My quest for perfect task management
Probably the largest singular app obsession with me revolves around todo/task management apps for my personal half of life. I am arguably more interested in trying, configuring, and playing around with todo apps more than I am with actually doing the items on those todo apps. I think it should be classified as a condition whenever the next DSM comes out.
My needs for todo/task management are limited to personal items on my personal devices. For work, I’m pretty much limited to what they give me. So I generally don’t need full fledged project management for tracking my personal todos as I just don’t have that many projects going on. What I focus on are important tasks that need to be started by or done on a certain date as well as the mundane day to day things that I would forget until bedtime if I wasn’t reminded throughout the day. This latter class of todos is really something I try to manage as remembering to fill the coffee pot when you’ve already gone to bed is frustrating on many levels.
I’ve tried many apps and systems over the years, some with success and many with failure. Below are a few of my longer lived implementations.
Reminders
The built in Reminders app on Apple devices has a come a long way since its skeuomorphic days. It has tagging, location based reminders, repeating todos, and all the usuals you expect from a basic todo system. It’s not bad. When using iCloud account as the backend service, it works well. Recent enhancements that Apple has done include the ability to create “Smart Folders” which are just filters. Not exactly powerful in all the possible combinations, but it’s better than nothing. Pretty straightforward and simple. One of the major advantages Reminders has is direct Siri support. It’s easier to say things like “remind me tomorrow to do this” than it is to set up a shortcut to include the name of the app you want to use for a todo. There is a hack a lot of apps use to auto-import reminders when opening the app, but they’re just that - a hack. And you have to open the app before it gets imported and therefore part of the app’s list. With Siri and Reminders, I can say “remind me to do the thing in an hour” and not worry about opening another app to import it from reminders; it’s already there.
OmniFocus is like the fully loaded luxury car of task management. It’s based on the GTD methodology, and adheres to it for the most part. It encourages capture via a mandatory Inbox folder, scheduling, start dates (so the tasks don’t appear before the start date), tags, projects, folders, and all sorts of stuff. It’s complete overkill for me. But I used it for quite a while because it did resonate with me on many levels. It has so many ways of organizing and classifying tasks that I could spend hours creating structures that were just insane and overly complex for what I really needed to do - which was actually get things done. But it was fun to play around with. There are very few setups, smart filters, etc., that you wouldn’t be able to accomplish with OmniFocus.
It is expensive and is Apple only. You have two ways of obtaining the “pro” version, which I recommend for the custom perspective alone. You can buy the apps where mobile and macOS are separate versions, purchased separately, or you can pay $10/month for all of them plus a web interface as part of a subscription. OmniFocus has its own sync service and is end to end encrypted for peace of mind. If you have lots of projects, or areas of focus like personal, work, and side hustle, then OmniFocus may be worth it for you for all its flexibility. For me it provided more of a distraction from the actual goal of completing my todos.
TickTick is a pretty simple todo management app. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles at all. What it does have is a reasonably priced subscription of $3/month or $28/year, and it syncs across just about all platforms, including Android and Linux. I used it for a year when I was actually exploring Android and Linux with occasional dalliances with Windows. And through it all and no matter where I was, I had access to my todo list. For that, it is a great todo app.
But as far as differentiating features to set it apart from all others, I can’t think of any. It’s simple. It’s fast. It’s reliable. And sometimes that’s all you need in a todo app.
Like TickTick, this is a cross platform todo management system. It has templates, quick adding of tasks, and some collaboration features. The collaboration features are what set it apart from some of the other apps. It also has Kanban-like boards, but it’s not quite a true Kanaban app like Trello.
Todoist never clicked with me, despite trying it a few times. It didn’t have start dates, and I have no one I need to collaborate with. So, the feature set and my needs didn’t have a whole lot of overlap other than “track my things” which even Reminders could handle. The subscription of $4/month or $36/year was not worth it to me.
Things 3 is an excellent app. It’s well designed and takes a different approach to todo lists than the others. In Things, the todos have dates associated with them, and the todos show up on the appropriate days. But if you don’t complete the task, it will just roll over to the next day. It doesn’t show up as “overdue” (unless you set a separate deadline date) and try to shame you into completing tasks just not to get yelled at by your software. For most of my todos, this is perfect. I can put todos like Mow the lawn and set a date, but if I don’t complete the task because of rain or knee injury or whatever, it just rolls to the next day without any judgment. It’s awesome. If I do have an actual due date, then I can assign a deadline date. But otherwise, it didn’t make me sad.
Things is only available on Apple devices, but the pricing is much better than OmniFocus. No subscriptions, at least yet. It offers a sync service on their own servers. In practice, this worked almost flawlessly. I think I only had one case where I ended up with a duplicate. They don’t do end to end encryption and make no guarantees about bulletproof security, though. But they’re in Germany which has some of the better privacy laws. Still, end to end encryption would have been good, and I have reservations about products that provide ongoing services without any kind of subscription past the initial purchase. But this methodology of non-judgmental rolling forward is perfect for 90% of the items I tracked.
GoodTask is kind of different. It’s essentially a shell on top of Reminders. So you need to be using Reminders and have some sort of backend and syncing. But it provides some added functionality on top of the standard Reminders. It has the ability to have start dates, more customizable repeating todos, and an entry screen with commonly used “shortcuts” that you create, like due next Saturday or due in three days. It has more robust smart filters so you can create your own lists of tasks to do based on the criteria you specify in that smart filter. But it does show things as overdue, like just about every other app.
It’s free to download on iOS, but they ask for $10 after week I think. macOS is $30 up front, but there’s a 30 day trial app you can download from their website. It’s not as feature rich as OmniFocus or Things, but it works well enough for what it is - an extension to the standard Reminders functionality.
Conclusion
I had been using Things 3 for about a year, but recently I’ve been transitioning to GoodTask/Reminders. I can easily add reminders via Siri or other mechanisms, and GoodTask uses them without needing to import, etc. Just works better for quick capture. Things 3 works really well from a functional standpoint, but something about the sync not being end to end encrypted and not supported by any kind of subscription made me think I might want to look at other options. Plus my never-ending quest for new task apps just kind of compels me to switch it up way too often.
And here’s a dog.
