43 Folders is a great way of keeping track of the things you need to do. You simply have 31 numbered folders – one for each day of the current month, plus 12 other folders for the months of the year. The numbered folders are used for the upcoming 31 days’ work.

To use 43 Folders you drop things into the respective date that you have to do something and at the start of each day you look in the current date’s folder and pick up the things to do.

Now, I’m a getting a little lazy keeping up to date. When I’m particularly busy, my 43 Folders don’t get reviewed regularly. So I decided to use Backpack to help me along:

I have one page for each of the following 31 days. For the purpose of 43 Folders, the useful content of each page is separated into a freeform body, a list (essentially a todo list), and any number of notes.

Using the API, I’ve written a simple web application that keeps these 43 Folders up to date. It does this by:

• Rolling over the body text of previous days’ to today’s page;
• Rolling over incomplete todos to today’s page;
• Rolling over the notes to today’s page;
• Creating appropriate new pages to ensure I’m still 31 days ahead.

Simple session management ensures that this housekeeping is only done once per day, and after the housekeeping is done I get redirected to today’s page. This web application is now my home page.

Each page of Backpack shows a list of all the pages you have, listed alphabetically, so the titles of these 43 Folders pages are like this: 2005-08-26, Friday (Aug) which means I can easily navigate to other days.

Next steps:

• Add Month pages and rollover their content into today’s page
• Provide an archive for completed todos

There’s obviously other scope: special annotations to the titles of todos or notes could mean certain things, and there’s great potential for integration with Basecamp once it’s API is published.