Best Todo List App for Small Businesses

Organize and assign todo tasks for yourself or employees at your business. Turnboards optimizes for fast item creation - no popups, redundant pages, or confirmation dialogs. Everything can be done from an action panel that slides up on the workspace. You can create items, edit them, delete, assign to people - all without leaving the workspace.

Why was it Built?
Designing a todo list that works for individuals and small business owners without being cumbersome or time consuming is a hard task. I have a lot of differnent projects in my personal life - I build apps; I'm currently building an off road motorcycle from scratch with tubing and other raw materials, and I'm thinking about building a cargo camper conversion. I needed a way to keep track of all the tasks associated with each of these projects. I write them down as I think of them. I used to use Notepad on my iphone, but there's not real way to organize by tasks on there and items just stick around when you check them off. It's not designed for this.

As you know, there's a plethora of apps that help track todos for projects. It's called project management software. Just type that into google, and you will be quickly overwhelmed. Atlassian, for example, is a billion dollar company, and their flagship product is Jira - a project management suite. Lots of other options exist like ClickUp, Asana, Basecamp just to name a few. For me, the problem with all of these products is that they are aimed at busineses - that's how they make their money. Teams need robust software to track and assign complex work among team members, QA, and other parties.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

I'm not a big company - I'm just a guy with a few projects. Me trying to use Jira or Asana to build my motorcycle is like using a sledgehammer to kill an ant. I would spend more time just entering my tasks into Jira than I would actually doing the tasks themselves. I needed something that I could write on just like Notepad but also had all the basic project management functionality. Turnboards is designed to fill this need - it requires no learning curve, and you can get started immediately.

Action Panel

Just slide up, and you can do everything without leaving the workspace. Turnboards reduces the amount of screens, buttons, and confirmations you have to deal with. It optimizes for the fewest number of taps, swipes, and user "Actions" so you can spend less time on the app and more time being productive.

Create and item
Delete an item
Assign an item to yourself, an employee, or co-worker
Do everything without leaving the workspace!

This action panel and the focus on reducing screens is in response to other apps and the multitude of options and things you have to wade through just to create an item or do basic things. Turnboards wants to get rid of all that fluff and make it as simple as writing on a piece of paper.

Workspace

Right now you have three columns as you can see in the screenshot:

Backlog - You would add items to an employees backlog and then he or she will move it up into active. You can also add items for yourself here and move them up when needed.
Active - What you are currently working on - you will spend most of your time here.
Complete - After checking something off in active, it moves to complete. You don't spend much time here unless you are a manager checking in on an employee. Things to into complete, and you don't look at them again.

Minimalist Todo App

If I'm making a todo list for myself, I typically just stay in the active tab all the time. You want as few sections here as possible - and this this get's back to the design philosophy of Turnboards. It tries to reduce options down to the bare minimum. I barely use all thee sections, and I think any more than this would be redundant.

The app wants you to be creating and checking off items as fast as possible, and you can do that most efficiently with fewer tabs. If I come up with a better way to do this, I may implement it. Your feedback is also important because this is the main section of Turnboards. The goal is to keep it as functional as possible. We don't want to go the router of other apps where they build every suggestion, and it becomes bloated with feature that users don't even know about.

Assign Tasks to yourself or your employees

Assigning work can be done at the Board level or at the item level, and this lets your employees set their own filters so they only see tasks in their workspace or board list that they are assigned to. If you have a lot of boards or a lot of items, this become super helpful.

The app will remember your filters. So if you choose yourself, everything will be scoped only to what is assigned to you from that point forward unless you change it. We user permanent storage on the device so that even after closing and re-opening the app, it still remembers everything. This saves time and frustration - it's designed to just work with as little input from you.

Employees can add tasks

Turnboards tries to be as open as possible - everybody can do pretty much anything. Employees that work at small businesses wear lots of hats - they do lots of different things and have lots of responsibilities. In my cases they manage themselves and the businesses doesn't have enough resources to micromanage.
That's why Turnboards is designed to be an open platform - meaning everyone in your organization can do most things in the app. Employees can create and assign tasks to themselves or others without any cumbersome rules.

I want it to function somewhat like and open source project where all the basic functionality is there without all the bells and whistles - if that makes sense. Too much customization and bloat in software is not what Turnboards is about. You're doing simple things - creating todo items and assigning them to employees or yourself. Let's not make it more complicated than that!

More features coming soon

Assigning tasks is arguably the main functionality that small businesses need, and more features are coming soon. Additionally visibility into who is assigned what tasks is needed, and I'm working ways to make that happen. But I want to keep this app as streamlined as possible and not add the bloat that you find in other apps.

We are currently looking for feedback on the work assignment feature. Here are some question we'd like to hear from you on:

Is it easy to add users to your organization and then assign them tasks?
Is the employee workspace aways remembering tasks correctly?
Are your employees able to see what's assigned to them without having to unselect themselves?
Are managers able to see what's being done?