App that took the edge off this dilemma but that accomplished it in a very straightforward, simple-list-making, uncluttered interface kinda way.
When I refer to “simple-list-making”, I’m talking about literally elementary stuff. If I’m making a list of responsibilities or items, it should automatically be assumed it’s important to me, hence me making one. I don’t care for apps that offer ability to set priorities, include additional task notes or create sub-tasks because the excessive features just discourages usage.
The task management category in the App Store in itself is a bursting one, so having had the patience to evaluate quite a few promising and lackluster ones, I ultimately grew heavily impressed with Zenbe Lists.
Managing the process
Right off the bat when launching the app, you’re given the option to establish categories for any list you create so for example my initial reaction at the moment was to create a Shopping List and inside that I simply started entering all the food products we needed. Zenbe List also offers a web-based system accompanied with nifty Ajax effects that’s free to setup, so anything else I thought of along the way while surfing the web, I immediately had access to input more information like there was no tomorrow and it updated right away.
You can also manage multiple lists. In addition to the Shopping List, I created several others that include Blog Ideas, Work Related, Errands and Interesting which is for cool software or gadgets that I have intentions in researching more. Each list is collapsable for easy navigation. You can also drag and drop list items to re-arrange them, mark items as completed, or simply delete them.
Get to the point
Ok, so now you know about the app but how does this solve my initial dilemma you ask? The thing that really makes this a valuable tool is in the ability it has for you to share any list you create and by sharing I don’t mean just for other people to view it but for them to have full access in adding or subtracting task from it.
Naturally the Shopping List I created from my end, I shared it with my wife. She received an email notification about its existence and launched it on her iPhone. So now if one day she suddenly gets an urge to stock up on bacon, all she has to do is input that item into the Shopping List we’re sharing and hit that Sync button in the app so that both our iPhones and the Zebe account on the web are updated.
For what I wanted to accomplish, Zenbe Lists has been an excellent solution and of continual use with one big feature setting it apart from the rest of the apps I tried and that’s its amazing ability to share and sync your task list over the air. So now launching Zenbe List while food shopping has become quite a habitual process for checking on those last minute items my wife may have added.
