Put grocery shopping app on your list

Sometimes, it seems like my life is one long to-do list.

I'm sure some of you felt the same way during the holidays. We wrote lists of gifts to buy and groceries for parties. We were bombarded with lists, as in "worst movies of the decade" or "top 10 food trends for 2010."

And now, after the holidays, we're writing lists of New Year's resolutions.

Well, one of my resolutions is to be more organized, so I'm playing with outofeggs.com.

Out of Eggs, a free tool created by Fresno Web developer Phil Derksen, is billed as "the simplest way to create and print grocery lists."

Derksen developed it because he wanted to move beyond paper lists. "Nothing online and no software did it exactly the way I wanted," he says. "I tried out quite a few, and a lot of them had only parts of what I wanted."

His concept: Customize your list according to where you shop.

For example, let's take the Trader Joe's at Willow and Nees avenues. The template for this list (available online) is divided into categories. It begins with dairy, pasta, baking goods and condiments, then ends with vegetables and fruits.

Anyone who's been to that Trader Joe's knows this list is like a tour of the store. Start at the north end (the dairy section) and work your way through the aisles to the south end (the produce section) and you can buy groceries in an orderly fashion.

This is light years beyond scribbles on a sheet of paper. Think about it: How many times have you picked up milk, moved to another part of the store, then had to go back to the dairy section because you didn't see yogurt until the end of your list?

If this sounds like you, don't fret. According to grocerylists.org, a gallery of discarded grocery lists, there's a lot of disorganized scribbling out there.

Even if you don't shop at a single store, it's still useful to divide your groceries by category. I use the system detailed by Ina Garten in her cookbook "Barefoot Contessa at Home," (Clarkson Potter, $35).

She divides her list into dairy items, shelf goods, meat and fish, produce, freezer and miscellaneous. She also offers this tip: write down the quantities you need. That way, you won't buy an 8-ounce bottle of olive oil if you really need 12 ounces.

I'm still trying to adapt this method to the Out of Eggs model, which works best if your diet doesn't change much. If you always need sliced bread and orange juice, just save them to your list so you won't have to write them down. And if you know you'll never buy more than seven types of fruits and vegetables at a time, leave seven blank lines on your list.

Because of my job, my grocery lists vary greatly. Sometimes, I need lots of fresh produce -- far more than seven lines' worth. And because I eat such a diverse diet, my staples are limited to pita bread and unsweetened iced tea.

But Out of Eggs is useful for at least one of my lists: the items I always need for vacations, such as sunglasses, cell- phone charger, eye drops for contact lenses and travel pillows.

That's useful information for Derksen, who's looking for more feedback. If you use Out of Eggs, drop him a line at the Web site. Depending on your input, he'll design more features.