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This first few sentences of this article describe almost exactly how I've been feeling lately: For a long time, I resisted to-do lists. I wanted the flexibil
by asadjb 10y ago
This first few sentences of this article describe almost exactly how I've been feeling lately:
For a long time, I resisted to-do lists. I wanted the flexibility. I felt that if I kept a list, it would tie me down to a particular set of tasks. Gradually, though, I came around. The busier my work life became, the more crucial it was to have some sort of running agenda on hand.
It was embarrassing after a few times when I kept forgetting important tasks, and that pushed me towards using a todo list manager at work.
Being a developer who works almost exclusively in a terminal, I settled for using TaskWarrior (TW). I can't recommend it enough for people who spend most of their time in a CLI. I tried a bunch of different options before I found TW, and my biggest problem with anything else was the added friction and mental context switch involved in switching to another app to add a task.
Now I'm looking for something more, a task manager that works everywhere. Especially for longer projects and goals, something I can use for my personal life. While TW is great for the CLI, it lacks apps for the desktop and mobile (OS X and iOS). I've settled to using Wunderlist for now, which is the best option I could find for myself, but I'd love something that works as well as TW for the desktop and mobile, which for me is just entering tasks as a single line of text and having meta data like due date, project, categorization, etc picked out automatically (which Wunderlist does for dates but not categorization).
And one very important thing I've felt a couple of days ago when I moved to Wunderlist for my personal stuff is that at least for me it makes me feel more relaxed as well. I had a bad day a while back where I was in a panic because I had a lot of things to do personally and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere with any of those tasks. I sat down for about 30 minutes and just created tasks for everything. Since then I feel a lot easier. While I may not have made any progress on the tasks, just knowing they are written down somehow makes me feel better.
- DiabloD3 10y agoWhen I last used Wunderlist, I really disliked how inflexible it was, and how bad it was at handling recurring tasks. I discovered Todoist shortly after, and stuck with it. I think for me, personally, to get anything even more productive, I'd have to write it myself.
- s_kilk 10y ago+1 for Todoist, really under-rated app, and it works everywhere, including the Web.
- asadjb 10y agoWriting something myself is an idea I have brewing in the back of my mind. But it's not something I have any clear ideas about. I have no idea how it should work, only a vague idea that it should be as seamless to my daily routine as TaskWarrior is right now. But I'm trying to collect notes on how I use Wunderlist and TaskWarrior. Maybe in a few months I'll have a better idea of my usage patterns and then I can come up with something that I'd love to use everywhere. Do you have any ideas on what you'd like to write yourself? I could get ideas off of you. :)
- DiabloD3 10y agoUnlimited priority levels (as opposed to just 4), more cohesive project parenting (I can parent projects, but Todoist sometimes won't list items from child projects if I ask for the parent in some areas but not others), and probably exchange Todoist's query language for straight up SQL ala JPQL-esque usage. Other than that, Todoist gets very little wrong (and they're constantly polishing the more mundate UX parts, which is also an important part of any frequently used app). Their team has been often very responsive to my requests, and have also been working on integrations into other services (which is often a sore spot for 'cloud' services).
- tjl 10y agoYou might want to try Taskpaper. It's a just a text file so you can edit it however you like. There's an OS X app that's excellent, but the iOS app has been removed. However, a number of the better text editors on iOS support it.
- qznc 10y agoHm, I use Wunderlist and I am frustrated with recurring tasks. Will try Todoist.