Focus on yourself first (personal and business aspects). That has more long term value, will contribute to your side of the collaboration improving, and puts you in a better position to scale to-dos.
Read GTD. It will inspire you and provide a path to success, walking you through creating meaningful todo lists. Many become devout followers, but for me just the basics and patterns were great to build on. There are concepts similar to the 'backlog' from scrum/XP, where you add a placeholder for every idea or task even very large ones, but only flesh out and break down into actionable items the near term / high value items.
Don't focus on tools, pen and paper are adequate, anything else is gravy. I use a location aware reminder app for short term/scheduled to-dos (iOS reminders, but before that Remember the Milk for years). The rest of the backlog and all details are in Evernote. Both are synced to all my devices (phone, ipad, laptop, etc) and available offline.
If I were trying to achieve your goal I would set a recurring weekday reminder when I arrived at the train station in the morning called "GTD". Just enough to remind me what I need to do. In evernote I'd have a folder with a todo list, plus all the notes/articles. Every day I would get on the train, review my todo app, see GTD at the top, open evernote to that todo, review/prioritize it and make as many happen as possible. The todo list I'd start with would be:
Buy GTD
Read GTD
Create todo for reading/implementing GTD
Read / delete pointless articles
Find todo apps
Create more todo lists