Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes:
- having your computer alert you to things that come up
- being able to tag notes
- being able to add events to a calendar
- being able to set priority of tasks
- expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda
- being able to add recurring tasks
- full-text search (grepping)
- formatting features (markdown)
Some of the laborious (or, in my opinion, plain unholy) solutions include:
- feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter for the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications
- hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list
- running a script on a VPS to sync notifications
- set up cron job with git commit
- writing post-it notes by hand
I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings (though provisions exist for vim users), but _every_ item on the list above is handled out of the box, or is offered through a free and maintained plugin.
The author of the OP claims to have tried _every_ todo app, and has afterwards moved (regressed?) to writing notes in a plain text file, but there is a path extending from this point that the author has not walked yet. I strongly suggest that, especially for people with a computing or technical background, it is an undisputed upgrade. https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html being the bible, of course.
What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them.
I think reading docs, understanding a new system which someone else has designed, and fitting one's brain into _their_ organisational structure is the hard part. Harder than designing one's own system. It's the reason many don't stick with an off-the-shelf app. Including Org mode.
> What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them
I think this is a vocal minority. Outside of internet comment sections, most everyone I know doesn’t care that much about their todo list software.
The most productive people I ever worked with all had really minimal productivity software. For one person it was a Google doc with nested lists. I know several people who preferred physical sticky notes or 3x5 note cards.
A lot of the people I’ve worked with who built elaborate productivity systems and custom software weren’t all that productive. They seemingly spent as much time doing productivity rituals and rearranging their productivity software stack as they did doing actual work. I count the really heavy Notion users in this category because I’ve recently been pulling my hair out dealing with a couple PMs who think “reorganizing Notion” and adding more rules for Notion is a good use of their time each week.
The most extreme example I remember was the eccentric coworker who was building an AI-powered productivity tool that was supposed to optimize his todo lists and schedule them according to his daily rhythms. He spent so much time working on it that our manager had to remind him daily to stay on track with his real work. He was obsessed with “productivity tooling” but the productivity was secondary.
That’s been my personal experience. Spend plenty of time looking at all kind of options to optimize my ir my teams workflow. Then just fallback on pen and paper or some very simple excel spreadsheet. Something thinking about being more productive makes you feel productive.
Sounds similar to playing video games: the rules are simple, so once you understand them, you can feel mighty and powerful simply by accomplishing banal tasks. Makes for a great dopamine rush.
The phhsical copy served an important purpose: it forces you to admit you will never do something and so give up on is. until I die it is safe to assume I will eat 3 meals per day. (It won't be 100% because of sickness but close enough) thus if I'm out of some food I will need a todo list to replace it. However if I never finish the ukuele I've started it won't matter and it is reasonable for me to give up on it.
The term that comes to mind, and one of my favorite concepts, is "progressive disclosure", which is a concept we really ought to be more mindful of.
One of the perks of just-a-text-file-with-a-bunch-of-addons is that it enables progressive disclosure - it takes no learning curve to just get in and use the tool on a basic level, but additional complexity (and power) can be introduced over time.
The problem with a purpose-built app is that there's a minimum level of new concepts to learn before the tool is even minimally useful, and that's a barrier to adoption.
A good example of this in action is something like Markdown. It's just text and will show up fine without you learning anything, but as you pick up more syntax it builds on top - and if you learn some markup syntax but not others, it doesn't prevent you from using the subset you know. There is a clear path to adding new knowledge and ability.
Right, instead of fomo over not using the extra features of utilizing the right flow - people tend to experience the want/need to incrementally increase complexity when using roll-your-own software
The whole point of org-mode is that it's so malleable, that you can extend it to be whatever you want it to be, much easier than writing your own, ad-hoc, bug-ridden reimplementation of org-mode.
This makes it so infuriating that the top comment on Todo systems is almost invariably "just org-mode lol". Same as remote editing "just TRAMP lol".
I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.
On-topic: TickTick or Todoist with a slimmed-down "Getting Things Done" system works really well. Almost no learning curve, and you get to free up so much mental bandwidth vis a vis remembering things and prioritizing things. And you don't have to do hamfisted tricks to make a 'simple' .txt system work. Bliss.
> - having your computer alert you to things that come up
If my own experience is a valid example, alerts are overrated. They don't work for long. I hate getting interrupted by something that actually does not need my attention at that precise moment. I would disable those alerts in no time.
I prefer leaving physical cues in the real world. I think screens are bad UI unless you already spend way too much time in front of them.
The god old in- and out- baskets are great, for example. Or notes on a physical board.
Sometimes when I think of something I want to do in the morning, I just leave an object that does not belong in a place I will definitely have to use in the morning. Seeing that object will remind me of that thought I had just before going to bed. I don't even need to write down what it was.
Physical cues are wonderful! And THAT is what I would want from Augmented Reality (in addition to it no longer requiring cumbersome hardware to wear). A flexible recreation of former physical work places, but using the new flexibility of computer augmentation of what I see. To be able to place digital notes in the real world. To view and touch documents not fixed in a single place in front of me, but anywhere! I put some documents on the left, some on the right, some on the wall, and I move my body around to view and use them.
A purely screen-based app, when I already hate having to stare straight ahead for hours every day just doesn't cut it for me. I want my digital world to be in the real world, and use my entire body, not just very limited arm and hand movements while barely moving the head because the viewport is just one small two-dimensional rectangle in my large reality.
Okay, that went slightly OT, but I made that point because it is relevant for TODOs and most interactions with computers. I think they are much better when tied to our real world, not inside a tiny screen where a lot of stuff is already squeezed in and waiting for our attention, and everything can only be used like a surgeon doing keyhole surgery - indirectly through a tiny port and tools, instead of ones hands. Place TODO hints in the real world on or near appropriate places.
I geeked out a bit, after reading another blog post, and used my thermal printer for this. I've been using it for a few weeks now. The little sticky notes it makes are great.
I am starting to collect too many of them though. I kinda like the idea of ops text-file because it is renewed from day to day. I'm still not quite sure how to deal with the items I know I need to get to eventually but that I won't get to today. I'm also not sure how to deal with the pile growing continually.
I have noticed that thermal notes fade relatively quickly. When they do that I have to think about weather I want to reprint them or just throw them out.
The recent HN thread on receipt printers for task tracking had this comment which I wish got some attention and replies:
"The biggest killer for any task tracker I find is an accumulating backlog of items that seem too important to quit but too intractable to make progress on." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270076
(I suspect that’s part of too many browser tabs hanging around, too)
I should build one that sends me an SMS message instead. So I stumbled on AT+ plus code for programing GSM devices. I have a MTN HUAWEI E303 modem from back in 2016 and I wrote a server using the npm serialport module.
I just need to write a dmenu script that pipes from every 3 git commits.
```txt SMS from :mtn-E303-sms-server
-------------------------
PROJECT: ppc-v.1.0
-------------------------
Commits: 3
New Features Added!
Bugs Squashed
Code Cleaned Up
-------------------------
Total XP: +150
Keep it up!
-------------------------
```
That should keep my monkey brain hooked for a while he he.
I've seen mention of using the dot matrix printers common in restaurant kitchens as an alternative which doesn't fade; they have the added benefit of two-color printing (most do black and red)
But if it's AR you can have a cute hamster run up to you and holding an urgent note. Or the hare from Alice in Wonderland. And it can just sit on your desk (virtually) and do cute things while you continue to finish what you were working on. Better than a boring annoying beeping alarm.
We have not even started combining digital an real world, and the last few idea, e.g. from Meta, were devoid of anything useful, showing how little actually useful imagination some super-rich have, putting so many resources into bad or even destructive ideas when sooo much useful stuff needs to happen. We still have this tiny viewport, behind which another world - our digital world - awaits, and people think it's normal that we use this tiny port and awkward indirect devices (mouse) to manipulate things in there. We could do soooo much better soon!
Okay, the access device still is missing. Few people want to wear the current generation of AR devices. But that just shows that neuro-computer interface needs investment on the level of AI, it's not magic (actual neurons are just very complex to work with, never mind finding the right one's to connect to), we could slowly build something there.
Somebody asked what the advantage is of having this computerized instead of actual matter, e.g. physical paper notes. It's all the general computer advantages of course, like sharing stuff. Never mind being able to reorganize everything in an instant.
Imagine having a software project not viewed with one tiny viewport, but like a physical project, even over several rooms. You don't need to click, you go to the place representing some module and physically (virtually physically) take out the code, edit with your fingers. Watch the data flow around you. Have a bunch of flying piranhas show up when something goes wrong. Work with all your body in a real 3D space instead of sitting in a chair all day, all week, all month, all life, watching that vast digital world and/or just your project through that tiny viewport.
Taks tracking is different from reminders. There’s actually few things that I want to be reminded of, and they either belongs to a calendar (collaborative items) or a reminder app. The separation is blurry and they can all fits within the agenda concept.
As for tasks tracking, it’s all lists. And a daily/weekly/monthly review is enough for me.
And my calender app is used like a list, i can sort it by setting the time for each list item if i really care. I kind of set a reminder for every item i put in, but not everybody wants that for sure.
You give a long list of features that I don't want. And then go on to encourage everyone to switch text editors, and adopt a specific plugin that happens to work in the way that you personally like.
As a vim user, this is kind of what I have come to expect from emacs users. Honestly, I'm glad that you've found something that works well for you. But I hope that some day you internalize the fact that other people aren't you, and they shouldn't always be "encouraged" to give up their existing solutions to do things in the way that you've decided is perfect.
Don’t switch text editors, and don’t use a plugin.
For a few years I used Orgmode. I didn’t use Emacs. That is, when I needed to edit text files, I used Vim or macOS TextEdit. I used Orgmode to track my tasks and keep notes. That Emacs was underneath it was purely incidental, and I didn’t use Emacs for anything else. For me, Orgmode was not a plugin. It was the primary software I used, and there was this Emacs thing under it.
Ironically, these days I do actually use Emacs, and I use OmniFocus for tasks, mostly because OmniFocus gets multi-device sync right so it’s worth the price. But don’t hesitate to use Orgmode even if you don’t want Emacs otherwise.
I think the OP is far from saying what you are implying. He is not advocating for changing text editor or installing any plugins. Just recommends trying out org mode. I think is very valid. I’ve known many many people (in the order of hundreds) that use vi for editing in general but emacs for other tasks, e.g. org mode, sbcl repl, etc. I think the suggestion ist just to give org mode a try. No need to feel offended or pushed to leave your favorite editor. At the end, is all about personal preference.
Too many programmers think they have a unique use case without considering that maybe the existing projects are bloated for a reason. Then they end up just recreating the same bloat.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
I think the reason people use text file + "snowflake software" is that they want just the structure (constraints) they want, and no more. BTW, what people want changes over time and by circumstance.
org mode has a lot of features, including customizability, but imposes some heavy constraints as well. By its nature it's only going to satisfy a sliver of the people who have come around to text file.
It's good you linked that document, though. At a glance it gives a fair idea of what you'd be buying in to.
So my current pet project is a to-do system with an app that you can look at, edit, or complete tasks in. But I have both a fully agentic interface and simpler LLM powered inputs.
I'm really enjoying it. I think it is a good example of how to leverage LLMs to reduce drudgery.
Things I can do now:
- take a picture of a notice like a license renewal and a task is created and automatically filled with due dates and information extracted from the image and likely from online searches.
- turn a design document into a reasonable task plan.
- create classified and researched tasks with a sentence.
I'm just getting started on it but it already is kind of feature complete. Programmed with Claude Code, about 20k lines.
The key I think is to have something as easy to input as a text file, because it applies intelligence to remove friction.
I found Reminders to be unreliable and foolishly designed. It only works for must-do tasks. It uses repeating-period instead of time-since, so it can't handle repeating tasks that are optional. If you fail to mark off a repeating task, the next instances stack up and crash the notification cycle.
I'm familiar with the pain point you're describing. In general, I would say a recurring calendar event is a better solution for your particular preferences. Personally my mental model is that the act of deciding to not do an optional task constitutes completion of the reminder for that occurrence. And if I forget or deprioritize that decision, the reminder still hangs out in my Today list until I do as a mitigation.
Ironically the Reminders app sucks at reminding. I use the Clock app for my todo list; it makes a pretty loud noise pretty reliably, which makes it pretty good for reminders.
Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app. For a todo there is no now, it is pick the best thing todo next. I need to be interupted for my dentist appointment. However I don't need to be interupted to buy milk, I need a remineer when I'm at the store anyway to also get milk. If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work.
Yeah I think this is a result of the attention economy, there are 75 million notifications per day that someone somewhere wants to push in your face so we've gotten really good at cutting them out. But the counter-swing is also too big and now critical things like calendars and reminders are buried in a list we never look at.
I agree it would be nice to have more alarm-like notification options. Flagging, setting as high priority, and assigning a date/time and getting in the habit of checking the Today category regularly all help mitigate; a bug-me-until-this-is-done feature would be a welcome alternative. (I will note that the GP's emacs stack isn't even close to offering native mobile push notifications, to state the obvious.)
I believe the Reminders app, when used alongside Notes and Calendar, is becoming a strong competitor in the productivity space. One feature I'd love to see added is persistent nudging reminders that keep alerting you until you manually dismiss them.
Things 3 is another excellent third-party option in this category. Together, these apps form my essential productivity stack. I honestly can't function without them.
Being pedantic, based on your example, I think the Reminders app does a good job at reminding, but a bad job at alerting. But that’s because a reminder to me is a gentle concept.
Reminders.app does a great job when I want create lists and inventories! I use it for groceries and webpages too. For example, I've sent many of the Emacs-related links to my Emacs list in Reminders, where I know I'll be able to find them the next time I forget Gall's Law and look for a more-complex system to replace my current one: writing things down; thinking about what I've written; redrafting; and repeating.
I have used emacs for more than 30 years, use it as a primary code editor now, and I have never found use of org-mode, despite a few attempts, to become a lasting habit. Of the list of integrations provided here, I only see alert and calendar support being of interest (but because of this, I may give org-mode one more try).
Do I need to start living in Emacs to get these benefits? Or are you saying I can use Emacs as my todo list app, close it after writing a todo, and have it pop up notifications?
Todoist does all of that and more, basically any reminders app does most of that.
Just a counterpoint to say, many of us look for a todo app, use one of the many great ones on the market and then don't write blog posts about it. It's worth just trying one of the many existing apps instead of building your own.
I'm in the process of doing most of this via Claude check-ins, using a combination of MCP, Obsidian, and Things. Obsidian is the memory system, context info, and archive, while Things hosts the active lists and desktop widgets. It doesn't work perfectly or even that well, but it's coming along.
Combining the feel of plain text with real structure is also exactly why we're building an "IDE but for tasks/notes" [1].
With structured apps (task managers, outliners) you lose the illusion of editing plain text, but plain text alone lacks things like structure, links, dates, and collaboration. We've spent the last few years building an editor completely from scratch to keep the ease of text editing while adding planning and structure.
Not so fast my dear, just this year I finally adopted the default home-directory structure of my linux distro (Document, Pictures, Music, Video, etc.) in my workflow. I'm not ready for more big obvious changes like this. ;)
Am i the only one to generally find those directories getting in the way ? I have very few videos or music, or even images worth storing as images and not related to other documents. Downloads and documents might be useful but then, documents is almost everything that is not online so why not put it in $HOME. And I don't like capitalized folders but that's me.
Im perfectly happy with markdown in vscode. Right next to my work and with a search function. I guess I could do txt but the syntax highlighting makes things a bit more readable.
I think it works for me because it's mostly just a working memory. I virtually never visit my notes again. It is not some personal knowledge base nor project tracker.
This satisfied me for awhile, eventually though I wanted a more comprehensive solution to record todo notes alongside thoughts and project ideas, so I escaped my IDE and got a simple obsidian setup going. I can definitely recommend
I think a lot of your examples demonstrate the power and low learning curve of a single text file as an organizing tool.
Org mode is one direction you could take your text file in. Feeding your text file into an LLM or committing it to git or formatting with Markdown are others. But starting with a plain text file doesn’t commit you to any of those paths.
How about having a synced and editable version of your to-do list on all your devices, including mobile? I've found that to be the main filter for note taking setups. You seem to suggest that there's an emacs plug-in that can handle that?
I think one thing that is missing from emacs/org-mode is the mobile integration. There are apps that handle some features of org-mode on mobile, but probably missing features of the desktop version. Currently, I manage my notes only on the desktop because I haven't found a good companion on mobile.
I still like to implement my own ideas, especially in fun languages like Erlang and Perl. I'm glad I can program, because personal programming in the small is fertile ground and tremendously useful. For starters, this entire site is generated by 269 lines of commented Perl, including the archives and the atom feed (and those 269 lines also include some HTML templates). Why? Because it was pleasant and easy, and I don't have to fight with the formatting and configuration issues of other software. Writing concise to-the-purpose solutions is a primary reason for programming in the twenty-first century.
As somone who uses text and paper for todos, happily for years now after spending equally much time procrastinating in search of the perfect task management system I will now do a half-ironic take on answering your points:
> having your computer alert you to things that come up
That's what the calendar or the alarm is for
> being able to tag notes
Write #tag and then grep for it. Not that hard
> being able to add events to a calendar
A event isn't a todo, you add it to the calendar instead
> being able to set priority of tasks
Cut it and paste it up to the top or write "IMPORTANT". If you have so many tasks that you need something better, you probably spend too much time organizing your todos and should start working
> expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda
If your todo lists are so long thst you cant read them in 30 seconds they are too long. Split them up and mive them to the relevant project.
> being able to add recurring tasks
Just leave it in the list and add a questionmark at the end. If it is time critical add it to the calendar
> full-text search (grepping)
Yeah, good observation you can grep text pretty fine. If you're annoyed by having to type the filename that is a shell oneliner
- formatting features (markdown)
You can use markdown in text, it is just more or less useless wothout rendering. But I don't see how formatting leads to more productivity
> feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter out the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications
Yeah ok, that one is bad.
> hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list
Get a decent texteditor where you can press modifiers + arrow keys to move lines. Works pretty well. In fact better/faster than dragging with your mouse.
> running a script on a VPS to sync notifications
No need to do that, you have a calendar
> set up cron job with git commit
If you need your todos in a git you either work at a nuclear facility, a space station or you take yourself too seriously
> writing post-it notes by hand
What else would you use, a typewriter? Just kidding. Paper has undeniable strengths for the todo space. It is there and you don't have to remember to open it. Rewriting your todos is doubling as both checking their state, refreshing your memory and cleaning them up. Paper can be read without electricity and by other people without any form of setup. People know how to use it without onboarding. Hackers cannot use a flaw in the the paper has been made to gwin remote code execution (they can however potentially use photographs of paper to do so).
I am not kidding, one of the best work-handoffs I ever had was entirely organized via emails and post its. It worked flawlessly.
And I say that as someone who has spent days on todo systems, task warrior and the likes. Everybody has their own needs, but very often boring and pragmatic wins.
Very well said. People here are interested in poking holes in things, instead of actually being productive. Again, we should just look at what actually productive people tend to do, which in my experience is generally to just use whatever works and not spend too much time thinking about optimising todo systems.
I truly just use a plain .txt file. Every "add-on" and layer beyond the .txt happens to run on a complex wetware device that came built-in with my body.
>Every "add-on" and layer beyond the .txt happens to run on a complex wetware device that came built-in with my body.
He was addressing the comments such as mine that determined a txt file without any runtime software layered on was not enough for some people. The built-in wetware was inadequate.
Apparently, you are one of the lucky ones that can just use a txt file. For others, they need a little more support apparatus ("bicycle for the mind") enabled by some type of active app that complements the TODO.txt file.
I've gone through this too and came to the same conclusion except for phone.
While on laptop/desktop nothing beats txt (or md or org), it's just so uncomfortable using a text file like that on the phone and relying on dropbox or something.
And I get it, all the note taking apps on the phone have issues: not local first, proprietary, subscriptions, or no encryption, or a thousand features before making sure the full text search works even offline.
Last year I finally sat down and wrote my own PWA out of frustration [1]. There was a SHOW HN too [2]. Yes, shameless plug. There are only a handful of other people using it (and probably never more than that) but I really wrote it for myself and it's been such a relief the past year knowing I always have my notes whenever wherever and works exactly the way I want.
I probably spent <5h fixing a few issues in the past year. As far as I'm concerned, my problem is solved once and for all.
There is a format called todo.txt that works follows very readable syntax (like your own example) and has some minimal bells and whistles if you want it to: http://todotxt.org/
Can you expand on which org-mode features you like for this use case?
On the top of my head, among the useful features I'm familiar with, you can:
* nest tasks
* set deadlines
* set priorities
* filter ~arbitrarily
* have as much content as you want per item (in comparison with todotxt with is one line per item), including non-text like images
* have statuses other than todo and done (like waiting)
What else do you use that makes you particularly like this setup?
Org-mode is this thing I've been trying to use for a while, but it never sticks because I'm just too used to vim and plain text. Once in a while I look for a killer use-case, hoping it'd make me stick to it, to no avail so far.
If you don't feel like you need the extra bells and whistles don't worry about it. The great thing about org-mode is it _is_ just plain text and all the magic is in the interpretation of the plain text. If you have yourself a table and one day ya want to do some spreadsheet magic on it or pipe it into a script easily, you can just check the manual for how to do it and KO it right there in the same place the data lives. Remembering how to do it afterwards is optional.
Personally, I use lazyvim in neovim and doom emacs in emacs and just kinda switch between the two based on what I feel like in a given day. NeoVim tends to have better treesitter/LSP stuff as well as marginally better performance, doom emacs has way better test running and org-mode and it is only a little behind neovim in that other stuff.
All the above is to suggest I think the question is flawed. BUT! To answer the question literally, my favorite thing in org mode that I've never seen anywhere else is the ability to dump babel blocks in my notes with code samples that are actually runnable and the output is able to be piped somewhere else.
I too have used org-mode for a while and here are some additional features which may pique your interest:
- agenda views let me create custom pages of tasks with certain states or tags
- a robust time tracking system. I use this for my freelancing work
- very nice text tables that are programmable
- a very customizable capturing system
- a huge ecosystem of plugins
- a programmable API: I'm currently working on an importer for the DayOne app as well as a fitness tracking package
- PDF export with LaTeX. I can use this for printing out my weekly plan for example
- in addition to deadlines, a scheduled property for when you intend to start a task
- extensive linking system (https://orgmode.org/guide/Hyperlinks.html#External-Links-1) I often have todos linking to places in code
I think that org-mode could use better learning resources. There's pretty much the manual and blog posts by experienced users, neither are especially aimed towards new users.
I have a very simple todo list, it's essentially the same every day!
- check mail
- check calendar
- check jira
- check azure devops board
- check Microsoft Tasks
- check confluence
- check Teams
- check home calendar
- check home e-mail
- check signal
- check whatsapp
- check client e-mail
- check client jira
- renew prescription for benzos
I'm a fan of Org Mode with Emacs [0] and using the app BeOrg [1] on my iPhone.
I have 3 main task files:
- todo.org for things I need to do
- backlog.org for things that I don't have to do now but should do in the future
- inbox.org for any random ideas or notes
The concept of an Inbox was taken straight from Getting Things Done [2].
I have different searches set up in BeOrg so that it is easy to view tasks from each different file.
This is definitely more complicated than a single file, but I like it mainly because it keeps my main task file (todo.org) organized. I also don't go through organizing my files that much either.
inbox.org is just a great place to dump anything, so I usually do a quick scan and either delete everything or refine it to the backlog.org.
For backlog.org, I'll usually just let things sit there and build up. After a while I'll realize that if something has been there for a long time, it probably isn't worth doing - or I already did it, so I delete it.
I like Org Mode but I feel like custom agenda views are not really as flexible as they should be, and as soon as you want to do something outside of the bounds of what Org offers with its settings for the built-in agenda views you have to go on a deep dive into the emacs lisp
For example I wanted the global TODO list view to show next to each entry when the TODO was scheduled for, but there's really no way to modify the global TODO list much at all
I've created a very rudimentary bash tool for extracting todos out of markdown (GFM) files. People might like it and contribute: https://github.com/hkdobrev/notetaker
I've done the text file thing, and it’s fine. Up to a (very small) point.
What the author describes as their “workload” barely registers.
For context, for me, Things on any given day has over 100 individual actions, most of which are recurring.
By doing this, I can stay on top of an extremely broad surface area. There is no way a text file can handle the number of parallel work streams my (or really many) people have.
Broadly, for me these work stream are:
* Self Care
* Relationship
* Children
* Special Needs (IEP, SSI, Conservatorship, GGRC, Medical, Special Needs Trust, etc)
It sounds like your life requires a manager's schedule. Lots and lots of things to fit into a busy day. Likely without a lot of big blocks of focus time.
Most programmers are far better off with a maker's schedule. Far fewer things in a day. Each with a significant block of time associated with it.
An absolutely minimal productivity system is perfect for anyone on a maker's schedule. You're right that it wouldn't work for your life.
See https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html if you're not familiar with the terms "manager's schedule" and "maker's schedule". It also provides context for why those different kinds of schedules are appropriate for different people. (One of the big mistakes that people on manager's schedules often make is to not recognize and respect the impact that a "quick 15 minute meeting" has on employees who need to be on a maker's schedule.)
100% - I read that when it came out, and I point others to it too.
The thing about Maker's schedule for me is that it's easy to get so into what I'm doing that other things in my life don't get the attention they need.
Having a reminder system helps make sure that doesn't happen.
Can you give some examples of your 100 daily actions? I’m struggling to understand how you’re scheduling so many things, like I’m sure I complete 100 actions in a day but most are going to be things like “brush my teeth” or “clean up the dinner dishes”, which I personally wouldn’t schedule.
Managing the line between daily and long-term tracking is one of the toughest parts. I have a flat list of files in Notes analogous to yours, but I'm not working in every one every day, some will sit dormant for months. Do I maintain a "to buy" or "Home Depot" list in each one, or at the top level?
I like using paper for today's tasks and instant thoughts. I like to avoid cluttering with recurring unless I'm really having trouble (or keep it in calendar). I find that the "oh shit" part of my brain is largely a good enough reminder system as long as I capture the thought before it flies away.
side note: I do like the "Relationship" call-out. I had a past relationship suffer in part because I kept it a bit too much in the back pocket and not up on the proverbial board with the other projects. Workaholics take note - make your relationship part of your workflow.
I’ve tried most of the major systems, and for me Things3 wins hands down. Yes, it costs some money to by the app on my phone and on my Mac, but the cost of missing even one deadline blows those costs out of the water.
I do with Things3 supported nested areas, but I just use Projects that I never complete to achieve the same effect.
I have use a system similar to this guy and TickTick is perfect. I even use shared lists with my girlfriend to track chores which is something we implemented recently and works great.
I went through something similar. I do use Logseq now, but for many, many years I found a notes.txt or todo.txt file in my home directory to be an excellent solution. I typically just write the date at the top of the file and put the notes underneath. A huge benefit is that I can trivially keep these under git. I keep them in my dotfiles repo so they can be easily synchronized to all my devices. A couple of shortcuts makes it quite fluid:
A bash alias so I can run `todo` and have the file open:
alias todo='nvim "$HOME/.todo.txt"'
Some vim config so I can run `\date` (from either insert mode or normal mode) and it will print a date line for me:
I host my own wall calendar. There is an annual subscription cost, but it's so cheap I don't notice. I hacked it together with thumbtack 1.0 and Bic Crystal a very long time ago. Others have used it and find the interface extremely intuitive. Localization is supported. I even have pencil support. If things become tentative, we can switch over to it seamlessly. When I have a todo item, I input it onto the day and time that works best. Highly recommended.
I use Todoist in a very light weight fashion. I add tasks and they sit on my screen until they're done, basically identical to a text file. I've never used the points, projects, labels, etc.
It does one thing a text file struggles at: scheduling recurring tasks and adding notes to a recurring task. I have annual reminders for infrequent, but important stuff. For example, I have a recurring annual task to review my insurance. Each year, I add context and details that are easily forgotten. Then, when the reminder comes up next year, I can refresh my memory and complete the task quickly.
Recurring tasks or tasks far into the future is what has me locked into Todoist. I love how comprehensive the plain-English scheduling is, such as "Do task every third Friday of the month". It's clearly got a lot more power than I use too.
Totally agree, Todoist rocks. Recurring tasks are necessary for any kind of regular maintenance tasks, and Todoist supports all natural language scheduling "every month on the 15th" or "every 8 weeks starting Thursday". Textfile certainly isn't going to do this for you. Article author writes:
> Todoist: Great until I realized I was gaming the points system instead of doing actual work. Turns out completing “drink water” 8 times a day doesn’t make you productive.
Why didn't he turn off the points system if it was distracting, instead of migrating to the next shiny new TODO workflow? Not sure I understand, but I guess that might've left nothing to blog about.
I have a similar setup in Todoist, it's just a reminder for scheduled recurring tasks like bills.
Funnily enough, I was quite savvy with the features several years ago but as my work changed and things aren't as easy to list down like a routine or in neatly defined projects and such.
And when regular tasks becomes freeform, it's no surprise that a plaintext file is sufficient.
It's like Rumshpringa for TODO apps. Everyone wants to rebel from the old norms and go do something different, only to end up returning to the reliability, clarity and comfort of a good pen and pocket notebook.
Big fan of the Rite-In-Rain notebooks, myself, and Fisher Space Pen's Cap-o-matic.
> Big fan of the Rite-In-Rain notebooks, myself, and Fisher Space Pen's Click-o-matic.
I carry this combo everywhere I go. Way less friction than taking out my phone, unlocking, and suffering the horrible experience of typing something on a virtual keyboard.
I do enjoy the looks I get from friends and family sometimes, as they all expect me to be high tech everywhere in my life but I'm probably one of the most low-tech people outside of work.
Interestingly enough, this just shows how different people like and hate different things. I personally can’t stand writing with a pen, and am very fluent and fast with a virtual keyboard and would never describe the experience as horrible. I’m writing this on one right now, and it’s great.
I also don’t want to carry an extra thing in my pocket when I already have a phone.
If we're being fair here then this must be the place to list the problems with the note card/pad system. For me, I ultimately settled on using a GitHub repo of todo lists w markdown as my solution, viewable on desktop & mobile.
The problems with a physical note card system are:
- I have to use the computer & mobile phone to enter and receive all my work, so it makes sense to consolidate the todo list(s) into those systems, instead of adding a third one. Having to remember to keep a physical bundle near me all the time, with a working pen, feels clunky.
- My handwriting is messy and this causes various problems. I can't really read it at a glance; longer messages take longer to decode; something about the non-uniformity of it also throws me off. I don't relish the thought of consulting a pile of my handwriting multiple times in an hour.
- I frequently cross off old items and add and/or modify new items. This is very easily done with a text file but sounds like a mess with note cards: keeping the empty cards around, scratching off or erasing existing ones, etc. With GitHub's commit history, I can even get a holistic view of how it's changed over the day, not possible with physical cards.
- A LOT of the value of my system comes from being able to view past days todo lists, to see what's getting done and what isn't; I do this daily. Obviously keeping up w/today's tasks stretches the physical card system to its limits; extending that to the past 7 days sounds like a nightmare.
I prefer A4, but yeah. I adopted something roughly based on Bullet Journal about 6 or 7 years ago and now on my 4th book.
There's something about manually writing and copying over TODOs to the next month that makes you really question if you still need to do it, and if you do, gives you a reminder that you still haven't done it.
I use a few basic markers copied from standard bullet journal, which work well as a dot can be promoted to all the others. A dash "-" for informational stuff, a centre dot "·" for a task, which turns into a slash "/" for partially done or a cross "X" for done, ">" if I carry it forward to the next month and "<" if I copy it into the future log (I have pages at the front for about 4 years of future events, 3 months per page). I also have a leftmost column for the date when something needs to be done or for meetings/events.
Surprisingly, even when doing a whole page of notes on something, it's not excessive to leave an inch margin, and sometimes you want to star a key point or attach an action point market.
I've got really used to this way of journaling, and appreciate the ability to do different things, like calendar views - such as 36 week views with one page for weekends and the other for mid week - which are great for planning holidays, weekends and significant events.
I never really got into the monthly reflection aspect, but I do like doing that around end of year and other inflection points through the year.
If there's really a hyperlink I need, I might e-mail it to myself, add it to a text file in an appropriate place in the appropriate project, leave the tab open in my browser, or just do the task now.
But IMHO none of that is related to the todo list, which is stuff like "7 · Fred's birthday". It's about remembering things that I need/want to do, and in a way that's tactile and I can reflect on it whether I'm using the computer or not, not trying to maintain a knowledge base of everything.
A4 maxi. surprised to find this here - and yea, you can 1) take photo 2) easily index later via vision llm types cheap now etc even local (99% time never do, essence of todo lists ie ack wont ever need to index most items)
I do this. I love good old fashioned pen and paper.
I've tried, many many times to use digital for both Todos and note taking and nothing ever stuck. Even tried using an iPad with GoodNotes & the Apple Pencil. Pen and paper is the only thing that has ever worked for me still. Plus I enjoy the physical sensation of writing things down physically, with a really nice pen and a high quality notebook.
So I always keep a notebook open on my desk, I intermix Todos and notes on sort of a "daily page" format, and I also carry a little field notes flip pad notebook with me everywhere I go. On the go it's also, oddly enough, less friction to write in my field notes book than it is to take out my phone, unlock it, and suffer through the horrible experience of typing anything out on a virtual keyboard.
OCR is readily available everywhere now so digitizing your handwritten notes, if you have to, is trivial.
Even so, I feel that much of the point of writing things down in the first place is to put the information into the mind (where the subconscious mind can work with it and do its jobs) and, ultimately, so you won't need to be reminded about it later.
I've been back and forth on that topic, going to paper and back to a todo manager of some sort.
For the past few years I've been using obsidian for all my note taking, and none of the extensions I tried did what I wanted, so I built myself one[^1]. The initial goal was to take todos right within my notes, so I could keep the context of what the todo was about. Then I started adding stuff like planification and tagging. So it's entirely text based, but with a planner UI on top of it that makes it easy to drag and drop stuff to when I want to do them, and plan my day accordingly.
I think the more you go, the more you get set in your own ways, the harder it is to tag along on someone else's implementation of a system.
Low tech like paper and text files are good because they're maleable, and dont embed stuff you don't actually need.
I’ve been using obsidian also, I just use the daily note with some tweaks. Works great with todo’s autopopulated in new notes until they are checked off, deadlines, etc. Only downside is that I do pay for their sync functionality since iOS makes it very annoying otherwise. I’ll check out your plugin though, sounds useful.
The problem with productivity apps is that one size does not fit all. Everyone has radically different goals, constraints, interests, and workflows. Many people would benefit from having a "living" app that is personalized to their tastes, and also adapts over time as the characteristics of your life change (e.g. having kids is probably going to change your approach to productivity!)
I recommend finding a framework within which to build your own apps, and then building your own suite of apps that have exactly the features you want (shameless plug, I built a platform that can serve as such a framework : WebWidgets.io. It is basically a way to hook up SQLite databases to JS objects in the browser, which allows wide liberty to build your own simple custom apps).
I've tried so many todo apps and the only thing I've stuck to is Obsidian and a daily morning habit of checking my list (I check it multiple times a day, but I set at least one 'forced' point in the morning to level set.
I also use a notebook that often feeds that obsidian tab because I still often prefer to take notes/diagram by hand. The kinetic action sticks with me better.
And that's pretty much it. I can pop open a long running file for temporary one offs, or pop open a directory with directories with files which all start with `01-`, `02-`,... to enforce order, with additions to a particular topic doing `01A-`, etc
And since I edit everything I work on in ViM, I have notes available in all my editors which have keyboard short cut quick jump navigation.
It keeps me very organized, can be set up anywhere with just a couple lines in the config file there, and only took me about a decade of steadily refining things down to get to
'Wow there are a 1000 of ToDo apps. I can't possibly try them all. So I will write my own ToDo app that does exactly what I want!'
Result:
There are now 1001 ToDo apps.
ToDo/productivity apps is a very tough market. I know because I wrote a visual task planner for Windows and Mac (hyperplan.com) and struggled to get enough visibility to make it commercially viable, despite a lot of rave feedback.
The same is true for group apps (manage a team; organize events with random people, etc. apps)... so many options... and so far every single season my kids have participated in a sport I've been privileged to try a new one... :-\
John Watson's "writer" webapp/website is an extremely useful and aesthetically pleasing tool that is free but has various perks for its' paid tiers. The "lifetime" purchase cost of $149.00 USD is totally worth it though.
Everything before the "no annoying banner ads" is included in the "free" tier:
-fast and distraction-free fullscreen writing environment
-Saves automatically as you write
-All writing is private, secure, and backed up regularly
-Save an unlimited number of documents
-Works online and off
-Customize colors, fonts, and line spacing
-Optional typewriter sounds
-Automatic word count and writing goals
-PDF and text export
-Markdown formatting
-No annoying banner ads
---
paid↓
-Export to Dropbox, Google Docs, Evernote, WordPress, and more
-Built-in thesaurus
-Word count updates as you type
-Hemingway mode (backspace disabled)
-Revision history
-Create downloadable eBooks
-Organize your writing with folders
-Track your productivity with writing statistics
-Downloadable archive of all your writing
-Premium support
100% worth $149 for the "pro/lifetime" license. Been using it regularly since December 2021.
This would be amazing if obsidian mobile did not take 10 seconds to start or even recover from being in the background and lose scroll position every time. For the desktop I would be absolutely happy with all todos in a simple markdown file. There can also be any number of UIs on top of markdown that people use over the years and grow out of but as long as the base system is markdown files you get the best of both worlds. I would never consider using an app for notes or todos that does not persist like that and no: ability export is not the same as native persistence in a human readable format. (Discovered the heard way multiple times when apps advertising with export failed or just lied.)
My journey has been like this: Wunderlist -> Microsoft acquired Wunderlist -> Any.DO -> Google Keep -> Todoist -> Trello -> ClickUp -> Obsidian -> todo.md file
(I am probably missing multiple.)
I still use Obsidian, but not as a Todo app, with absolute zero plugins. And Wunderlist remains the most tasteful todo app I have ever seen.
Now I just open up Alacritty and type in `vim todo.md`. It has today's date in H2, and tasks as checkboxes. That's it. Works better than anything else. Why . md over .txt? Because I like the syntax highlighting in vim.
thing is, if the person continues with the .txt file at some point the habits will form and maybe tools will support his goals just fine.
the Getting Things Done book starts with pencil and paper.
A lot of people do this with literal tools. They skip from a manual screwdriver to a power screwdriver before they understand the "mechanics feel"¹ of tightening a screw and make a mess of things.
Then they go back to basics, use a hand screwdriver and learn to properly tighten a screw. At some point in the future a power screwdriver will accelerate what they are doing. And when necessary, use the hand screwdriver or the principles learned with it.
After trying text files and other apps, I wrote my own about ten years ago and have been using it ever since. ( https://famplan.io - I'm starting to turn it into something other people might use.)
I tend to agree with the idea that simpler is better, but a single text file wasn't quite enough. I like being able to see my lists on multiple devices, I tend to like to have multiple lists for different purposes, and it's also very useful to have shared lists for coordinating with my family and others.
The experience of using this has taught me a few things about how to use these lists effectively:
1. Using a list is like writing a journal - you need to be intentional about explicitly working to make it part of your routine. (Part of this is committing to record tasks that need to be done and then committing in some explicit way to actually doing those things.)
2. It needs to be fast, it needs to be easy, and it needs to be present. Anything else gets in the way of point 1.
3. It's important to track when you need/want to do, but lists of things to do can be overwhelming. (It's useful to have at least a few ways to ignore items when you can't or don't want to deal with them. I handle this by having multiple lists, and also having a snooze feature to ignore items for a while.)
4. You need to have a way to handle items or tasks that go on for a while. (You need to make a call, but have to leave a message, and are waiting for a callback... etc. These are places where you need to take action to push something along, but the action doesn't result in a complete task, so you need to revisit it later.)
This is going to sound odd coming from someone who wrote a tool for the purpose, but the key here is really to pick a system (any system) and then actually use it. Spend too much time developing the system, then all you've done is give yourself something else to do.
Thanks for trying. (It expects mixed-case, which I need to actually say in the messaging.)
The codebase started out as something I used entirely myself, so the aspects of the workflow that relate to new user onboarding (most important for actually getting customers) are the ones that are the weakest. So this part of the codebase is where I'm working now to clean it up and it's probably also the most rough.
Why does it require mixed-case? It's for TODOs, not healthcare. If I want to use my insecure password to try out your service, please let me! It took extra code here for you to try to be secure, when it's now generally known that password requirements are security theatre at best and anti-security at worst.
Thank you for the feedback. A month ago, it didn't need any text in the password field at all. I may have overshot the mark a bit when I added validation.
Longer term, I mainly want it to just use external auth (Google, etc.) and not use passwords at all.
> Longer term, I mainly want it to just use external auth (Google, etc.) and not use passwords at all.
I usually avoid services that do this because I don't want any issues to my Google account (or any other service) to affect other services I use. Good luck trying to talk with someone at Google if some automated system flags and blocks your account.
Sounds to me like you need something simple and quick. If the current system works for you I would suggest to keep using it. If you ever feel like you need something better I would recommend trying microsoft todo or google tasks. Google Tasks syncs with your google calendar so it's a bit more powerful. Apart from them both a pretty simple. If you are looking for something even simpler take a look at google keep. This is what I use personally.
I'm sympathetic to the text file, but for me the problem comes when you have todo lists that you are sharing with someone else, like a spouse. Then you have/want to share and edit them collaboratively.
Simple enough, there's ways to do that, but by the time you set that up to work across multiple devices of your own and someone else's, it's simpler from a UX perspective to just use an app dedicated to that task. I suppose we could use a Google doc or something but there's Keep.
I'd be interested in trying something else — I have tried other things — but keep going back to Google Keep.
Especially for Android users, Google Tasks is dead simple to use and works seamlessly with voice prompting. The less I have to manually write or type out my reminders, the better.
Funny coincidence, I just published an offline infinity-scroll notes app[0] today to replace my long txt file. Desktop version probably in a couple of days. Last time I published an app for myself, my friends (and ~1k others!) loved it so trying doing it again.
I've used a .txt pretty much my whole life from my old Vaio running Ubuntu to my Mac books after, especially as a heavy terminal/nano enjoyer.
I always saved it as do.txt in my base dir. Thousands of lines which was always nice to look at and more importantly easy to reference links I used during debugging or troubleshooting from months ago.
It's a weird mix of a bookmarking list, daily to dos and quickly jotting down phone numbers or details while on the phone with someone (if I'm not on my personal laptop, I usually type the thing while I'm on the phone in the PC browser address bar then copy it over which is not ideal because auto-search).
Another strategy I've used is iMessaging myself with links or notes, which in my opinion is the best way since it auto syncs AND you can pin yourself in the iMessage app for quick access.
What I need TODO for is just to come up with a plan for the day. I don't really look at it after that. I don't look at it after today except maybe tomorrow. So yeah, a text file works.
I've came to a very similar conclusion. Productivity SaaS apps feel exciting to get started but eventually I've abandoned them all. I feel that many others have similar experiences but I'm not exactly sure why. Like the author, I too ended up with a plain text format (org-mode) and I've happily been on it for 7 years. Some questions that came to mind:
- Is it the artificial hype and promises around certain productivity apps (e.g. youtube notion promoters) that ultimately leave one disappointed?
- Does the productization of these apps make the companies feel compelled to change too much, thus alienating users? Is this why Apple notes has such a following, since it's not a monetized product of apple?
- Is the allure of plain text the fact that it doesn't change, analogous to something written on paper?
Still very sad about no Android, but it's good enough from my computers that I've managed to work around it with a few cloudflare-worker based mobile affordances.
I actually built the app myself. And for one simple reason - recently started learning to better plan my time. Started with paper version, and up to 5 most important task - my personal goal is to have consistency rather than squeeze every minute of every day.
And paper version is great. However, the vacation came and I wasn't really keen on dragging the book everywhere. Additionally i noticed that while planning, I don't really respect my long term goals - so I build an app for that: Simple thing that does several thing:
- 1. Keep only 5 slots for most important tasks.
- 2. Have calendar view in the same view (like google tasks) to make sure that I havent' forgotten some important meeting
- 3. (Unlike google tasks, or clickup) - have short-term and long term goals in the same view , to make sure that every important task is related to long term goal
- Bonus: I see stats on how much of important tasks I have completed. Goal is at least 80% avg for 7 days.
- Bonus2: I've added my values to make sure that these are not forgotten in other places.
So single view to address todays work and relate it to long term vision. But I believe it depend on what you're optimising for. Dumping things or makeing sure that signal to noise ratio is better.
Same. I use Apple Notes. I have a few notes pinned (regular work, creative work, self-education, travel, chores). I write tasks. Break them up into small tasks with indents. Pick a task from the pool and execute. "Regular Work" tasks get priority. But if I'm not feeling it, I move to the other ones. Once I finish a task, I delete it/replace it with next steps. Nothing fancy. No formatting except for indentation. Been crushing it.
But I will add, there is no right way to do things in life in general. Experiment, and do what works for you.
I've been using the Gmail webpage for tracking my TODOs for like 20 years. The idea being, since I always have the webpage open in the first tab of my browser, and since I'm checking the webpage at least once a day, I never forget it. Every time I check my emails I also see my TODOs. And I can check/edit it from my phone when I'm not at home.
If it's a list of TODOs for the current day or week (e.g. work tasks, watering the plants, etc) I just start a draft and keep the draft open in the UI and update it regularly, then delete it when everything is done. If it's more mid-long term (let's say TODOs for the month, like buying some big stuff, etc), I usually send it to myself with "TODO [3-4 words description]" in subject and keep it in the inbox to be visible until I completed it. If I need to add something else I just reply to the same email.
I think Gmail has actually an integrated TODO widget in its webpage, but I just use emails out of habit.
Something I miss with modern UI design is the location persistence of items. Like the old windows desktop widgets or the OSX dashboard. You should show the desktop or bring up the dashboard and the todo list would always be in the same location and show up or hide with a quick key strokes.
I just vim ~/.todo.txt or more recently, just having claude code act as a middle man for it asking to generate what (should) be done then asking it what I need to do to finish x, has mcp integration to my IDE's so it can see what I am doing update the todo automatically, basically, a real life assistant which I now see why nearly every CEO has one.
I strongly believe using just a plain text files or overly basic tools makes your life more complicated, not less. I get a tonne of value out of OmniFocus
> “But what about mobile?” - The file syncs through Dropbox
Yup now you have to handle conflicts, or keep in mind which device you last edited on
> I use my calendar for time-specific stuff
Cool, the app I use just has a due date field that reminds me. I don't want the thing spread out over multiple places. I don't need to check my calendar every night for due dates and then add them to my list because it's already.. in my list.. with due dates..
> It’s searchable
Kind of? For basic searches I guess.. and only on a computer. Searching plain text files on mobile is hell
They seem to be inventing problems and then implementing a solution that doesn't actually solve them. Kept forgetting to check Things? How does a plain text file solve that?
> Kept forgetting to check Things? How does a plain text file solve that?
This. It just doesn’t. My bet is that some people just need to change their tools from time to time. And tbh I think it’s totally fine, no need to explain yourself. Just buy another todo list app and don’t feel bad about it. Or this expensive paper notebook. Or this “dumb phone” that will make you productive. Maybe just don’t try to find a deeper meaning in it or try to convince everyone that you finally solved some big mistery
Probably. Whatever method I use, physical or digital, it tends to fade into the background after a while and I stop noticing it. My best bet might be to switch to a new method every few weeks, in which case it's probably best to keep them simple and cheap. Maybe a whiteboard for a while, then a notebook, then a text file, and so on looping through a few basic methods.
I echo the authors sentiment except for one thing: mobile-native editing experience. This is where Google Keep shines for me personally. I need to also be able to modify my notes immediately and with an intuitive note taking interface.
Shameless plug: I built [1] and use a small magit like interface on top of org-mode.
I love org for all its bells and whistles and use them in various ways. But most of the time I need a small subset of org in a form-factor that allows ease of use.
Markdown on Obsidian is a prestine setup. Can be used to embed many file types; media, documents, code snippets, graphs, ... all this can be linked and this unlocks so much context.
Being able to sync that; My 2nd hand Lenovo running Linux and my Samsung S20 Phone.
I am a tech creative and this is one of my vice.
Having a todo is an opportunity to go through your experiences for clarity.
I feel the pain of this, I use obsidian for my day to day note taking and tasks to do as a general plan, I push tasks from Slack into Trello inbox as people chat me things that I need to look into, I make reminders for myself while away from a computer on my iPhone via Siri.
Apple reminders has a kanban now that is actually pretty okay, but I dont have a great way to get things from slack into it - manually copying all the text/attachments/url is super annoying.
There is an app that syncs your reminders with an obsidian task list, but I ran into too many bugs with it resetting and taking too long to clean all the old shit up that just got archived due to not being required.
I could probably get away with a bunch of MCP servers that query my local reminders, trello, and obsidian daily notes, outlook calendar, gmail calendar.... but it feels like such a bad way of going about aggregating everything.
My inbox is my todo list. If I want to go nuts I can add a “waiting for them” label. Archive means done. Unread means unprocessed. I can send myself an email or if the task originates from someone else their email thread is the task. For voicemail, call, SMS heavy workflows of the past I routed my sms and voicemail through my inbox as well. This tooling is very personal but the above I’ve found to standup to very large workloads.
My journey has been identical, and I have a suspicion that this inability to use an app with bells and whistles might have something to do with ADHD.
I actually ended up making an app as a side project which is just todo.txt with one extra feature: if you start a line with a "!", it turns that line to a push notification on your lock screen. just keeps the important things in your list just a bit closer to awareness without overwhelming
I see that nobody mentions Howm for Emacs. I find it more simple than Org-mode and its task sorting algorithm just works well for my brain. I really recommend it to those interested in a zettlekasten like note system with integrated tasks, all in text files.
This flies a bit in the face of the author's "The sync breaks. The company sells out and dies" point and the simple beauty of a text file. I find that Obsidian.md is just one step above a text file.
Simple daily notes, which are automatically organized into year and month folders. (Tip: Set the date format to YYYY/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD)
The Sync feature works great, but no reason you couldn't do this with just git on your own.
Plenty of built-in features (Plugins, ToDos, etc...)
Cross platform apps.
Markdown
Free. The sync feature is $4/month. Worth it for me.
They also have a one-time $25 payment to get early access to beta versions and a VIP discord channel.
I love Obsidian and the sync is worth it, but I wouldn't say it's one step above a text file. It's miles away. Never-ending features and customisations. If you want simplicity, a text file really can't be beaten.
I use Obsidian as basically just a markdown editor that I can throw images into. I find that all of the bells and whistles stay out of your way if you don't want them.
The point is, you don't need to play with extra features and customizations if you don't want to, so you can keep it "a step above a text file". That said, having those additional features is nice when you want just a little bit more, or you want to link a note file with your todo file, etc.
I just use Google Keep Note as my todo app.
You don't need anything complex than that.
I call my notes as DeathNotes where tasks go to die i.e. finish.
It reminds me of the developers I know who spend 6 hours out of every 8 hour day tinkering with their obscure toolsets and crazy build systems to avoid writing code.
I've seen folks using vim get way more done than some of these Youtube addicted professional tool testers.
After using Evernote for 10 years and seeing what they did to it, I'm never switching from plain txt/md files for notes and todos. For simple and daily todos, I just use iPhone notes (They don't have anything long-term or important, and the sync is nice).
For the rest, I just use plain files that are encrypted locally and stored on GitHub and Google Drive.
I totally wrote my own TODO system. It's actually quite featureful, and it works as a command-line program that stores its data in a human-readable text file. And can produce graphs. Admittedly, it's more of a time-tracking system with an attached TODO list than anything else, and it doesn't pop up reminders for anything - I have an annoying calendar for that instead. Maybe one day I'll pop it on github and see if anyone else likes it.
It's challenging. I struggle with the mismatch between work and personal in particular. They run both on different software stack and different cadence. On work side I'm constrained by whatever corporate thingie they give us, and on personal side I prefer selfhost FOSS...so fundamentally incompatible
No idea except knowing if I can crack this my life would be better
I've never found that emailing to a todo.txt file works very well. Seriously, though, if your only goal is to make a long list of things you don't want to forget, use a text file, paper, or any system you want. I get a boatload of things to do in my email. Forwarding the message to a task manager reduces a lot of stress.
Another thing for me is the ability to capture files or take pictures. I just can't do that with todo.txt in an efficient way. Being able to grab my phone and snap a picture or create a new task and upload a file is hard to beat. I can later come back and add some comments.
Good man. Everyone eventually reaches the same year zero: a text file.
Then adds structure back, as it suits their persona. Not too much, not too little, just right - goldilocks. It's very personal, even more than a smartphone.
For me - $ githome add logBook to git $HOME solves versioning and replication:
I prefer keeping everything in one file as well, since even the act of creating a new file is sometimes enough of a hassle for me to skip jotting something important down.
Question for fellow one-file'ers: what do you on mobile? My problem in the past was that all plain text editor apps on iOS open files at the top, which meant scrolling all the way down every time I opened my notes file.
These days I use NotePlan, but I don't really use enough of its features to justify continuing my subscription (the dev is really great though).
I don't use a to do file, but I do keep notes in (mostly) a single text file, and I just have them on a server exposed to the internet. When I need to read/write something I SSH to the box and use Vim to update the note.
I wouldn't recommend this if you didn't already have a server set up for other reasons, but it might be a useful option for some commenters here.
How about writing new things at the top of the file? If you use dates as sections you can still add new things at the bottom of the current day, but you always have current day at top.
Just add new notes and tasks at the top? I find that it means less important tasks tend to settle towards the bottom, and I’ll periodically go and reshuffle things as required.
Okay, so there are people who do this? I've actually considered it on several occasions, but it always felt a bit 'wrong', like prepending rather than appending to an array.
I like the idea though of less important things being farther down, like sediment, whereas current/important things stay closer to the surface. There's a fun metaphor in there.
Obsidian is great but it's a productivity trap for me. The last time I got into it I went too far in designing the 'perfect' PKM system, while not actually using it all that much. Turns out I just really like designing systems. =p
Try as I might, the best to-do/task list I can come up with is a legal pad. Mixed with notes of the day for meetings or ad-hoc remembering-of-things.
Closest to that is a .txt file in my specific format, but even that is not quite as good.
The days/weeks I can maintain discipline with a legal pad are much more productive. It works well if you work out of an office or a single location, but breaks down quickly if you are moving around.
A notebook is a close second, just not quite as easy to go page through quickly to figure out wtf you were doing 3 weeks ago or find that one note you're pretty sure you have but not quite sure where or when.
I've tried pretty much every electronic form out there, but have never been able to maintain it. The Remarkable 2 comes the closest, but I've found it tends to be very much "write only" compared to a legal pad. Hard to go through it and reference past notes quickly.
The author's complaints about the various solutions hit home. My wife and I tried a bunch of solutions for shared tasks and lists. Finally I found vikunja, put it on my home cluster, and it's been a game changer. We never run out of milk due to a lack of communication, and I have no excuse to forget the chore she asked me to get around to last week.
There really is a sweet spot between helping productivity and overcomplicating life, and most of these applications go for the latter. Glad we finally found something that works for us. I'm just sharing here hoping it'll help someone else.
- Reminders: I just have a few simple lists: TODO, WIP, and BLOCKED (for stuff I'm waiting on others for).
- Notes: I keep daily, weekly, and monthly notes. At the end of each day, I clean up my daily note and move anything important to the weekly one, and then do the same into monthly.
The pinnacle of notes and task lists was achieved in 1997 by the Palm Pilot. It’s been downhill ever since. I realize some people need or want something more integrated and elegant, but simple really does suffice for the vast majority of cases.
I used a different model of Palm and miss it. It is simple and just works. Ironically, with the current much more powerful smartphone, I have yet to find something similar to the Palm. The only downside of Palm was its frustrating touchscreen.
I can't imagine using a to-do app that isn't Obsidian+tasks. You can link notes for infinite subtasking and for describing/logging to your heart's desire. Just better version of txt
I have a "never-ending .txt file" too. About 4100 pages' worth, at the moment, across 25 volumes and counting, over the span of now nearly eight years.
I don't intend particularly to advocate the format here, but I will say that of all my many bookshelves, in a certain way there's none I find more satisfying than the one I work to fill myself. Is that worth more than being able to use grep(1) on their contents? Or are those contents worth more to me because I can't? Who could say, but it's fun to think about, at least. (And for those young enough to be easily swayed by vanity, if you think performative reading is in fashion right now...)
I was also dissatisfied with existing task tracking apps, and built my own:
t-do.com
There are still many rough edges, but it’s extremely useful. One of the best features that a text file has that very few apps support is unlimited sub-task nesting, and that’s a core feature of T-Do.
I made a dumb command-line tool that sends a 1-line email to my work email or to my personal email. The tool is in my PATH on 2 computers. I use paper when I'm not at my computer and I have small pen and small paper with me at all times. Occasionally I send texts to my email address. I'm considering giving this tool to my coworkers.
I like that the author mentions making a post it and actually achieving all the stuff on the post-it.
I have a portable whiteboard on my desk, around the size of a sheet of printer paper. I use it only to write the things I want to accomplish today. I have found that very effective for me personally.
I believe todo apps run into the challenge that "to do" is way too broad a concept. Personally I track in-progress tasks (on a giant roll of paper), recurring and schedule tasks (especially where I coordinate with my spouse; on a dedicated Skylight smart-calendar), long term ideas and goals (as issues in a dedicated GitHub repo), meeting follow-ups (as .txt), groceries (on scrap paper), etc. The UX I want for each of these is quite different so I've never been able to make a generic todo app work. Worse, I'd hate to accidentally see my work list when I'm trying to do housework as I'm liable to start a side quest. So I need dedicated tools for each type of list.
I came to the same conclusion. Except I decided I could make a simpler software. I'm still in the "one more feature bro" phase, but if this blog post resonates for anyone and you're open to a simple saas -- would love feedback https://grugnotes.com
I made my own. I needed to have a calendar that showed every todo item per day, and a text editor to edit the tasks just like in a todo.txt. Used it all day every day for over 15 years. I still have it installed on nearly all my Win systems, just because it opens instantly, has priority and colors. I also used it to produce reports for work, so I eventually added export options for HTML to paste directly into an email.
There is definitely something to be said for simple file formats augmented with tooling like LLMs and such. I am one of the people who also ended up writing my own todo list app. It really started as a journaling system, but it was super simple to add TODOs. I basically created my own clone of Logseq if anyone is familiar with that. I've basically got what the author has got, but I've automated the part where a fresh page is created each day, and a feature to quickly move undone TODOs to any day.
The only feature I need that would accelerate my workflow that text file editors don't currently have is a column with the last modified timestamp of that particular line, and maybe some color indication to show which lines were modified the most recently compared to others. And this would be based on change, not based on save or commit.
https://workflowy.com is the closest to a text file I've used and that's why I like it. It's like a text file that is synchronized between all your devices and lets you collapse nested bullet lists. That's enough for me.
Came to say this. It's not exactly a todo list, and it certainly isn't "yours", but it's very close to a text file, with just about the right amount of additional functionality, and it's free.
I don't use it all that often but it's a good companion, for example to make checklists for packing, etc.
Suggestion for Android: Tasks — I’ve been using this (free) to-do list, planner and reminders app for probably more than ten years now, mostly as a shopping list app. Be aware that there are other apps with very similar names and icons.
I've had a plain TODO.txt file for over 20 years so I agree with all the benefits the author mentioned. However, I don't like it because without an app, there's no runtime loop to notify and alert me of what's coming up.
This means I don't have "ambient awareness" of what's going on unless... I open the TODO.txt file ... manually scan it... then rescan it again and again multiple times per day. It's really tedious and inefficient to manually re-read the same items again. Offloading repetition like that is what computers are good for. I just don't have a good app at the moment to turn my TODO.txt into something I don't have to manually eyeball all the time.
So even though I have a tasks in my TODO.txt, a lot of things still falls through the cracks because I forget I need to do them.
If you have the type of brain that has a built-in "6th sense" of tasks that need to get done, a lightweight-no-runtime TODO.TXT will work fine for you. But it's definitely inadequate for me and I need to fix that.
EDIT replies to "use calendar for reminders" : Yes, that's a workaround but I've resisted doing that because I wanted the utopia of my TODO.TXT file being the Single-Source-Of-Truth instead of manually copying items to Google Calendar. (Yes, I know that "perfection is the enemy of the good" and all that.) The way other people do it is they make Google Calendar itself the SSOT. But that defeats the purpose of the freeform flexibility of the TODO.TXT that has all the notes, etc in addition to tasks.
I want my TODO.TXT to be a unified view of everything I want to do in life and splitting some items off into Google Calendar is just more digital housekeeping I wanted to avoid.
... but that requires an active runtime loop ... like a Python script constantly scanning my TODO.TXT and then automatically populating the Google Calendar. I just haven't gotten around to coding that yet. Yes, the irony is that meta-task to enhance my TODO.txt is already in my TODO.txt.
I want to address the underlying philosophy behind your edit (and also your original comment). "Perfect is the enemy of good" is not just "all that." It is the thing, the critical design constraint. Computers are a hundred years old. If you believe all repetition should be offloaded to computers -- it sounds like that isn't working for you? I'm in the same boat, and I reacted by.. reducing my standards. I have a tool. It isn't perfect and there are no signs it's going to get perfect in my lifetime. So I don't wait for perfection. I get on with my life. Even if computers will be suitable for all repetitive tasks in another hundred years.
I do have a single source of truth, and it's my todo list. However, I manualate to keep it thus. When I add something to the calendar, I copy it over to my todo list as well.
I don't do this for everything, only stuff that improves my decision making. So an appointment with a barber can just be on my calendar. Long todo lists intimidate me anyway, so it would do more harm than good cluttering up my view of critical decisions I need to make. Stuff like, "what should I make next," or "how should this thing be designed?"
So if manualating seems like too much work, I'd suggest that maybe you're taking on too much in the critical decision category, in which case you might make better decisions by focusing on fewer things. But yeah, YMMV. This is how I think about it and it works well for me.
For event-based things I tend to have a reminder on my calendar. If things are relatively important, you'd assign them some kind of priority; in a simple .txt file, I'd expect them to be at the top for instance.
If the file has too many important tasks (such that I lose track of them), it means that at least some of them are not actually important and they should be revisited. IIRC that's the point of the weekly review mentioned in the GTD book: don't assume your workflow keeps working as you use it, there is some regular maintenance involving taking a step back and revisitings tasks, prioritizations etc.
Another way to solve this is to use Fossil. Fossil has a built-in wiki. You can launch Fossil UI and use the built-in wiki with Markdown. Have legacy txt files? Just open a new fossil project and add them to it. And if you set up the admin and user correctly, you can mirror your notes to GitHub. So, it's not that text files are not a good option. There are vastly superior options with almost no effort.
I've been running a text based todo/status doc for about that long and my hack for that particular problem is to occasionally do a scan and copy anything 'active' to the top (or bottom if you append to the end :) of the file. Yeah, there's a bit of duplication there (I usually just copy a short description and a pointer back to the date of the original so not so bad..), but it works for me.
Surely this would be easy to fix with a simple script that runs on a VPS to alert you on a platform of your choice, maybe using something like Apprise (https://github.com/caronc/apprise). Get the notification as an email, on Discord, Signal, etc.
This does complicate the system a bit, but still low overhead in my opinion.
I use a very basic system similar to this idea of running TODO.txt, but they are notecards i write every day. I sit them Infront of me and any timed tasks go onto the calendar. Outlook Calendar has notifications so those are my prompts for time based activities.
i realized either it's pen & or paper or .txt this was a 10+ year experiement and i wasted alot of time finding and building workflows and none of them sticks more than .txt file (i also had a more automated version of it in macos using .txt file and macros that time blocked my calendar but it was too restrict)
nothing falls my mind i can just add #note #<project> #idea or whatever consistent tagging or subnotes i can do the todo.txt and it'd be easier to even feed it to chatgpt/or what everllm to even remind of my most important ones in the future and send me notification in telegram or something.
It's a big upfront investment but it's one of the things that Org mode with its built in agenda view is fantastic for. I've really never needed anything else for note taking and scheduling.
I just switched to printing my todo tasks on a receipt printer. I have an arduino connected to a receipt printer and a Python script that can send commands to the arduino to print tasks. Also just finished adding barcode scanning so the task gets printed with a barcode and I use an iOS Shortcut to mark the task as complete. Actually works so well! Having the tasks in physical form helps me stay more focused and scanning the barcode to mark a task as complete feels so satisfying. I have the code if anyone wants to delve into this but it does require arduino + receipt printer + a TTL to RS232 module, though! And BPA-free receipt paper if you are concerned about that.
Markdown with Obsidian is a good mix. Let's you add context and you could figure a way to sync with phone from my 2nd hand lenovo running linux to view; code snippets, documents, media, graphs, ...all due to the - in my own view the universal document format.
I am a tech creative so I am okay with this vice.
Trying to finetune the above setup btw.
I just use a Kanban board for my to-do's, and it has been working amazingly well for years now. I sort stuff based on four columns, starting with the most important that should be done "today".
I love Markdown files with editors such as Obsidian or Logseq, but found them to be suboptimal for to-do's / tasks.
A few years back a friend approached me with an idea to track todos in Google Calendar directly by adding #todo to event titles. If you don't mark them as done they will roll forward to the next day. We ended up shutting it down as a product, but I recently vibe coded it back as a Google Apps Script so it's free to run on your own. It works super well for people who live off of their calendar - https://github.com/slackpad/hashtagtodo-redux.
I'm also a fan of the minimalist approach, having settled on a combination of Notes app and temporary paper lists. When I'm feeling overwhelmed and really need to knock out some tasks, nothing beats pencil and paper for me.
I recently came across the Analog product from Ugmonk and I love it. It's basically just a dedicated little wood holder for you desk, and different types of cards. I use the blank lined cards.
What perspective are you coming from where that is a crazy amount? If it works for one it will become a part of their daily life. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Most pairs of pants cost at least that much unless you're of the "I only shop at Costco/Target" mindset.
I'm sure you could get a knockoff or DIY and save a few bucks but I appreciate the thought that's gone into their designs.
Couldn't agree with this more! Obsidian is my go-to. I essentially do the same thing but make look a little better with Obsidian's markdown theming/formatting. I keep a Priorities.md file and review that at the start of each day, making needed updates as I go.
I use a pretty similar setup. At the beginning of my day when I get to my desk at work I open a new .txt and enter all the tasks I'm currently working on (copied from the last day). I then mark them as completed or leave notes as needed. Works perfectly for me - no need for anything more fancy.
This is what I do with my "Daily Brain Dump". I use Apple Notes bc it syncs up nicely with my phone. Every day I add a new entry to the top of the note. Mix of TODO's and a journal. Actually have two files, one for my life in general and one for work.
Exactly this. I realized that full featured tools like OmniPlan made increased my anxiety because it is too easy the build up to do items that you would never do. Having a simple note pad forces me to delete unnecessary cruft every week since I have to manually copy it. Also the notes approach gives me one place to look for and summarize all of my activities.
For short term tasks (task-cache) I have ended up with essentially the same thing, just using *.md file + Notepad++ because of markdown syntax highlighting + snappiness of Notepad++ and I can then see it as a webpage using Markdown Viewer extension on Firefox.
For structured documentation of my projects + searching + writing notes down on the go via phone I am using Joplin.
For tasks to be done on a specific date I have calendar
For project management I have Redmine behind VPN so I can get on it from anywhere.
It's simple enough for me to understand but has the following features I want:
nice simple UI where I can add stuff without too many clicks
syncs between phone and browser (requires $1.49/mo which I'm fine with)
Can make multiple lists
Can drag items around in the list
Can add a longer description and reminders
For tech side projects I use GitHub issues as TODO/wish lists
For work I use a Google Doc to plan out the days tasks and meetings (similar to todo.txt). Google docs is really nice for this because I can collapse headers to shorten yesterdays work and use checklists that I check off as the day passes. I can also scribble notes in a freeform fashion at the bottom. I dedicate a whole browser (Safari) just to this page so I can easily tab to it.
For work I use MSFT Todo for stuff I'd like to do "at some point when I get time" (it's approved by my company, unlike my personal Todo app)
I find it most interesting that despite Notions appeal and fanbase, it continues to lead to failure of this function. I am one of those who has built not just one, but two two apps for this! But, for todo management, I still use a Notes file (.txt on iOS is hard). I suspect that the upcoming integration with AI/calendar in iOS 26 will make it less appealing to me however, because it will take away the control and simplicity of managing things myself manually.
Other benefits of plain text notetaking: perfect versioning, using favorite text editor (therefore spell checking and various tools), amazing integration with unix programs, support on any platform/device.
Two shortcomings are: figure out cross-device sync (ssh/nfs are good options), reinventing the wheel for rich text (tags, references, data tables, etc.)
Once things became overwhelming, it was less trackable across time and became messy - so I created tascli: https://crates.io/crates/tascli to centrally manage tasks and records with sqlite in a CLI app.
Think I'm in a sweet spot now having both of these minimal version logging - the lack of functionality is exactly why they are great.
I spent my 20s searching for the perfect todo solution but my search ended when I discovered org-mode. It's not that I'm the most productive person you'll meet, it's just that there's nothing further to look for. Should I decide to be my productive self for a while, I know org-mode will support me and not stand in my way :)
I swear by Mindmapping Applications (e.g. Xmind, Mindmanager) - one file every month (extractable with a python library for LLM evaluation).
One top-level branch is a prioritized Inbox with a Pending branch at the top (Item half-completed, but awaits external action, e.g. an order has to arrive).
One top-level branch with Done, which is a folder with a branch for each week, then day, where I dump completed items into
One top-level branch for ongoing subscriptions with alerts
Collapsed top-level branches for Hobbies and Family Ideas and things-to-do
With xmind, you can easily tag the task progress of each item.
Took me 8 years, including a really beautiful Android ToDo Concept which I build and ended up abandoning :D
I also do the text file thing. I use EditPad Pro. The only additional thing I've done is create syntax coloring in any file named 'tasks-*.txt'.
I added simple things like:
- Color anything ending in a ? green, so when looking at a list of notes, so I know where the questions were.
- Any line beginning with an all caps word is highlighted (e.g. TODO: )
- Any line ending in a : is highlighted light blue (e.g. title)
- Any Line Containing "Error" is red
I do suppose I could be using Markdown, but I've had this going for 20 years now.
The only thing that ever really worked for me is taskwarrior.org. It is super easy to get started and can be made more sophisticated as you. I live in the terminal most of the time anyway so that makes it a natural fit.
Read this and you clearly want something like Obsidian.
Get obsidian and then set up
- Syncthing for free open source syncing that doesn't go to any cloud, just replicates across your own devices
- You can just do a single markdown file instead of a single txt file if you really want to smoosh everything into one file (gross but you do you). markdown is portable and many software can render it easily, if they can't markdown is still readable raw plaintext
- But I would get some cool plugins like Periodic Notes and then set up either a Monthly or a Weekly periodic note. Basically the idea is the same as what you are doing, but instead of one lifetime markdown file, you split them up into monthly or weekly chunks. I do weekly (one note for each week), but its really your preference.
Now you get pretty rendering of your notes, generate sharable links to your notes, password protect them, all still free, open source, syncing, and portable (markdown plaintext)
The only note taking app I've been able to use is "Reflect" (https://reflect.app/) because it gives me a calendar view and allows linking with tags and backlinks. Plus it's encrypted and I can always export my notes.
The only downside is that it's only on OSX/IOS but the webapp is good enough for my use cases.
I use todo.txt on steroids. In fact, the file is called todo.org and is best used in Emacs' org-mode, which does the best of all worlds for decades now. I can have a plain ASCII todo list and some algorithmic magic that understands it, if I want that.
If you live in VS Code there is a notes plugin that lets you create and manage Markdown notes in the sidebar. I usually create one note per repo and then pin the tab in that repo. If you work on a lot of projects it is a great way to segregate your todos by project so you don’t get overloaded. I also have a todo folder that has multiple notes pinned (today, scratchpad and long term notes) that I keep open in my main workspace window. It works for me, YMMV.
Amazing. It doesn't surprise me that the most simple workflows are the ones that work best. Probably because there is not a lot of resistance (keyboard shortcut instead of searching through a list of apps / no tutorial on how to use it; it's just a text file / it's easily readable and you get to choose the formatting and structure of your text).
As a developer, however, I have to scratch the itch of always having "wrangleable" data, and yet again text files are the best at it. I am already thinking of doing this and just follow a set of writing "guidelines" so I can parse the txt if I wanted to do some visualization stuff.
I tried a bunch of todo apps, task trackers etc and also tried a txt file. None of it really worked for me. I tried bullet journals, I couldn’t stick to it.
What did end up working for me is a clipboard with a sheet of paper that I replace every few days. I write my todo list on it and I cross done tasks off in red marker. I guess it’s kinda like the bullet journal but even more lite.
New todo apps have absolutely amazing UIs because people think the frustration of todo apps has to do with the UI. The thing is YOU WANT FRICTION in your todo app. There is something rewarding and satisfying about a UX where you've accomplished a task and you get to check it off.
The perceived holy grail of todo apps is the one that automatically creates tasks and then checks them off when we complete the task with zero interaction. This is wrong.
Ironically, I ignored Apple’s Reminders app as an options for years. It’s now my daily operating system. Lots of simple table-stakes features out of the box that elevate the experience above just using a simple Notes app
Too much organization never helps, I've learned this with both note taking and with todo apps.
My workflow with ticktick is largely based on having all my to-dos in one "next actions" list.
Tags are the one feature I can't throw away though, most of my to-do lists is tagged with a project name. My day to day view of Ticktick is usually some tag
I started using a text todo list at work just last February. I'd tried various things over the years and this has been the best so far. It's a combination of things to do, a record of what has been done since I started, in some cases a filling in of historical important things that have happened, and as a simple way of keeping track of different steps of individual processes, or individual items that need the same fix.
The top part is the todo list and the bottom portion is a list of days and what was done beneath each.
I have an always running session of Notepad++ with (currently) 356 tabs open. I can search through all of them if needed. This worked for me after also piloting several solutions.
I like Tasks.org for Android and I think it syncs with CalDAV that comes with my e-mail provider. That should just about do the trick, even with Thunderbird.
I love this article. The magic of todos is that it's really about the process, not the apps. An app can facilitate the process, but it's not required. I personally use Things and an ongoing Google doc. It requires me to copy between them every day, but I find that forces me to do the process of prioritizing and paring down, which is the magic part. A text file would work as well.
There are a few things I wish I could magically add to the text doc, though, like inline alarms and calendar events.
I've built Wren (https://github.com/bjesus/wren) with a pretty similar idea of simplicity in mind — a task is just a file — but, it can also be whatever kind of file you want:
1. Drag an email to ~/Notes and it's a task
2. touch ~/Notes/get\ milk and it's a task
3. ln -s ~/Documents/something-i-need-to-finish-writing.doc ~/Notes/complete\ writing and it's task
Yeah - I mean I haven't been adding any new features recently, but mostly because the system just works. I'm using it daily and definitely fixing stuff if they break.
I guess the more organised you are, the better off with just a textfile. I'm not, so I use layers:
- postit notes
- google (I know!) calendar if it's time sensitive
- paper or text file notes
- if it's a longer thing, maybe obsidian (I know!)
The point is, I don't think one app, any app can solve all mankind's all scheduling problems.
In my case, I ended up using a simple note in Apple Notes, for each month/quarter, having a collapsible day heading and just adding tasks there. Bold indicates a bit of a higher priority, and I can move things that I don't complete from previous days.
There was a curses-based todo program that was totally awesome MANY years ago, source code posted to usenet I believe back in the day, but I have never been able to find it again. Anyone have a pointer?
shameless plug: I also got fed up with todo apps (and note-taking apps in general), so I built "Zettel"[1]. It's a simple piece of paper, but on your phone. It's amazing what you can get done with such a simple tool.
I've cycled between a few low tech. solutions and have finally settled on Emacs org-mode. I don't use my phone to track TODOs and this works fine for me.
I gave up on to-do apps as well. I have a text file I started in 2017. It's on my desktop and always open in a text editor. I just add the following at the top for a new entry:
20250811 - Core API - deploy to production
20250810 - Customer X - call about upgrading to new version
Every day I move items I have not yet done to the top of the list. Order in the list is the priority.
I've used a TODO.md for years. I prefer it to a .txt as I can get some syntax highlighting in Vim.
About a year ago I merged my TODO with my work journal. So now, instead of two files I just have LOG.md with the TODO stuff at the top, a horizonal line and the journal of what I've been doing each day below.
I also copy the file (e.g. LOG-2024.md) each year and clear out the journal to keep the number of lines down.
A txt (rtf in my case) is a notebook that doesn't get messy. Deepest parts go back to 2007. Cell phone alarm for reminders, also acts as a clotting agent for time. After you do what the alarm is for you have choice of setting alarm again or proceeding into the next item.
I had a similar journey, settled on a todo app that actually uses text files too
https://www.taskpaper.com
Save the text file to a cloud sync provider and you can check it on every device
This certainly doesn't apply to all cases, and version control / history is very complicated, but I use a notepad and a felt tip pen and I just couldn't use anything else to keep track of my TODOs for the day! It has been my goto ever since my first job, and it's never failed me!
nvAlt must surely have been mentioned somewhere. It’s the best by far. Very simple markdown, searchable notes etc. there’s a new version in the works (and has been for some time) but the original is still great. The best thing is that the notes are just a folder of .txt files.
I currently have three editors open: nvim (because I've been using it since it was vi), VS Code (because that's what work mandates) and Emacs (for org mode only). Horses for courses, and all that.
This is a concept I tried to sell many years ago, it is not available, but I still use it and believe this is the most flexibility in todo list. Will be happy for feedback
It is easy to create text with checkbox you can click on, and on macbook you can type fn + Q to open the floating Notes window, or use hot corners.
It is automatically available on your iPhone as well, since it syncs.
I had Claude Sonnet make me a text-based notes/todo app.
I write all of my notes in plain text, but I can add things like:
#Note: title
This is a note
--
And the text editor will highlight the note and show it in another window that shows all notes.
I can edit this in any standard text editor if I'm on a device without my custom app.
I can also convert them into sticky notes that are each "always on top" windows that can be dragged/dropped to set their position.
The notes also have tags for background color, border color, font color, due by, etc... that are all set in the text. When shown as sticky notes or in the note list, markdown content can be rendered.
Using text for the raw content and having a tool that will parse and display the content in a way that works for me has really made for a great note taking experience.
This is the best thing in a long time. Made me feel productive just by reading it. I've made my own list and plan to attack it diligently today. Most of the highly productive people I've made are just militant about
I tried both Org and taskwarrior, still for me it takes more actions, more frictions and formatless nature of txt file suits me otherwise I will end up optmizing my org mode workflow lol
I do a combined TODO + Log in pure text. So the stuff at the bottom of the list is todo, and the stop above is a log of stuff I've done. I do one list per year.
i like text files for day to day lists that are easily discarded. what am i trying to do for work today, who do i need to call, other reminders
for longer term planning i’ve found todoist to be indispensable. UI and features haven’t changed much in years, great cross platform, pretty enable to different styles of planning, etc
you are forgetting the most goat/clutch better than .txt - pen on back of hand :) (being completely serious/earnest here. great article, read thru the whole thing. same experience, tho i do love things), but ultimately back to my tried true high school days, timeless, eternal: WRITE IT ON THE BACK OF YOUR HAND THEN WASH IT OFF
BONUS - take a PHOTO as soon as you write it (so you can check later if needed, 99% never. just cognitive safety). but BODY as POST-IT is FASTEST, TIMELESS
That's exactly my workflow but I use markdown txt file, and use vim + macros for auto inserting a new entry with date or marking things done. Plus some custom syntax highlighting for done tasks.
my slightly next gen todo is a notebook on my remarkable. added features are sharing between devices, and since it's eink its a good paper like alternative to sticky-notes. For me beating procrastination can be more important than organizing many subtasks.
FWIW, i only use this for work todos and differentiate todo with calendar(paper calendar and dry erase board for home, outlook for work calendar)
MS Onenote? I have a page called "todo" but it never really took off. I suppose if the lesson here is "extreme simplification", then MS Onenote--> todo.txt represents an improvement.
Similar experience here, except I'm using the built in notes app on my phone and keep nothing more than a list. When I used various todo apps, I felt as if I was fighting against them.
My favorite todo app is "NotePlan.co" which actually uses .txt files for its data storage. The file is synced on icloud and can be used on iOS and mac OS apps.
ToDo apps are a perfect example of coming up with solutions for a non-existent problem. Most of the tech solutions fall into this category.
When the consumer gets to take a hard look at their needs and gives a thrashing for sales pitch and doesn't give a damn to peer pressure, and demands for a bare-bones functional solutions only for their real and immediate needs, 90% of these solutions vanish into thin air.
Another way to solve this is to use Fossil. Fossil has a built-in wiki. You can launch Fossil UI and use the built-in wiki with Markdown. Have legacy txt files? Just open a new fossil project and add them to it. And if you set up the admin and user correctly, you can mirror your notes to GitHub. So, it's not that text files are not a good option. There are many vastly superior options with almost no effort.
I'd be happy if I could define my own notification system on top of a text file tbh.
I can't tell you how many times I would have forgotten something if I had not made it a timestamped reminder.
That said, most apps all suck in various ways. So I feel the urge to just use text.
I'm currently using Reminders.app (the default on iOS) and it's nice that it's somewhat lightweight. But organizing things is clunky and the experience feels flimsy.
All throughout college I used Trello, and frankly it was better that way. I should go back, except every time I log in something new is different and I don't like change.
Next, next version, just commit everything to working memory, as in one's brain. To help with this, simply tell others what you are doing and give them updates. Practice can be gained by doing things such as shopping without a list. Hacks can also be used, so a list of code fixes can be called 'updating the specs', even though it is a list of things to do.
As for pen and paper, writing things down is a way of committing todos to working memory, the paper does not have to be referred to, just the act of writing means that it gets noted.
Forgetfulness is a feature. If it wasn't important and it gets forgotten, then forgetfulness has worked.
Joking aside, todo lists, in whatever form, are rarely going to be forever solutions, and, depending on the task and who you are working with, the solution is going to vary.
What is fascinating is working with someone that has all the tools for the day job and to work on another project, for instance DIY. They might have all of these fancy project management tools for work, but do they use them for renovating the house?
Of course not! They are back to either pen and paper or just working memory.
Spreadsheet programs such as LibreOffice are the next level. These are the most advanced and easily customized text files yet. Think of these as multidimensional text files that are all connected in an endless grid. Text files may seem ok, but managing tens of thousands of pages across sheets and books seems more straightforward with the spreadsheet format. But Vim is a great fallback when sheets are overkill.
To be honest, I have never understood the TODO "industry." Do people really have so many things to do, and is it really that difficult to keep track of them all? I do not know if it's just me but I feel completely alienated by these apps and articles.
House projects: Probably over 20 distinct chores over the course of a week, plus currently two maintenance things that I can't do myself and have to call people repeatedly because 90% of contractors just don't show up unless you remind them to.
Kids: most things can be handled immediately (e.g. sign a form), but there are always at least half-a-dozen things in the air that can't for one reason or another.
Other: Resubmitting medical bills to insurance (can only be done during business hours, I typically open my mail after business hours). Contacting bank about something. &c.
Here's a fraction of what I'm doing today, including one from each category (except calling a contractor because my wife is doing that):
- I have to contact my bank during business hours because they sent me the wrong form (discovered while I was filling it out this weekend).
- I need to call a coworker because one project is blocked on them regarding an issue that they haven't replied to my e-mail sent Thursday afternoon.
- I need to pickup my daughter from a day-camp on the way home from work. Before dark, I need to weed part of the front yard.
- Tonight the trash (but not the recycling) goes out to the curb for a pickup tomorrow morning.
Yes, I have met people who can keep track of these things in their head. I am not one of them.
For someone with ADD, it can be extremely difficult to keep track of even 3-4 relatively simple items that need completed in a day. They will get distracted by something minor, and 8 hours later have completed 20 things in a highly productive manner, but 0 of the 3-4 important items they were supposed to do (and most likely, they will have forgotten those items existed entirely). For me what works is starting each day with a list of 3 items that need done that day, and to check that list about every 30 minutes all day long.
That's a fair point - but most of these threads focus on comparing systems rather than discussing whether they are necessary in the first place. I can see how folks with ADHD or similar challenges would benefit from a TODO app (or similar).
I'm more curious about a broader question: at what point does life complexity actually require a formal system versus just mental tracking? Tech people are, for the most part, the only people I encounter actively using and iterating on their TODO solutions, and I am skeptical that in general they lead more complex lives.
Maybe virtual tasks need better organization or reminders than physical tasks. I rarely forget to wash my dishes because the dishes are right there. I don't forget to go gather the eggs because I have to shut up the chickens every night and check their food and water, or living creatures could die. There are physical consequences and reminders of those things.
The need to update a piece of software doesn't give me any physical cues, and if I have a couple dozen tasks like that waiting on me, I'm never going to remember them all unless they're all popping into my head throughout the day. That pretty much is how I used to try to do it, and it wasn't good.
I also just began experimenting with plaintext. At the moment, I create regular apple reminders when I want to receive a notification, and for everything else I keep a markdown file `quicknotes-YYYYMM.md`, which I use also for some some throwaway notes.
Every month, I duplicate the file, remove what's been completed and the things I don't want to do anymore. The file is on iCloud Drive in the obsidian folder, so I can edit it also from my phone.
I respect using plain text for everything so kudos to OP. That said, I use Things by Cultured Code because I really like it. Does everything I want on my various computing devices.
Everyone thinks I’m crazy for saying this, but I like Microsoft ToDo. And I’ve tried dozens of them. I’ve been using the Microsoft one for the past two years every day.
Microsoft ToDo has native apps for Mac and Windows, and a third-party one for Linux (https://itsfoss.com/kuro-to-do-app/). It has apps on iOS and Android and you can access it via the web.
It works very well. It even _finally_ (in 2023) made me switch from paper grocery lists to electronic ones.
Things3 has also worked incredibly well for me for the past 4 years. My only wish is that they would roll out a version for Windows. I have been in the Apple ecosystem for quite some time so it was never a problem until I built a gaming PC that I also started using for work. As a result of this switch, I have to rely heavily on my phone to manage tasks. I still think this beats a todo.txt file that I would have to put quite a bit of effort in to manage every day and set up exactly how I want it, but is a big pain point for sure.
For work I use Logseq, but I treat it like a .txt file. 90% of my use is the daily journal pages, adding NOW and LATER todos, notes, whatever. The ability to link nodes to other pages or nodes is just good enough to beat out a .txt.
For my personal life I use Things 4. I bought the Mac and iOS versions. Despite the steep price for the Mac version, I think it's worth it. I appreciate how the app is organized. I like that the "Inbox" dumping ground is totally separate from the "Today" queue, that it pulls in calendar events to the Today queue, and the differentiation of Anytime vs Someday. I would forget to check it too, if I hadn't placed a large widget right on my Home Screen. It's the first thing I see any time I unlock my phone, it helps a lot.
I am also an avid user of post-it notes. I like to keep a stack of them on my desk. These are for things I need to complete _today_, if not _up next_. This is how I stay focused when I'm in deep work. "add test for new sort fn", "better name for site/tenant var", "need new fixture for sortables", that kind of thing. When I leave my desk I should have no sticky notes on it, whatever left ends up in Logseq.
Totally agreed - Things for Mac/iOS/iPad/Watch is a great ecosystem and Just Works™.
I started by reading the GTD book, and then tried lots of different apps, but Things for Mac by Cultured Code requires the least work and conforms roughly to the GTD approach. I don't use the strict GTD approach, but its approach to quickly writing down ideas and thoughts has shaped a lot of how I operate at work and even in my personal life.
I record stuff I want to have around in TXT files, by week every week over 10 years. The files lived on OneDrive for a time, but now on my desktop, backed up daily. Advantage is I can search.
My to-do list was sticky notes forever, moved to new ones when the old was getting too worn out to read. Now it's Rite notebooks as needed.
AI helps but isn’t needed: With Cursor/Claude Code or Neovim + Supermaven, I can write my entire day’s schedule in 5 minutes. The AI completes my sentences, predicts meeting times, memorizes how I write tasks.
In a typical todo list, I expect the following features (explained with examples of a typical school timetable:
What, When, Where, Who, Color, Some Notes, Completion checkmark.
1. Name of the event/task e.g. Chemistry
2. Day/Date/Time of the task (can either be specific weekdays or a specific date with time) e.g. Monday at 9:30am, Thursday at 4pm.
3. Person who the task will be with (professor name) e.g. John Doe
4. Location of task e.g. McKenzie Hall Room 504
5. Color e.g. red or hex code #FF0000
6. Some extra notes
7. Maybe ability to add checkmark before the task when it's done. This can be done using the unicode character.
We also need nested tasks (think Lab for Chemistry or some Assignment due for Chemistry). This can be done by adding tabs or hyphens before the line.
The format which works best is a text file containing:
-------------
Chemistry on Monday at 9:30am, Thursday at 4pm #green @McKenzie Hall Room 504 by John Doe //this comment can be a note
- Lab on Wednesday at 2pm by 8am #blue //don't forget to bring lab coat
- Assignment on Mar 9 at 8am #red
Dentist appointment on April 5 at 11am
/* Full block comment which is multiline.
Lorem ipsum is placeholder text commonly used in the graphic, print, and publishing industries for previewing layouts and visual mockups. */
Me personally I'm very satisfied by org-mode, but the main point is not org-mode itself but Emacs, or an integrated, end-user programmable environment. Org-agenda handle todos, but in the same notes I handle attachments, runnable live code, links to mails/threads, ... because of that and that's the point: we have a single brain, we need systems who are integrated as well.
Not a gazillion of independent apps lacking also unix CLI IPCs (only cut&paste), but a single integrate, moldable one. Modern software have ERPs as best integrated solution, Emacs is the most integrated one still alive and kicking, Smalltalk workstations and LispM was the best from the past.
Maybe in some more decades, a step at a time, we will be back at such evolutive levels...
I wanted to make my own todo app. One thing that I would want is to reorder things, group and rank them etc.
For example, in my text file I usually put the number of minutes or hours something would take, and then order things by easiest first, to get things done. That way I have less things to carry over for the next day.
I also found that if I keep procrastinating on important but long things, it probably means I need to hire someone, or partner with someone, who is better than me in that thing. I don't believe in pushing myself more than I already am, or optimizing personal productivity, I think it's actually a sign that I need to work on recruiting people to a startup or join an existing project. I believe in optimizing the organization and its systems, not people.
Like the simplicity ... but this would never work for me ... I literally have thousands of tasks and ideas and notes and possible tasks and checklists and ...
The key is being able to filter all of your tasks down quickly to what's essential today. No way in hell I can visual-scan everything that's important to me.
I went through the same process and now use a text file, or more accurately, I use a "canvas" in slack which is essentially a free-form text page with Markdown formatting (including check boxes that I can check). I make one page per month, with H1 headings for each day.
The reason I use this in Slack is that I already have Slack open all day and don't want to have YetAnotherWindowOpen. Also, I get sync between computers/devices for free.
This is just for the work I need to do that day. Otherwise we have YouTrack tickets; any meetings I set in Google Calendar.
I suppose I'm boring and already in the Apple ecosystem, but Notes app has checkbox and indent support, works between laptop and phone nicely. Just works
Yep. I lost all my notes to a proprietary format back in 2004. I've been 100% a notes.txt person ever since and it's never failed me nor been not enough.
I don't know what people are talking about not having notification or not being aware. Just make a habit of looking at it and put important stuff near the top with attention grabbing characters by it.
it's actualy simpler to text yourself a note and keep the "conversation" as a file
would be nice if basic andriod allowed for a long press, and then create a file/document, like *** gasp*** a word processor
My advice to anyone, is to start tracking stuff on paper, and once you've got some workflow nailed down, search for digital tools to augment it (or be fine with the current workflow). I prefer digital and have settled on org mode. It has the structure that I would need to implement if I was starting with .txt files.
Another tool I like is Things.app. But it's Apple only and I'm moving away from that ecosystem.
Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes:
- having your computer alert you to things that come up
- being able to tag notes
- being able to add events to a calendar
- being able to set priority of tasks
- expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda
- being able to add recurring tasks
- full-text search (grepping)
- formatting features (markdown)
Some of the laborious (or, in my opinion, plain unholy) solutions include:
- feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter for the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications
- hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list
- running a script on a VPS to sync notifications
- set up cron job with git commit
- writing post-it notes by hand
I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings (though provisions exist for vim users), but _every_ item on the list above is handled out of the box, or is offered through a free and maintained plugin.
The author of the OP claims to have tried _every_ todo app, and has afterwards moved (regressed?) to writing notes in a plain text file, but there is a path extending from this point that the author has not walked yet. I strongly suggest that, especially for people with a computing or technical background, it is an undisputed upgrade. https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html being the bible, of course.
What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them.
I think reading docs, understanding a new system which someone else has designed, and fitting one's brain into _their_ organisational structure is the hard part. Harder than designing one's own system. It's the reason many don't stick with an off-the-shelf app. Including Org mode.
> What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them
I think this is a vocal minority. Outside of internet comment sections, most everyone I know doesn’t care that much about their todo list software.
The most productive people I ever worked with all had really minimal productivity software. For one person it was a Google doc with nested lists. I know several people who preferred physical sticky notes or 3x5 note cards.
A lot of the people I’ve worked with who built elaborate productivity systems and custom software weren’t all that productive. They seemingly spent as much time doing productivity rituals and rearranging their productivity software stack as they did doing actual work. I count the really heavy Notion users in this category because I’ve recently been pulling my hair out dealing with a couple PMs who think “reorganizing Notion” and adding more rules for Notion is a good use of their time each week.
The most extreme example I remember was the eccentric coworker who was building an AI-powered productivity tool that was supposed to optimize his todo lists and schedule them according to his daily rhythms. He spent so much time working on it that our manager had to remind him daily to stay on track with his real work. He was obsessed with “productivity tooling” but the productivity was secondary.
Not everyone is like this, but it happens a lot.
I strongly agree. I think it's a form of procrastinating.
I read about all these complex systems for notes and second brains and whatnot.
All procrastinating imho.
That’s been my personal experience. Spend plenty of time looking at all kind of options to optimize my ir my teams workflow. Then just fallback on pen and paper or some very simple excel spreadsheet. Something thinking about being more productive makes you feel productive.
Sounds similar to playing video games: the rules are simple, so once you understand them, you can feel mighty and powerful simply by accomplishing banal tasks. Makes for a great dopamine rush.
The phhsical copy served an important purpose: it forces you to admit you will never do something and so give up on is. until I die it is safe to assume I will eat 3 meals per day. (It won't be 100% because of sickness but close enough) thus if I'm out of some food I will need a todo list to replace it. However if I never finish the ukuele I've started it won't matter and it is reasonable for me to give up on it.
The term that comes to mind, and one of my favorite concepts, is "progressive disclosure", which is a concept we really ought to be more mindful of.
One of the perks of just-a-text-file-with-a-bunch-of-addons is that it enables progressive disclosure - it takes no learning curve to just get in and use the tool on a basic level, but additional complexity (and power) can be introduced over time.
The problem with a purpose-built app is that there's a minimum level of new concepts to learn before the tool is even minimally useful, and that's a barrier to adoption.
A good example of this in action is something like Markdown. It's just text and will show up fine without you learning anything, but as you pick up more syntax it builds on top - and if you learn some markup syntax but not others, it doesn't prevent you from using the subset you know. There is a clear path to adding new knowledge and ability.
Right, instead of fomo over not using the extra features of utilizing the right flow - people tend to experience the want/need to incrementally increase complexity when using roll-your-own software
The whole point of org-mode is that it's so malleable, that you can extend it to be whatever you want it to be, much easier than writing your own, ad-hoc, bug-ridden reimplementation of org-mode.
Org-mode is the most appropriate answer. It is as simple or as sophisticated as we want it to be.
Obviously one needs to be an Emacs user first
> Obviously one needs to be an Emacs user first
This makes it so infuriating that the top comment on Todo systems is almost invariably "just org-mode lol". Same as remote editing "just TRAMP lol".
I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.
On-topic: TickTick or Todoist with a slimmed-down "Getting Things Done" system works really well. Almost no learning curve, and you get to free up so much mental bandwidth vis a vis remembering things and prioritizing things. And you don't have to do hamfisted tricks to make a 'simple' .txt system work. Bliss.
Also, if you are a developer by trade a lot of these features are quick and easy to implement.
And might even be fun to implement and maintain.
I think we have a winner. This sort of personal toolsmithing is fun, and you can try out some new programming language or whatever.
We all love a good excuse to build something small-to-medium sized for our own perfect "tailor fit" preferences.
All the excuses about other tools not being adequate are just what we need to say to ourselves to justify the time ;)
This starts to sound like something someone might waste time building instead of actually being productive…
In terms of earning money, but surely that's not what's it's all about, is it?
Systems you design yourself for yourself naturally will come easier to us.
> - having your computer alert you to things that come up
If my own experience is a valid example, alerts are overrated. They don't work for long. I hate getting interrupted by something that actually does not need my attention at that precise moment. I would disable those alerts in no time.
I prefer leaving physical cues in the real world. I think screens are bad UI unless you already spend way too much time in front of them.
The god old in- and out- baskets are great, for example. Or notes on a physical board.
Sometimes when I think of something I want to do in the morning, I just leave an object that does not belong in a place I will definitely have to use in the morning. Seeing that object will remind me of that thought I had just before going to bed. I don't even need to write down what it was.
Physical cues are wonderful! And THAT is what I would want from Augmented Reality (in addition to it no longer requiring cumbersome hardware to wear). A flexible recreation of former physical work places, but using the new flexibility of computer augmentation of what I see. To be able to place digital notes in the real world. To view and touch documents not fixed in a single place in front of me, but anywhere! I put some documents on the left, some on the right, some on the wall, and I move my body around to view and use them.
A purely screen-based app, when I already hate having to stare straight ahead for hours every day just doesn't cut it for me. I want my digital world to be in the real world, and use my entire body, not just very limited arm and hand movements while barely moving the head because the viewport is just one small two-dimensional rectangle in my large reality.
Okay, that went slightly OT, but I made that point because it is relevant for TODOs and most interactions with computers. I think they are much better when tied to our real world, not inside a tiny screen where a lot of stuff is already squeezed in and waiting for our attention, and everything can only be used like a surgeon doing keyhole surgery - indirectly through a tiny port and tools, instead of ones hands. Place TODO hints in the real world on or near appropriate places.
I geeked out a bit, after reading another blog post, and used my thermal printer for this. I've been using it for a few weeks now. The little sticky notes it makes are great.
https://joeldare.com/trying-to-stop-procrastination-with-my-...
I am starting to collect too many of them though. I kinda like the idea of ops text-file because it is renewed from day to day. I'm still not quite sure how to deal with the items I know I need to get to eventually but that I won't get to today. I'm also not sure how to deal with the pile growing continually.
I have noticed that thermal notes fade relatively quickly. When they do that I have to think about weather I want to reprint them or just throw them out.
The recent HN thread on receipt printers for task tracking had this comment which I wish got some attention and replies:
"The biggest killer for any task tracker I find is an accumulating backlog of items that seem too important to quit but too intractable to make progress on." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270076
(I suspect that’s part of too many browser tabs hanging around, too)
I came across a similar post on YouTube; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg45b8UXoZI - it's titled "I Fixed My ADHD with a Receipt Printer".
I should build one that sends me an SMS message instead. So I stumbled on AT+ plus code for programing GSM devices. I have a MTN HUAWEI E303 modem from back in 2016 and I wrote a server using the npm serialport module.
I just need to write a dmenu script that pipes from every 3 git commits.
That should keep my monkey brain hooked for a while he he.└── Dey well
I've seen mention of using the dot matrix printers common in restaurant kitchens as an alternative which doesn't fade; they have the added benefit of two-color printing (most do black and red)
Alerts are most important, that's why paper doesn't work for me. I just write everything in my calender app in my phone.
But if it's AR you can have a cute hamster run up to you and holding an urgent note. Or the hare from Alice in Wonderland. And it can just sit on your desk (virtually) and do cute things while you continue to finish what you were working on. Better than a boring annoying beeping alarm.
We have not even started combining digital an real world, and the last few idea, e.g. from Meta, were devoid of anything useful, showing how little actually useful imagination some super-rich have, putting so many resources into bad or even destructive ideas when sooo much useful stuff needs to happen. We still have this tiny viewport, behind which another world - our digital world - awaits, and people think it's normal that we use this tiny port and awkward indirect devices (mouse) to manipulate things in there. We could do soooo much better soon!
Okay, the access device still is missing. Few people want to wear the current generation of AR devices. But that just shows that neuro-computer interface needs investment on the level of AI, it's not magic (actual neurons are just very complex to work with, never mind finding the right one's to connect to), we could slowly build something there.
Somebody asked what the advantage is of having this computerized instead of actual matter, e.g. physical paper notes. It's all the general computer advantages of course, like sharing stuff. Never mind being able to reorganize everything in an instant.
Imagine having a software project not viewed with one tiny viewport, but like a physical project, even over several rooms. You don't need to click, you go to the place representing some module and physically (virtually physically) take out the code, edit with your fingers. Watch the data flow around you. Have a bunch of flying piranhas show up when something goes wrong. Work with all your body in a real 3D space instead of sitting in a chair all day, all week, all month, all life, watching that vast digital world and/or just your project through that tiny viewport.
Alright mate settle down
Taks tracking is different from reminders. There’s actually few things that I want to be reminded of, and they either belongs to a calendar (collaborative items) or a reminder app. The separation is blurry and they can all fits within the agenda concept.
As for tasks tracking, it’s all lists. And a daily/weekly/monthly review is enough for me.
They blur into each other enough that it's good to use one app/text file that can do all three.
And my calender app is used like a list, i can sort it by setting the time for each list item if i really care. I kind of set a reminder for every item i put in, but not everybody wants that for sure.
Blurring into each other is exactly the problem.. you become numb to both.
Digitizing your real world environment sounds similar to using a special TODO app instead of a text file.
What benefit does your digital sticky note have over a physical one?
You give a long list of features that I don't want. And then go on to encourage everyone to switch text editors, and adopt a specific plugin that happens to work in the way that you personally like.
As a vim user, this is kind of what I have come to expect from emacs users. Honestly, I'm glad that you've found something that works well for you. But I hope that some day you internalize the fact that other people aren't you, and they shouldn't always be "encouraged" to give up their existing solutions to do things in the way that you've decided is perfect.
Don’t switch text editors, and don’t use a plugin.
For a few years I used Orgmode. I didn’t use Emacs. That is, when I needed to edit text files, I used Vim or macOS TextEdit. I used Orgmode to track my tasks and keep notes. That Emacs was underneath it was purely incidental, and I didn’t use Emacs for anything else. For me, Orgmode was not a plugin. It was the primary software I used, and there was this Emacs thing under it.
Ironically, these days I do actually use Emacs, and I use OmniFocus for tasks, mostly because OmniFocus gets multi-device sync right so it’s worth the price. But don’t hesitate to use Orgmode even if you don’t want Emacs otherwise.
> As a vim user, this is kind of what I have come to expect from emacs users.
I'm a vim user, with two exceptions:
1. SLIME
2. Org mode
There's a vim plugin for org mode that I used to use, but TBH, Emacs excels at org mode.
I think the OP is far from saying what you are implying. He is not advocating for changing text editor or installing any plugins. Just recommends trying out org mode. I think is very valid. I’ve known many many people (in the order of hundreds) that use vi for editing in general but emacs for other tasks, e.g. org mode, sbcl repl, etc. I think the suggestion ist just to give org mode a try. No need to feel offended or pushed to leave your favorite editor. At the end, is all about personal preference.
You didn’t need to go all tribalistic mate.
Too many programmers think they have a unique use case without considering that maybe the existing projects are bloated for a reason. Then they end up just recreating the same bloat.
Gall's Law:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
"Surely I can do it better in a few weeks than all preceding civilizational knowledge" is probably the most popular tech entrepreneur stereotype.
I think the reason people use text file + "snowflake software" is that they want just the structure (constraints) they want, and no more. BTW, what people want changes over time and by circumstance.
org mode has a lot of features, including customizability, but imposes some heavy constraints as well. By its nature it's only going to satisfy a sliver of the people who have come around to text file.
It's good you linked that document, though. At a glance it gives a fair idea of what you'd be buying in to.
So my current pet project is a to-do system with an app that you can look at, edit, or complete tasks in. But I have both a fully agentic interface and simpler LLM powered inputs.
I'm really enjoying it. I think it is a good example of how to leverage LLMs to reduce drudgery.
Things I can do now: - take a picture of a notice like a license renewal and a task is created and automatically filled with due dates and information extracted from the image and likely from online searches.
- turn a design document into a reasonable task plan.
- create classified and researched tasks with a sentence.
I'm just getting started on it but it already is kind of feature complete. Programmed with Claude Code, about 20k lines.
The key I think is to have something as easy to input as a text file, because it applies intelligence to remove friction.
A lot of this is solved by todo.txt format ( https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt )
There are apps that support it on many platforms and it is easy to sync across devices.
Sometimes I like to imagine early people inventing, forgetting about and inventing the wheel again.
Now that I think about it that probably actually happened, considering the large distances between groups.
Apple's Reminders app does all of those things and many more without having to learn emacs
I found Reminders to be unreliable and foolishly designed. It only works for must-do tasks. It uses repeating-period instead of time-since, so it can't handle repeating tasks that are optional. If you fail to mark off a repeating task, the next instances stack up and crash the notification cycle.
I'm familiar with the pain point you're describing. In general, I would say a recurring calendar event is a better solution for your particular preferences. Personally my mental model is that the act of deciding to not do an optional task constitutes completion of the reminder for that occurrence. And if I forget or deprioritize that decision, the reminder still hangs out in my Today list until I do as a mitigation.
Ironically the Reminders app sucks at reminding. I use the Clock app for my todo list; it makes a pretty loud noise pretty reliably, which makes it pretty good for reminders.
Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app. For a todo there is no now, it is pick the best thing todo next. I need to be interupted for my dentist appointment. However I don't need to be interupted to buy milk, I need a remineer when I'm at the store anyway to also get milk. If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work.
> If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work.
Reminders basically does have this: you can set a given item to alert when you are arriving/leaving from a specific location.
Yeah I think this is a result of the attention economy, there are 75 million notifications per day that someone somewhere wants to push in your face so we've gotten really good at cutting them out. But the counter-swing is also too big and now critical things like calendars and reminders are buried in a list we never look at.
"Reminders" is maybe the most poorly named app of all time. The last thing it does is remind you of anything.
I agree it would be nice to have more alarm-like notification options. Flagging, setting as high priority, and assigning a date/time and getting in the habit of checking the Today category regularly all help mitigate; a bug-me-until-this-is-done feature would be a welcome alternative. (I will note that the GP's emacs stack isn't even close to offering native mobile push notifications, to state the obvious.)
I believe the Reminders app, when used alongside Notes and Calendar, is becoming a strong competitor in the productivity space. One feature I'd love to see added is persistent nudging reminders that keep alerting you until you manually dismiss them.
Things 3 is another excellent third-party option in this category. Together, these apps form my essential productivity stack. I honestly can't function without them.
Being pedantic, based on your example, I think the Reminders app does a good job at reminding, but a bad job at alerting. But that’s because a reminder to me is a gentle concept.
Reminders.app does a great job when I want create lists and inventories! I use it for groceries and webpages too. For example, I've sent many of the Emacs-related links to my Emacs list in Reminders, where I know I'll be able to find them the next time I forget Gall's Law and look for a more-complex system to replace my current one: writing things down; thinking about what I've written; redrafting; and repeating.
I have used emacs for more than 30 years, use it as a primary code editor now, and I have never found use of org-mode, despite a few attempts, to become a lasting habit. Of the list of integrations provided here, I only see alert and calendar support being of interest (but because of this, I may give org-mode one more try).
Do I need to start living in Emacs to get these benefits? Or are you saying I can use Emacs as my todo list app, close it after writing a todo, and have it pop up notifications?
https://github.com/doppelc/org-notifications is a thing if you want that.
Emacs will happily run in the background.
I've known folks who used Emacs for writing and org-mode, but didn't live in it otherwise.
But living in Emacs is more the sort of thing you get to do, not the sort of thing you'd need to do ;)
No. I hate emacs but orgmode is still a good file format.
I use orgzly revived with it.
Org mode could do with a bigger non emacs ecosystem, though.
> many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software
The most robust, stable solution for me has been to use foundational tools with proven longevity:
= bash
= git
= ncal
https://github.com/viviparous/showcal.git
"Copy-pasting tasks is laborious"
"I recommend people read this 30,000 word technical guide"
Lmao
Todoist does all of that and more, basically any reminders app does most of that.
Just a counterpoint to say, many of us look for a todo app, use one of the many great ones on the market and then don't write blog posts about it. It's worth just trying one of the many existing apps instead of building your own.
I'm in the process of doing most of this via Claude check-ins, using a combination of MCP, Obsidian, and Things. Obsidian is the memory system, context info, and archive, while Things hosts the active lists and desktop widgets. It doesn't work perfectly or even that well, but it's coming along.
Combining the feel of plain text with real structure is also exactly why we're building an "IDE but for tasks/notes" [1].
With structured apps (task managers, outliners) you lose the illusion of editing plain text, but plain text alone lacks things like structure, links, dates, and collaboration. We've spent the last few years building an editor completely from scratch to keep the ease of text editing while adding planning and structure.
[1] https://thymer.com
Not so fast my dear, just this year I finally adopted the default home-directory structure of my linux distro (Document, Pictures, Music, Video, etc.) in my workflow. I'm not ready for more big obvious changes like this. ;)
Am i the only one to generally find those directories getting in the way ? I have very few videos or music, or even images worth storing as images and not related to other documents. Downloads and documents might be useful but then, documents is almost everything that is not online so why not put it in $HOME. And I don't like capitalized folders but that's me.
I put my media files in other folders, just to spite Microsoft
Im perfectly happy with markdown in vscode. Right next to my work and with a search function. I guess I could do txt but the syntax highlighting makes things a bit more readable.
I think it works for me because it's mostly just a working memory. I virtually never visit my notes again. It is not some personal knowledge base nor project tracker.
This satisfied me for awhile, eventually though I wanted a more comprehensive solution to record todo notes alongside thoughts and project ideas, so I escaped my IDE and got a simple obsidian setup going. I can definitely recommend
I think a lot of your examples demonstrate the power and low learning curve of a single text file as an organizing tool.
Org mode is one direction you could take your text file in. Feeding your text file into an LLM or committing it to git or formatting with Markdown are others. But starting with a plain text file doesn’t commit you to any of those paths.
How about having a synced and editable version of your to-do list on all your devices, including mobile? I've found that to be the main filter for note taking setups. You seem to suggest that there's an emacs plug-in that can handle that?
I think one thing that is missing from emacs/org-mode is the mobile integration. There are apps that handle some features of org-mode on mobile, but probably missing features of the desktop version. Currently, I manage my notes only on the desktop because I haven't found a good companion on mobile.
from James Hague's blog https://prog21.dadgum.com/56.html:
8<---------------------
I still like to implement my own ideas, especially in fun languages like Erlang and Perl. I'm glad I can program, because personal programming in the small is fertile ground and tremendously useful. For starters, this entire site is generated by 269 lines of commented Perl, including the archives and the atom feed (and those 269 lines also include some HTML templates). Why? Because it was pleasant and easy, and I don't have to fight with the formatting and configuration issues of other software. Writing concise to-the-purpose solutions is a primary reason for programming in the twenty-first century.
Because it’s never about finding the good or good enough or even the perfect system of something. It’s about the itch!
As somone who uses text and paper for todos, happily for years now after spending equally much time procrastinating in search of the perfect task management system I will now do a half-ironic take on answering your points:
> having your computer alert you to things that come up
That's what the calendar or the alarm is for
> being able to tag notes
Write #tag and then grep for it. Not that hard
> being able to add events to a calendar
A event isn't a todo, you add it to the calendar instead
> being able to set priority of tasks
Cut it and paste it up to the top or write "IMPORTANT". If you have so many tasks that you need something better, you probably spend too much time organizing your todos and should start working
> expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda
If your todo lists are so long thst you cant read them in 30 seconds they are too long. Split them up and mive them to the relevant project.
> being able to add recurring tasks
Just leave it in the list and add a questionmark at the end. If it is time critical add it to the calendar
> full-text search (grepping)
Yeah, good observation you can grep text pretty fine. If you're annoyed by having to type the filename that is a shell oneliner
- formatting features (markdown)
You can use markdown in text, it is just more or less useless wothout rendering. But I don't see how formatting leads to more productivity
> feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter out the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications
Yeah ok, that one is bad.
> hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list
Get a decent texteditor where you can press modifiers + arrow keys to move lines. Works pretty well. In fact better/faster than dragging with your mouse.
> running a script on a VPS to sync notifications
No need to do that, you have a calendar
> set up cron job with git commit
If you need your todos in a git you either work at a nuclear facility, a space station or you take yourself too seriously
> writing post-it notes by hand
What else would you use, a typewriter? Just kidding. Paper has undeniable strengths for the todo space. It is there and you don't have to remember to open it. Rewriting your todos is doubling as both checking their state, refreshing your memory and cleaning them up. Paper can be read without electricity and by other people without any form of setup. People know how to use it without onboarding. Hackers cannot use a flaw in the the paper has been made to gwin remote code execution (they can however potentially use photographs of paper to do so).
I am not kidding, one of the best work-handoffs I ever had was entirely organized via emails and post its. It worked flawlessly.
And I say that as someone who has spent days on todo systems, task warrior and the likes. Everybody has their own needs, but very often boring and pragmatic wins.
Very well said. People here are interested in poking holes in things, instead of actually being productive. Again, we should just look at what actually productive people tend to do, which in my experience is generally to just use whatever works and not spend too much time thinking about optimising todo systems.
I don't do anything that you mentioned.
I truly just use a plain .txt file. Every "add-on" and layer beyond the .txt happens to run on a complex wetware device that came built-in with my body.
>Every "add-on" and layer beyond the .txt happens to run on a complex wetware device that came built-in with my body.
He was addressing the comments such as mine that determined a txt file without any runtime software layered on was not enough for some people. The built-in wetware was inadequate.
Apparently, you are one of the lucky ones that can just use a txt file. For others, they need a little more support apparatus ("bicycle for the mind") enabled by some type of active app that complements the TODO.txt file.
how exactly is a .txt not greppable?
That's more because Emacs is an OS-within-an-editor, which imho is not a good thing.
I use Google Calendar tasks. Why? Because I'm always in Google Calendar anyway. They are actually a bit shit UI wise but good enough.
It's less work than dealing with a text file and available anywhere. I could drop box a text file but editing on a phone would be fiddly.
I've gone through this too and came to the same conclusion except for phone.
While on laptop/desktop nothing beats txt (or md or org), it's just so uncomfortable using a text file like that on the phone and relying on dropbox or something.
And I get it, all the note taking apps on the phone have issues: not local first, proprietary, subscriptions, or no encryption, or a thousand features before making sure the full text search works even offline.
Last year I finally sat down and wrote my own PWA out of frustration [1]. There was a SHOW HN too [2]. Yes, shameless plug. There are only a handful of other people using it (and probably never more than that) but I really wrote it for myself and it's been such a relief the past year knowing I always have my notes whenever wherever and works exactly the way I want.
I probably spent <5h fixing a few issues in the past year. As far as I'm concerned, my problem is solved once and for all.
[1] https://unforget.computing-den.com/demo
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40645743
There is a format called todo.txt that works follows very readable syntax (like your own example) and has some minimal bells and whistles if you want it to: http://todotxt.org/
As an alternative: I started using org-mode 5 years ago and have never looked back. This is my workflow (https://karelvo.com/blog/orgmode) although I sync it via Git now, and have an iPhone where I use Plain Org (https://xenodium.com/plain-org-for-ios).
Can you expand on which org-mode features you like for this use case?
On the top of my head, among the useful features I'm familiar with, you can:
* nest tasks
* set deadlines
* set priorities
* filter ~arbitrarily
* have as much content as you want per item (in comparison with todotxt with is one line per item), including non-text like images
* have statuses other than todo and done (like waiting)
What else do you use that makes you particularly like this setup?
Org-mode is this thing I've been trying to use for a while, but it never sticks because I'm just too used to vim and plain text. Once in a while I look for a killer use-case, hoping it'd make me stick to it, to no avail so far.
If you don't feel like you need the extra bells and whistles don't worry about it. The great thing about org-mode is it _is_ just plain text and all the magic is in the interpretation of the plain text. If you have yourself a table and one day ya want to do some spreadsheet magic on it or pipe it into a script easily, you can just check the manual for how to do it and KO it right there in the same place the data lives. Remembering how to do it afterwards is optional.
Personally, I use lazyvim in neovim and doom emacs in emacs and just kinda switch between the two based on what I feel like in a given day. NeoVim tends to have better treesitter/LSP stuff as well as marginally better performance, doom emacs has way better test running and org-mode and it is only a little behind neovim in that other stuff.
All the above is to suggest I think the question is flawed. BUT! To answer the question literally, my favorite thing in org mode that I've never seen anywhere else is the ability to dump babel blocks in my notes with code samples that are actually runnable and the output is able to be piped somewhere else.
I too have used org-mode for a while and here are some additional features which may pique your interest:
- agenda views let me create custom pages of tasks with certain states or tags - a robust time tracking system. I use this for my freelancing work - very nice text tables that are programmable - a very customizable capturing system - a huge ecosystem of plugins - a programmable API: I'm currently working on an importer for the DayOne app as well as a fitness tracking package - PDF export with LaTeX. I can use this for printing out my weekly plan for example - in addition to deadlines, a scheduled property for when you intend to start a task - extensive linking system (https://orgmode.org/guide/Hyperlinks.html#External-Links-1) I often have todos linking to places in code
I think that org-mode could use better learning resources. There's pretty much the manual and blog posts by experienced users, neither are especially aimed towards new users.
I have a very simple todo list, it's essentially the same every day! - check mail - check calendar - check jira - check azure devops board - check Microsoft Tasks - check confluence - check Teams - check home calendar - check home e-mail - check signal - check whatsapp - check client e-mail - check client jira - renew prescription for benzos
I was thinking "oh boy that's miserable" and then you got me in the end...
I'm a fan of Org Mode with Emacs [0] and using the app BeOrg [1] on my iPhone.
I have 3 main task files:
- todo.org for things I need to do
- backlog.org for things that I don't have to do now but should do in the future
- inbox.org for any random ideas or notes
The concept of an Inbox was taken straight from Getting Things Done [2].
I have different searches set up in BeOrg so that it is easy to view tasks from each different file.
This is definitely more complicated than a single file, but I like it mainly because it keeps my main task file (todo.org) organized. I also don't go through organizing my files that much either.
inbox.org is just a great place to dump anything, so I usually do a quick scan and either delete everything or refine it to the backlog.org.
For backlog.org, I'll usually just let things sit there and build up. After a while I'll realize that if something has been there for a long time, it probably isn't worth doing - or I already did it, so I delete it.
[0]: https://orgmode.org/
[1]: https://www.beorgapp.com/
[2]: https://hamberg.no/gtd
I like Org Mode but I feel like custom agenda views are not really as flexible as they should be, and as soon as you want to do something outside of the bounds of what Org offers with its settings for the built-in agenda views you have to go on a deep dive into the emacs lisp
For example I wanted the global TODO list view to show next to each entry when the TODO was scheduled for, but there's really no way to modify the global TODO list much at all
I've created a very rudimentary bash tool for extracting todos out of markdown (GFM) files. People might like it and contribute: https://github.com/hkdobrev/notetaker
sigh
I've done the text file thing, and it’s fine. Up to a (very small) point.
What the author describes as their “workload” barely registers.
For context, for me, Things on any given day has over 100 individual actions, most of which are recurring.
By doing this, I can stay on top of an extremely broad surface area. There is no way a text file can handle the number of parallel work streams my (or really many) people have.
Broadly, for me these work stream are:
* Self Care
* Relationship
* Children
* Friends* Professional (BD, etc)
* Investments (Real Estate, Angel Investments, SEP, etc)
* Legal (LLCs, Litigation, Wills, etc)
* Financial (Quarterly and Annual Taxes in 2 countries, Insurance, etc)
* Home (Massive)
* Hobbies
* Vehicles
Without a serious amount of structure in the form of my todo system, there’s no way a person could manage this - certainly not with a text file.
Calendars very rapidly fall down for scheduled tasks that you can’t knock out the day of, they lack reminder functions, etc.
It sounds like your life requires a manager's schedule. Lots and lots of things to fit into a busy day. Likely without a lot of big blocks of focus time.
Most programmers are far better off with a maker's schedule. Far fewer things in a day. Each with a significant block of time associated with it.
An absolutely minimal productivity system is perfect for anyone on a maker's schedule. You're right that it wouldn't work for your life.
See https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html if you're not familiar with the terms "manager's schedule" and "maker's schedule". It also provides context for why those different kinds of schedules are appropriate for different people. (One of the big mistakes that people on manager's schedules often make is to not recognize and respect the impact that a "quick 15 minute meeting" has on employees who need to be on a maker's schedule.)
100% - I read that when it came out, and I point others to it too.
The thing about Maker's schedule for me is that it's easy to get so into what I'm doing that other things in my life don't get the attention they need.
Having a reminder system helps make sure that doesn't happen.
Can you give some examples of your 100 daily actions? I’m struggling to understand how you’re scheduling so many things, like I’m sure I complete 100 actions in a day but most are going to be things like “brush my teeth” or “clean up the dinner dishes”, which I personally wouldn’t schedule.
It's definitely detailed. Here are a few from today:
Call PG&E about medical baseline allowance
Check SM Court website re: Conservancy ruling
Expect next invoice from [redacted]
Order refill of [medication]
Book service for [vehicle]
Various financial transfers associated with agreements.
Tons of project related tasks for work I can't share
etc, etc.
Managing the line between daily and long-term tracking is one of the toughest parts. I have a flat list of files in Notes analogous to yours, but I'm not working in every one every day, some will sit dormant for months. Do I maintain a "to buy" or "Home Depot" list in each one, or at the top level?
I like using paper for today's tasks and instant thoughts. I like to avoid cluttering with recurring unless I'm really having trouble (or keep it in calendar). I find that the "oh shit" part of my brain is largely a good enough reminder system as long as I capture the thought before it flies away.
side note: I do like the "Relationship" call-out. I had a past relationship suffer in part because I kept it a bit too much in the back pocket and not up on the proverbial board with the other projects. Workaholics take note - make your relationship part of your workflow.
Maybe you can talk a bit about what does work for you?
I’ve tried most of the major systems, and for me Things3 wins hands down. Yes, it costs some money to by the app on my phone and on my Mac, but the cost of missing even one deadline blows those costs out of the water.
I do with Things3 supported nested areas, but I just use Projects that I never complete to achieve the same effect.
I have use a system similar to this guy and TickTick is perfect. I even use shared lists with my girlfriend to track chores which is something we implemented recently and works great.
This looks like anxiety
I would argue that it would be trivial to have a todo.txt for each area you mentioned. Put them in a folder labeled “todo” and you’re all set.
There’s a reason pilots don’t use text files for their checklists. Sometimes people need better features.
"Things on any given day has over 100 individual actions, most of which are recurring" looks more like checklist(s) to me.
Sure, but I would lose a ton of reminder and repeating action functionality.
I’d also have to scan across a dozen or more files to figure out what my day looks like.
Seems strictly worse to me.
I went through something similar. I do use Logseq now, but for many, many years I found a notes.txt or todo.txt file in my home directory to be an excellent solution. I typically just write the date at the top of the file and put the notes underneath. A huge benefit is that I can trivially keep these under git. I keep them in my dotfiles repo so they can be easily synchronized to all my devices. A couple of shortcuts makes it quite fluid:
A bash alias so I can run `todo` and have the file open:
Some vim config so I can run `\date` (from either insert mode or normal mode) and it will print a date line for me:I have this in tmux opening a flaoting window with neovim and <leader>g to search by tags which opens quickfix pane
I host my own wall calendar. There is an annual subscription cost, but it's so cheap I don't notice. I hacked it together with thumbtack 1.0 and Bic Crystal a very long time ago. Others have used it and find the interface extremely intuitive. Localization is supported. I even have pencil support. If things become tentative, we can switch over to it seamlessly. When I have a todo item, I input it onto the day and time that works best. Highly recommended.
The real curveball is sending smoke signals to request pricing info.
How do you deal with multi tenancy? What's your back up strategy?
I use Todoist in a very light weight fashion. I add tasks and they sit on my screen until they're done, basically identical to a text file. I've never used the points, projects, labels, etc.
It does one thing a text file struggles at: scheduling recurring tasks and adding notes to a recurring task. I have annual reminders for infrequent, but important stuff. For example, I have a recurring annual task to review my insurance. Each year, I add context and details that are easily forgotten. Then, when the reminder comes up next year, I can refresh my memory and complete the task quickly.
Recurring tasks or tasks far into the future is what has me locked into Todoist. I love how comprehensive the plain-English scheduling is, such as "Do task every third Friday of the month". It's clearly got a lot more power than I use too.
Totally agree, Todoist rocks. Recurring tasks are necessary for any kind of regular maintenance tasks, and Todoist supports all natural language scheduling "every month on the 15th" or "every 8 weeks starting Thursday". Textfile certainly isn't going to do this for you. Article author writes:
> Todoist: Great until I realized I was gaming the points system instead of doing actual work. Turns out completing “drink water” 8 times a day doesn’t make you productive.
Why didn't he turn off the points system if it was distracting, instead of migrating to the next shiny new TODO workflow? Not sure I understand, but I guess that might've left nothing to blog about.
I have a similar setup in Todoist, it's just a reminder for scheduled recurring tasks like bills.
Funnily enough, I was quite savvy with the features several years ago but as my work changed and things aren't as easy to list down like a routine or in neatly defined projects and such.
And when regular tasks becomes freeform, it's no surprise that a plaintext file is sufficient.
Well said.
Then, finally you reach the last layer: a 4" x 6" notepad and pen that are always kept at your desk
Hipster PDAs (a stack of index cards with a binder clip) were all the rage before people even had smartphones. I used something like it for a decade.
My extravagance was a corner punch.
Even more hipster: A nicely machined piece of walnut and bespoke pre-rounded cards:
https://ugmonk.com/collections/analog
I love it! There's a disc-bound version for on-the-go as well.
It's like Rumshpringa for TODO apps. Everyone wants to rebel from the old norms and go do something different, only to end up returning to the reliability, clarity and comfort of a good pen and pocket notebook.
Big fan of the Rite-In-Rain notebooks, myself, and Fisher Space Pen's Cap-o-matic.
Meme on why Rite-in-Rain is de rigeur: https://www.reddit.com/r/tacticalgear/comments/u6dq3i/fuck_y...
I'm a pencil person, though.
> Big fan of the Rite-In-Rain notebooks, myself, and Fisher Space Pen's Click-o-matic.
I carry this combo everywhere I go. Way less friction than taking out my phone, unlocking, and suffering the horrible experience of typing something on a virtual keyboard.
I do enjoy the looks I get from friends and family sometimes, as they all expect me to be high tech everywhere in my life but I'm probably one of the most low-tech people outside of work.
Interestingly enough, this just shows how different people like and hate different things. I personally can’t stand writing with a pen, and am very fluent and fast with a virtual keyboard and would never describe the experience as horrible. I’m writing this on one right now, and it’s great.
I also don’t want to carry an extra thing in my pocket when I already have a phone.
But I’m glad what works for you works for you!
The only productivity I do from my phone is reminder alerts.
Did you mean Cap-o-matic?
Yep, thanks for the correction
Just making sure I didn't miss a new pen coming out of Fisher.
If we're being fair here then this must be the place to list the problems with the note card/pad system. For me, I ultimately settled on using a GitHub repo of todo lists w markdown as my solution, viewable on desktop & mobile.
The problems with a physical note card system are:
- I have to use the computer & mobile phone to enter and receive all my work, so it makes sense to consolidate the todo list(s) into those systems, instead of adding a third one. Having to remember to keep a physical bundle near me all the time, with a working pen, feels clunky.
- My handwriting is messy and this causes various problems. I can't really read it at a glance; longer messages take longer to decode; something about the non-uniformity of it also throws me off. I don't relish the thought of consulting a pile of my handwriting multiple times in an hour.
- I frequently cross off old items and add and/or modify new items. This is very easily done with a text file but sounds like a mess with note cards: keeping the empty cards around, scratching off or erasing existing ones, etc. With GitHub's commit history, I can even get a holistic view of how it's changed over the day, not possible with physical cards.
- A LOT of the value of my system comes from being able to view past days todo lists, to see what's getting done and what isn't; I do this daily. Obviously keeping up w/today's tasks stretches the physical card system to its limits; extending that to the past 7 days sounds like a nightmare.
I prefer A4, but yeah. I adopted something roughly based on Bullet Journal about 6 or 7 years ago and now on my 4th book.
There's something about manually writing and copying over TODOs to the next month that makes you really question if you still need to do it, and if you do, gives you a reminder that you still haven't done it.
I use a few basic markers copied from standard bullet journal, which work well as a dot can be promoted to all the others. A dash "-" for informational stuff, a centre dot "·" for a task, which turns into a slash "/" for partially done or a cross "X" for done, ">" if I carry it forward to the next month and "<" if I copy it into the future log (I have pages at the front for about 4 years of future events, 3 months per page). I also have a leftmost column for the date when something needs to be done or for meetings/events.
Surprisingly, even when doing a whole page of notes on something, it's not excessive to leave an inch margin, and sometimes you want to star a key point or attach an action point market.
I've got really used to this way of journaling, and appreciate the ability to do different things, like calendar views - such as 36 week views with one page for weekends and the other for mid week - which are great for planning holidays, weekends and significant events.
I never really got into the monthly reflection aspect, but I do like doing that around end of year and other inflection points through the year.
The only issue with paper is links. Hyperlinks are nice and makes notes (and task list) a true knowledge base.
If there's really a hyperlink I need, I might e-mail it to myself, add it to a text file in an appropriate place in the appropriate project, leave the tab open in my browser, or just do the task now.
But IMHO none of that is related to the todo list, which is stuff like "7 · Fred's birthday". It's about remembering things that I need/want to do, and in a way that's tactile and I can reflect on it whether I'm using the computer or not, not trying to maintain a knowledge base of everything.
For me, it’s not about remembering what I have to do. It’s mostly about capturing the context and track what I have done.
A4 maxi. surprised to find this here - and yea, you can 1) take photo 2) easily index later via vision llm types cheap now etc even local (99% time never do, essence of todo lists ie ack wont ever need to index most items)
I do this. I love good old fashioned pen and paper.
I've tried, many many times to use digital for both Todos and note taking and nothing ever stuck. Even tried using an iPad with GoodNotes & the Apple Pencil. Pen and paper is the only thing that has ever worked for me still. Plus I enjoy the physical sensation of writing things down physically, with a really nice pen and a high quality notebook.
So I always keep a notebook open on my desk, I intermix Todos and notes on sort of a "daily page" format, and I also carry a little field notes flip pad notebook with me everywhere I go. On the go it's also, oddly enough, less friction to write in my field notes book than it is to take out my phone, unlock it, and suffer through the horrible experience of typing anything out on a virtual keyboard.
OCR is readily available everywhere now so digitizing your handwritten notes, if you have to, is trivial.
Are people not doing Hipster PDA on 3x5 cards??
If only I could read my own writting. (Dysgraphia - slowing down does not help)
The moment you will start burying old tasks in new tasks, you will find out that it is not a good idea.
Don’t forget scissors, glue and a photocopier!
I prefer scraps of paper that eventually get spontaneously disposed of, regardless of whether I crossed all of the items from them.
> scraps of paper that eventually get spontaneously disposed of
Where "spontaneously disposed of" is sometimes abbreviated L-O-S-T, right? <g>
Even so, I feel that much of the point of writing things down in the first place is to put the information into the mind (where the subconscious mind can work with it and do its jobs) and, ultimately, so you won't need to be reminded about it later.
Very true; I've noticed the same thing myself.
I've been back and forth on that topic, going to paper and back to a todo manager of some sort.
For the past few years I've been using obsidian for all my note taking, and none of the extensions I tried did what I wanted, so I built myself one[^1]. The initial goal was to take todos right within my notes, so I could keep the context of what the todo was about. Then I started adding stuff like planification and tagging. So it's entirely text based, but with a planner UI on top of it that makes it easy to drag and drop stuff to when I want to do them, and plan my day accordingly.
I think the more you go, the more you get set in your own ways, the harder it is to tag along on someone else's implementation of a system.
Low tech like paper and text files are good because they're maleable, and dont embed stuff you don't actually need.
^1: https://obsidian.md/plugins?id=proletarian-wizard
I’ve been using obsidian also, I just use the daily note with some tweaks. Works great with todo’s autopopulated in new notes until they are checked off, deadlines, etc. Only downside is that I do pay for their sync functionality since iOS makes it very annoying otherwise. I’ll check out your plugin though, sounds useful.
The problem with productivity apps is that one size does not fit all. Everyone has radically different goals, constraints, interests, and workflows. Many people would benefit from having a "living" app that is personalized to their tastes, and also adapts over time as the characteristics of your life change (e.g. having kids is probably going to change your approach to productivity!)
I recommend finding a framework within which to build your own apps, and then building your own suite of apps that have exactly the features you want (shameless plug, I built a platform that can serve as such a framework : WebWidgets.io. It is basically a way to hook up SQLite databases to JS objects in the browser, which allows wide liberty to build your own simple custom apps).
One useful addition for text file users: on Windows, create hotkey\macro timestamps using something like Autohotkey (https://autohotkey.com/)
3 letter hotkeys seem to work well - long enough to be unique without overlapping real words.
for instance, when I type ddd it automatically stamps this:
20250811 10:57 AM
then I type my note and can look back at what time\date it was.
sometimes I just need the date so that is dds (date-date-short) which gives
20250811
occasionally I just want the time so that's ttt
11:02:02 AM
I have many other 3 letter codes using Autohotkey to bring in frequently typed things too, useful in emails and such.
Since I think through typing, autohotkey has been a QoL helper.
I've tried so many todo apps and the only thing I've stuck to is Obsidian and a daily morning habit of checking my list (I check it multiple times a day, but I set at least one 'forced' point in the morning to level set.
I also use a notebook that often feeds that obsidian tab because I still often prefer to take notes/diagram by hand. The kinetic action sticks with me better.
I follow something similar automated as:
So I can do.: And silver searcher for full text search.Very true. I never got used to any of the todo apps
You just need these three things.
- A Text Editor - A Calendar - A Cloud Sync for easy access
If you need to history just backup to any cloud drives or git or home backup.
My simple notes setup that I love since I live in ViM and TMux sessions
```.vimrc
map <leader>x :vs<cr>:e ~/Documents/notepad.txt<cr>
map <leader>X :vs<cr>:e ~/Documents/notes<cr>
map <leader>P :Files ~/Documents/notes<cr>
```
And that's pretty much it. I can pop open a long running file for temporary one offs, or pop open a directory with directories with files which all start with `01-`, `02-`,... to enforce order, with additions to a particular topic doing `01A-`, etc
And since I edit everything I work on in ViM, I have notes available in all my editors which have keyboard short cut quick jump navigation.
It keeps me very organized, can be set up anywhere with just a couple lines in the config file there, and only took me about a decade of steadily refining things down to get to
Every developer:
'Wow there are a 1000 of ToDo apps. I can't possibly try them all. So I will write my own ToDo app that does exactly what I want!'
Result:
There are now 1001 ToDo apps.
ToDo/productivity apps is a very tough market. I know because I wrote a visual task planner for Windows and Mac (hyperplan.com) and struggled to get enough visibility to make it commercially viable, despite a lot of rave feedback.
The same is true for group apps (manage a team; organize events with random people, etc. apps)... so many options... and so far every single season my kids have participated in a sport I've been privileged to try a new one... :-\
John Watson's "writer" webapp/website is an extremely useful and aesthetically pleasing tool that is free but has various perks for its' paid tiers. The "lifetime" purchase cost of $149.00 USD is totally worth it though.
https://writer.bighugelabs.com/welcome
Everything before the "no annoying banner ads" is included in the "free" tier:
-fast and distraction-free fullscreen writing environment -Saves automatically as you write -All writing is private, secure, and backed up regularly -Save an unlimited number of documents -Works online and off -Customize colors, fonts, and line spacing -Optional typewriter sounds -Automatic word count and writing goals -PDF and text export -Markdown formatting -No annoying banner ads
--- paid↓
-Export to Dropbox, Google Docs, Evernote, WordPress, and more -Built-in thesaurus -Word count updates as you type -Hemingway mode (backspace disabled) -Revision history -Create downloadable eBooks -Organize your writing with folders -Track your productivity with writing statistics -Downloadable archive of all your writing -Premium support
100% worth $149 for the "pro/lifetime" license. Been using it regularly since December 2021.
John Watson's website: https://johnwatsonllc.com/
This would be amazing if obsidian mobile did not take 10 seconds to start or even recover from being in the background and lose scroll position every time. For the desktop I would be absolutely happy with all todos in a simple markdown file. There can also be any number of UIs on top of markdown that people use over the years and grow out of but as long as the base system is markdown files you get the best of both worlds. I would never consider using an app for notes or todos that does not persist like that and no: ability export is not the same as native persistence in a human readable format. (Discovered the heard way multiple times when apps advertising with export failed or just lied.)
Where does the author talk about obsidian?
Haha. Been there, done that.
My journey has been like this: Wunderlist -> Microsoft acquired Wunderlist -> Any.DO -> Google Keep -> Todoist -> Trello -> ClickUp -> Obsidian -> todo.md file
(I am probably missing multiple.)
I still use Obsidian, but not as a Todo app, with absolute zero plugins. And Wunderlist remains the most tasteful todo app I have ever seen.
Now I just open up Alacritty and type in `vim todo.md`. It has today's date in H2, and tasks as checkboxes. That's it. Works better than anything else. Why . md over .txt? Because I like the syntax highlighting in vim.
I think a more nuanced look at this is:
- he needs to get things done
- checks out some tools
- they don't enforce fundamentals
- he needs self-discipline to do fundamentsls
- uses least-common-denominator
thing is, if the person continues with the .txt file at some point the habits will form and maybe tools will support his goals just fine.
the Getting Things Done book starts with pencil and paper.
A lot of people do this with literal tools. They skip from a manual screwdriver to a power screwdriver before they understand the "mechanics feel"¹ of tightening a screw and make a mess of things.
Then they go back to basics, use a hand screwdriver and learn to properly tighten a screw. At some point in the future a power screwdriver will accelerate what they are doing. And when necessary, use the hand screwdriver or the principles learned with it.
1: zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
After trying text files and other apps, I wrote my own about ten years ago and have been using it ever since. ( https://famplan.io - I'm starting to turn it into something other people might use.)
I tend to agree with the idea that simpler is better, but a single text file wasn't quite enough. I like being able to see my lists on multiple devices, I tend to like to have multiple lists for different purposes, and it's also very useful to have shared lists for coordinating with my family and others.
The experience of using this has taught me a few things about how to use these lists effectively:
1. Using a list is like writing a journal - you need to be intentional about explicitly working to make it part of your routine. (Part of this is committing to record tasks that need to be done and then committing in some explicit way to actually doing those things.)
2. It needs to be fast, it needs to be easy, and it needs to be present. Anything else gets in the way of point 1.
3. It's important to track when you need/want to do, but lists of things to do can be overwhelming. (It's useful to have at least a few ways to ignore items when you can't or don't want to deal with them. I handle this by having multiple lists, and also having a snooze feature to ignore items for a while.)
4. You need to have a way to handle items or tasks that go on for a while. (You need to make a call, but have to leave a message, and are waiting for a callback... etc. These are places where you need to take action to push something along, but the action doesn't result in a complete task, so you need to revisit it later.)
This is going to sound odd coming from someone who wrote a tool for the purpose, but the key here is really to pick a system (any system) and then actually use it. Spend too much time developing the system, then all you've done is give yourself something else to do.
I tried '4famplan4' as my password just to try it, and it said password insufficiently complex so I backed out. :(
Thanks for trying. (It expects mixed-case, which I need to actually say in the messaging.)
The codebase started out as something I used entirely myself, so the aspects of the workflow that relate to new user onboarding (most important for actually getting customers) are the ones that are the weakest. So this part of the codebase is where I'm working now to clean it up and it's probably also the most rough.
Why does it require mixed-case? It's for TODOs, not healthcare. If I want to use my insecure password to try out your service, please let me! It took extra code here for you to try to be secure, when it's now generally known that password requirements are security theatre at best and anti-security at worst.
Thank you for the feedback. A month ago, it didn't need any text in the password field at all. I may have overshot the mark a bit when I added validation.
Longer term, I mainly want it to just use external auth (Google, etc.) and not use passwords at all.
> Longer term, I mainly want it to just use external auth (Google, etc.) and not use passwords at all.
I usually avoid services that do this because I don't want any issues to my Google account (or any other service) to affect other services I use. Good luck trying to talk with someone at Google if some automated system flags and blocks your account.
Sounds to me like you need something simple and quick. If the current system works for you I would suggest to keep using it. If you ever feel like you need something better I would recommend trying microsoft todo or google tasks. Google Tasks syncs with your google calendar so it's a bit more powerful. Apart from them both a pretty simple. If you are looking for something even simpler take a look at google keep. This is what I use personally.
I'm sympathetic to the text file, but for me the problem comes when you have todo lists that you are sharing with someone else, like a spouse. Then you have/want to share and edit them collaboratively.
Simple enough, there's ways to do that, but by the time you set that up to work across multiple devices of your own and someone else's, it's simpler from a UX perspective to just use an app dedicated to that task. I suppose we could use a Google doc or something but there's Keep.
I'd be interested in trying something else — I have tried other things — but keep going back to Google Keep.
Especially for Android users, Google Tasks is dead simple to use and works seamlessly with voice prompting. The less I have to manually write or type out my reminders, the better.
Funny coincidence, I just published an offline infinity-scroll notes app[0] today to replace my long txt file. Desktop version probably in a couple of days. Last time I published an app for myself, my friends (and ~1k others!) loved it so trying doing it again.
I've used a .txt pretty much my whole life from my old Vaio running Ubuntu to my Mac books after, especially as a heavy terminal/nano enjoyer. I always saved it as do.txt in my base dir. Thousands of lines which was always nice to look at and more importantly easy to reference links I used during debugging or troubleshooting from months ago. It's a weird mix of a bookmarking list, daily to dos and quickly jotting down phone numbers or details while on the phone with someone (if I'm not on my personal laptop, I usually type the thing while I'm on the phone in the PC browser address bar then copy it over which is not ideal because auto-search).
Another strategy I've used is iMessaging myself with links or notes, which in my opinion is the best way since it auto syncs AND you can pin yourself in the iMessage app for quick access.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/infinote-single-page-notes/id6...
What I need TODO for is just to come up with a plan for the day. I don't really look at it after that. I don't look at it after today except maybe tomorrow. So yeah, a text file works.
I've came to a very similar conclusion. Productivity SaaS apps feel exciting to get started but eventually I've abandoned them all. I feel that many others have similar experiences but I'm not exactly sure why. Like the author, I too ended up with a plain text format (org-mode) and I've happily been on it for 7 years. Some questions that came to mind:
- Is it the artificial hype and promises around certain productivity apps (e.g. youtube notion promoters) that ultimately leave one disappointed?
- Does the productization of these apps make the companies feel compelled to change too much, thus alienating users? Is this why Apple notes has such a following, since it's not a monetized product of apple?
- Is the allure of plain text the fact that it doesn't change, analogous to something written on paper?
me, too, then https://godspeedapp.com/, and it finally stuck.
Still very sad about no Android, but it's good enough from my computers that I've managed to work around it with a few cloudflare-worker based mobile affordances.
I actually built the app myself. And for one simple reason - recently started learning to better plan my time. Started with paper version, and up to 5 most important task - my personal goal is to have consistency rather than squeeze every minute of every day.
And paper version is great. However, the vacation came and I wasn't really keen on dragging the book everywhere. Additionally i noticed that while planning, I don't really respect my long term goals - so I build an app for that: Simple thing that does several thing: - 1. Keep only 5 slots for most important tasks. - 2. Have calendar view in the same view (like google tasks) to make sure that I havent' forgotten some important meeting - 3. (Unlike google tasks, or clickup) - have short-term and long term goals in the same view , to make sure that every important task is related to long term goal - Bonus: I see stats on how much of important tasks I have completed. Goal is at least 80% avg for 7 days. - Bonus2: I've added my values to make sure that these are not forgotten in other places.
So single view to address todays work and relate it to long term vision. But I believe it depend on what you're optimising for. Dumping things or makeing sure that signal to noise ratio is better.
Same. I use Apple Notes. I have a few notes pinned (regular work, creative work, self-education, travel, chores). I write tasks. Break them up into small tasks with indents. Pick a task from the pool and execute. "Regular Work" tasks get priority. But if I'm not feeling it, I move to the other ones. Once I finish a task, I delete it/replace it with next steps. Nothing fancy. No formatting except for indentation. Been crushing it.
But I will add, there is no right way to do things in life in general. Experiment, and do what works for you.
I've been using the Gmail webpage for tracking my TODOs for like 20 years. The idea being, since I always have the webpage open in the first tab of my browser, and since I'm checking the webpage at least once a day, I never forget it. Every time I check my emails I also see my TODOs. And I can check/edit it from my phone when I'm not at home.
If it's a list of TODOs for the current day or week (e.g. work tasks, watering the plants, etc) I just start a draft and keep the draft open in the UI and update it regularly, then delete it when everything is done. If it's more mid-long term (let's say TODOs for the month, like buying some big stuff, etc), I usually send it to myself with "TODO [3-4 words description]" in subject and keep it in the inbox to be visible until I completed it. If I need to add something else I just reply to the same email.
I think Gmail has actually an integrated TODO widget in its webpage, but I just use emails out of habit.
Something I miss with modern UI design is the location persistence of items. Like the old windows desktop widgets or the OSX dashboard. You should show the desktop or bring up the dashboard and the todo list would always be in the same location and show up or hide with a quick key strokes.
I just vim ~/.todo.txt or more recently, just having claude code act as a middle man for it asking to generate what (should) be done then asking it what I need to do to finish x, has mcp integration to my IDE's so it can see what I am doing update the todo automatically, basically, a real life assistant which I now see why nearly every CEO has one.
I strongly believe using just a plain text files or overly basic tools makes your life more complicated, not less. I get a tonne of value out of OmniFocus
> “But what about mobile?” - The file syncs through Dropbox
Yup now you have to handle conflicts, or keep in mind which device you last edited on
> I use my calendar for time-specific stuff
Cool, the app I use just has a due date field that reminds me. I don't want the thing spread out over multiple places. I don't need to check my calendar every night for due dates and then add them to my list because it's already.. in my list.. with due dates..
> It’s searchable
Kind of? For basic searches I guess.. and only on a computer. Searching plain text files on mobile is hell
They seem to be inventing problems and then implementing a solution that doesn't actually solve them. Kept forgetting to check Things? How does a plain text file solve that?
> Kept forgetting to check Things? How does a plain text file solve that?
This. It just doesn’t. My bet is that some people just need to change their tools from time to time. And tbh I think it’s totally fine, no need to explain yourself. Just buy another todo list app and don’t feel bad about it. Or this expensive paper notebook. Or this “dumb phone” that will make you productive. Maybe just don’t try to find a deeper meaning in it or try to convince everyone that you finally solved some big mistery
Probably. Whatever method I use, physical or digital, it tends to fade into the background after a while and I stop noticing it. My best bet might be to switch to a new method every few weeks, in which case it's probably best to keep them simple and cheap. Maybe a whiteboard for a while, then a notebook, then a text file, and so on looping through a few basic methods.
I echo the authors sentiment except for one thing: mobile-native editing experience. This is where Google Keep shines for me personally. I need to also be able to modify my notes immediately and with an intuitive note taking interface.
Shameless plug: I built [1] and use a small magit like interface on top of org-mode.
I love org for all its bells and whistles and use them in various ways. But most of the time I need a small subset of org in a form-factor that allows ease of use.
[1] https://github.com/ChanderG/toodoo.el
Markdown on Obsidian is a prestine setup. Can be used to embed many file types; media, documents, code snippets, graphs, ... all this can be linked and this unlocks so much context. Being able to sync that; My 2nd hand Lenovo running Linux and my Samsung S20 Phone.
I am a tech creative and this is one of my vice. Having a todo is an opportunity to go through your experiences for clarity.
└── Dev well
I feel the pain of this, I use obsidian for my day to day note taking and tasks to do as a general plan, I push tasks from Slack into Trello inbox as people chat me things that I need to look into, I make reminders for myself while away from a computer on my iPhone via Siri.
Apple reminders has a kanban now that is actually pretty okay, but I dont have a great way to get things from slack into it - manually copying all the text/attachments/url is super annoying.
There is an app that syncs your reminders with an obsidian task list, but I ran into too many bugs with it resetting and taking too long to clean all the old shit up that just got archived due to not being required.
I could probably get away with a bunch of MCP servers that query my local reminders, trello, and obsidian daily notes, outlook calendar, gmail calendar.... but it feels like such a bad way of going about aggregating everything.
My inbox is my todo list. If I want to go nuts I can add a “waiting for them” label. Archive means done. Unread means unprocessed. I can send myself an email or if the task originates from someone else their email thread is the task. For voicemail, call, SMS heavy workflows of the past I routed my sms and voicemail through my inbox as well. This tooling is very personal but the above I’ve found to standup to very large workloads.
My journey has been identical, and I have a suspicion that this inability to use an app with bells and whistles might have something to do with ADHD.
I actually ended up making an app as a side project which is just todo.txt with one extra feature: if you start a line with a "!", it turns that line to a push notification on your lock screen. just keeps the important things in your list just a bit closer to awareness without overwhelming
https://www.whatistoday.net/2024/06/scratch-paper-minimal-mo...
I see that nobody mentions Howm for Emacs. I find it more simple than Org-mode and its task sorting algorithm just works well for my brain. I really recommend it to those interested in a zettlekasten like note system with integrated tasks, all in text files.
https://kaorahi.github.io/howm/
This flies a bit in the face of the author's "The sync breaks. The company sells out and dies" point and the simple beauty of a text file. I find that Obsidian.md is just one step above a text file.
Simple daily notes, which are automatically organized into year and month folders. (Tip: Set the date format to YYYY/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD)
The Sync feature works great, but no reason you couldn't do this with just git on your own.
Plenty of built-in features (Plugins, ToDos, etc...)
Cross platform apps.
Markdown
Free. The sync feature is $4/month. Worth it for me.
They also have a one-time $25 payment to get early access to beta versions and a VIP discord channel.
I love Obsidian and the sync is worth it, but I wouldn't say it's one step above a text file. It's miles away. Never-ending features and customisations. If you want simplicity, a text file really can't be beaten.
I use Obsidian as basically just a markdown editor that I can throw images into. I find that all of the bells and whistles stay out of your way if you don't want them.
The point is, you don't need to play with extra features and customizations if you don't want to, so you can keep it "a step above a text file". That said, having those additional features is nice when you want just a little bit more, or you want to link a note file with your todo file, etc.
I just use Google Keep Note as my todo app. You don't need anything complex than that. I call my notes as DeathNotes where tasks go to die i.e. finish.
I like the "dopamine hit" of changing a task from TODO to DONE that comes from colors. I use this very simple vim syntax file for that :)
syntax match TODOKey "TODO"
syntax match DONEKey "DONE"
syntax match BLCKKey "BLCK"
syntax match MAYBKey "MAYB"
syntax match Comment "\/\/.*$"
hi def link TODOKey DiagnosticWarn
hi def link DONEKey Type
hi def link BLCKKey DiagnosticError
hi def link MAYBKey Constant
hi def link Comment Comment
Productivity really doesn’t need “solving”.
The problem is procrastination.
It’s quite ironic the amount of time people sink into these productivity methods and apps. Almost like it was yet another form of procrastination…
Checking things off might give that small endorphin drip enough to break the procrastination habit.
It reminds me of the developers I know who spend 6 hours out of every 8 hour day tinkering with their obscure toolsets and crazy build systems to avoid writing code.
I've seen folks using vim get way more done than some of these Youtube addicted professional tool testers.
I use TickTick.
I saw the author tried it but didn’t actually write about it under “What Actually Happened With Each App”
I use TickTick over Todoist and other apps because it’s basically a .txt file dump for me, but with notifications and reoccurring tasks /shrug
After using Evernote for 10 years and seeing what they did to it, I'm never switching from plain txt/md files for notes and todos. For simple and daily todos, I just use iPhone notes (They don't have anything long-term or important, and the sync is nice).
For the rest, I just use plain files that are encrypted locally and stored on GitHub and Google Drive.
I totally wrote my own TODO system. It's actually quite featureful, and it works as a command-line program that stores its data in a human-readable text file. And can produce graphs. Admittedly, it's more of a time-tracking system with an attached TODO list than anything else, and it doesn't pop up reminders for anything - I have an annoying calendar for that instead. Maybe one day I'll pop it on github and see if anyone else likes it.
It's challenging. I struggle with the mismatch between work and personal in particular. They run both on different software stack and different cadence. On work side I'm constrained by whatever corporate thingie they give us, and on personal side I prefer selfhost FOSS...so fundamentally incompatible
No idea except knowing if I can crack this my life would be better
Personally I like that my work and personal life is being clearly separated. Some device ale work only, some are personal only. Same with software
I've never found that emailing to a todo.txt file works very well. Seriously, though, if your only goal is to make a long list of things you don't want to forget, use a text file, paper, or any system you want. I get a boatload of things to do in my email. Forwarding the message to a task manager reduces a lot of stress.
Another thing for me is the ability to capture files or take pictures. I just can't do that with todo.txt in an efficient way. Being able to grab my phone and snap a picture or create a new task and upload a file is hard to beat. I can later come back and add some comments.
Good man. Everyone eventually reaches the same year zero: a text file.
Then adds structure back, as it suits their persona. Not too much, not too little, just right - goldilocks. It's very personal, even more than a smartphone.
For me - $ githome add logBook to git $HOME solves versioning and replication:
giho() { (cd "$HOME" && git --git-dir="$HOME"/.githome/ --work-tree="$HOME" "$@";) } # prior must $ git init --bare $HOME/.githome
And in the logBook structure currently at:
1. Sections FIXME, TODO, DONE, DONTDO. Keep them vi searchable /^SECTION$.
2. Entry start searchable /^-(space).
3. Entry end separator from next is empty line searchable /^$.
4. New items add at the top, push old items down.
5. Items move wholesale, no change on between sections move.
6. Items spending too long in TODO moved into DONTDO.
7. No new items added in TODO if FIXME is not empty.
8. If really really need to add to TODO - then move blocking FIXME entries to TODO.
9. Above are rules of thumb - break them with a reason, don't break them without reasons.
I prefer keeping everything in one file as well, since even the act of creating a new file is sometimes enough of a hassle for me to skip jotting something important down.
Question for fellow one-file'ers: what do you on mobile? My problem in the past was that all plain text editor apps on iOS open files at the top, which meant scrolling all the way down every time I opened my notes file.
These days I use NotePlan, but I don't really use enough of its features to justify continuing my subscription (the dev is really great though).
I don't use a to do file, but I do keep notes in (mostly) a single text file, and I just have them on a server exposed to the internet. When I need to read/write something I SSH to the box and use Vim to update the note.
I wouldn't recommend this if you didn't already have a server set up for other reasons, but it might be a useful option for some commenters here.
How about writing new things at the top of the file? If you use dates as sections you can still add new things at the bottom of the current day, but you always have current day at top.
Just add new notes and tasks at the top? I find that it means less important tasks tend to settle towards the bottom, and I’ll periodically go and reshuffle things as required.
Okay, so there are people who do this? I've actually considered it on several occasions, but it always felt a bit 'wrong', like prepending rather than appending to an array.
I like the idea though of less important things being farther down, like sediment, whereas current/important things stay closer to the surface. There's a fun metaphor in there.
Might try your way, after all!
I use obsidian. It's markdown, and can sync across devices.
Obsidian is great but it's a productivity trap for me. The last time I got into it I went too far in designing the 'perfect' PKM system, while not actually using it all that much. Turns out I just really like designing systems. =p
Try as I might, the best to-do/task list I can come up with is a legal pad. Mixed with notes of the day for meetings or ad-hoc remembering-of-things.
Closest to that is a .txt file in my specific format, but even that is not quite as good.
The days/weeks I can maintain discipline with a legal pad are much more productive. It works well if you work out of an office or a single location, but breaks down quickly if you are moving around.
A notebook is a close second, just not quite as easy to go page through quickly to figure out wtf you were doing 3 weeks ago or find that one note you're pretty sure you have but not quite sure where or when.
I've tried pretty much every electronic form out there, but have never been able to maintain it. The Remarkable 2 comes the closest, but I've found it tends to be very much "write only" compared to a legal pad. Hard to go through it and reference past notes quickly.
The author's complaints about the various solutions hit home. My wife and I tried a bunch of solutions for shared tasks and lists. Finally I found vikunja, put it on my home cluster, and it's been a game changer. We never run out of milk due to a lack of communication, and I have no excuse to forget the chore she asked me to get around to last week.
There really is a sweet spot between helping productivity and overcomplicating life, and most of these applications go for the latter. Glad we finally found something that works for us. I'm just sharing here hoping it'll help someone else.
I use Apple Notes and Reminders for work.
- Reminders: I just have a few simple lists: TODO, WIP, and BLOCKED (for stuff I'm waiting on others for).
- Notes: I keep daily, weekly, and monthly notes. At the end of each day, I clean up my daily note and move anything important to the weekly one, and then do the same into monthly.
The pinnacle of notes and task lists was achieved in 1997 by the Palm Pilot. It’s been downhill ever since. I realize some people need or want something more integrated and elegant, but simple really does suffice for the vast majority of cases.
I used a different model of Palm and miss it. It is simple and just works. Ironically, with the current much more powerful smartphone, I have yet to find something similar to the Palm. The only downside of Palm was its frustrating touchscreen.
I mostly use text(markdown) these days.
I can't imagine using a to-do app that isn't Obsidian+tasks. You can link notes for infinite subtasking and for describing/logging to your heart's desire. Just better version of txt
I have a "never-ending .txt file" too. About 4100 pages' worth, at the moment, across 25 volumes and counting, over the span of now nearly eight years.
I don't intend particularly to advocate the format here, but I will say that of all my many bookshelves, in a certain way there's none I find more satisfying than the one I work to fill myself. Is that worth more than being able to use grep(1) on their contents? Or are those contents worth more to me because I can't? Who could say, but it's fun to think about, at least. (And for those young enough to be easily swayed by vanity, if you think performative reading is in fashion right now...)
I was also dissatisfied with existing task tracking apps, and built my own:
t-do.com
There are still many rough edges, but it’s extremely useful. One of the best features that a text file has that very few apps support is unlimited sub-task nesting, and that’s a core feature of T-Do.
I made a dumb command-line tool that sends a 1-line email to my work email or to my personal email. The tool is in my PATH on 2 computers. I use paper when I'm not at my computer and I have small pen and small paper with me at all times. Occasionally I send texts to my email address. I'm considering giving this tool to my coworkers.
I like that the author mentions making a post it and actually achieving all the stuff on the post-it.
I have a portable whiteboard on my desk, around the size of a sheet of printer paper. I use it only to write the things I want to accomplish today. I have found that very effective for me personally.
I believe todo apps run into the challenge that "to do" is way too broad a concept. Personally I track in-progress tasks (on a giant roll of paper), recurring and schedule tasks (especially where I coordinate with my spouse; on a dedicated Skylight smart-calendar), long term ideas and goals (as issues in a dedicated GitHub repo), meeting follow-ups (as .txt), groceries (on scrap paper), etc. The UX I want for each of these is quite different so I've never been able to make a generic todo app work. Worse, I'd hate to accidentally see my work list when I'm trying to do housework as I'm liable to start a side quest. So I need dedicated tools for each type of list.
I came to the same conclusion. Except I decided I could make a simpler software. I'm still in the "one more feature bro" phase, but if this blog post resonates for anyone and you're open to a simple saas -- would love feedback https://grugnotes.com
I made my own. I needed to have a calendar that showed every todo item per day, and a text editor to edit the tasks just like in a todo.txt. Used it all day every day for over 15 years. I still have it installed on nearly all my Win systems, just because it opens instantly, has priority and colors. I also used it to produce reports for work, so I eventually added export options for HTML to paste directly into an email.
https://github.com/DexterLagan/todo-master
No source code?
There is definitely something to be said for simple file formats augmented with tooling like LLMs and such. I am one of the people who also ended up writing my own todo list app. It really started as a journaling system, but it was super simple to add TODOs. I basically created my own clone of Logseq if anyone is familiar with that. I've basically got what the author has got, but I've automated the part where a fresh page is created each day, and a feature to quickly move undone TODOs to any day.
The only feature I need that would accelerate my workflow that text file editors don't currently have is a column with the last modified timestamp of that particular line, and maybe some color indication to show which lines were modified the most recently compared to others. And this would be based on change, not based on save or commit.
https://workflowy.com is the closest to a text file I've used and that's why I like it. It's like a text file that is synchronized between all your devices and lets you collapse nested bullet lists. That's enough for me.
Came to say this. It's not exactly a todo list, and it certainly isn't "yours", but it's very close to a text file, with just about the right amount of additional functionality, and it's free.
I don't use it all that often but it's a good companion, for example to make checklists for packing, etc.
Oh yeah, sharing is another nice feature it offers for things like packing checklists. You can share part of your bullet list with collaborators.
Suggestion for Android: Tasks — I’ve been using this (free) to-do list, planner and reminders app for probably more than ten years now, mostly as a shopping list app. Be aware that there are other apps with very similar names and icons.
https://mytasksapp.com/
cheers
>I’ve tried them all. Notion, Todoist, Things 3, OmniFocus, Asana, Trello, Any.do, TickTick.
There are hundreds of todo apps. Possibly 1000s. Including mine, which isn't mentioned. ;0) So all is something of an exaggeration.
I've had a plain TODO.txt file for over 20 years so I agree with all the benefits the author mentioned. However, I don't like it because without an app, there's no runtime loop to notify and alert me of what's coming up.
This means I don't have "ambient awareness" of what's going on unless... I open the TODO.txt file ... manually scan it... then rescan it again and again multiple times per day. It's really tedious and inefficient to manually re-read the same items again. Offloading repetition like that is what computers are good for. I just don't have a good app at the moment to turn my TODO.txt into something I don't have to manually eyeball all the time.
So even though I have a tasks in my TODO.txt, a lot of things still falls through the cracks because I forget I need to do them.
If you have the type of brain that has a built-in "6th sense" of tasks that need to get done, a lightweight-no-runtime TODO.TXT will work fine for you. But it's definitely inadequate for me and I need to fix that.
EDIT replies to "use calendar for reminders" : Yes, that's a workaround but I've resisted doing that because I wanted the utopia of my TODO.TXT file being the Single-Source-Of-Truth instead of manually copying items to Google Calendar. (Yes, I know that "perfection is the enemy of the good" and all that.) The way other people do it is they make Google Calendar itself the SSOT. But that defeats the purpose of the freeform flexibility of the TODO.TXT that has all the notes, etc in addition to tasks.
I want my TODO.TXT to be a unified view of everything I want to do in life and splitting some items off into Google Calendar is just more digital housekeeping I wanted to avoid.
The way I'd prefer to use Google Calendar is via the developer API to programmatically add entries that's based off of my TODO.TXT. E.g. : (https://developers.google.com/workspace/calendar/api/guides/...)
... but that requires an active runtime loop ... like a Python script constantly scanning my TODO.TXT and then automatically populating the Google Calendar. I just haven't gotten around to coding that yet. Yes, the irony is that meta-task to enhance my TODO.txt is already in my TODO.txt.
I want to address the underlying philosophy behind your edit (and also your original comment). "Perfect is the enemy of good" is not just "all that." It is the thing, the critical design constraint. Computers are a hundred years old. If you believe all repetition should be offloaded to computers -- it sounds like that isn't working for you? I'm in the same boat, and I reacted by.. reducing my standards. I have a tool. It isn't perfect and there are no signs it's going to get perfect in my lifetime. So I don't wait for perfection. I get on with my life. Even if computers will be suitable for all repetitive tasks in another hundred years.
I do have a single source of truth, and it's my todo list. However, I manualate to keep it thus. When I add something to the calendar, I copy it over to my todo list as well.
I don't do this for everything, only stuff that improves my decision making. So an appointment with a barber can just be on my calendar. Long todo lists intimidate me anyway, so it would do more harm than good cluttering up my view of critical decisions I need to make. Stuff like, "what should I make next," or "how should this thing be designed?"
So if manualating seems like too much work, I'd suggest that maybe you're taking on too much in the critical decision category, in which case you might make better decisions by focusing on fewer things. But yeah, YMMV. This is how I think about it and it works well for me.
What do you mean by coming up? Like a deadline?
For event-based things I tend to have a reminder on my calendar. If things are relatively important, you'd assign them some kind of priority; in a simple .txt file, I'd expect them to be at the top for instance.
If the file has too many important tasks (such that I lose track of them), it means that at least some of them are not actually important and they should be revisited. IIRC that's the point of the weekly review mentioned in the GTD book: don't assume your workflow keeps working as you use it, there is some regular maintenance involving taking a step back and revisitings tasks, prioritizations etc.
Fwiw, this is pretty much a slam dunk usecase for current LLMs.
Vibe code a script that parses your existing text file and creates events in your chosen calendar app. Then run this script on a schedule
Explicitly tell it to add a tag or anything else identifiable so it can Auto remove/update the events on changes etc.
You'll have a PoC in minutes and will likely be happy with the result within an hour, if you're using Claude Code
Another way to solve this is to use Fossil. Fossil has a built-in wiki. You can launch Fossil UI and use the built-in wiki with Markdown. Have legacy txt files? Just open a new fossil project and add them to it. And if you set up the admin and user correctly, you can mirror your notes to GitHub. So, it's not that text files are not a good option. There are vastly superior options with almost no effort.
I've been running a text based todo/status doc for about that long and my hack for that particular problem is to occasionally do a scan and copy anything 'active' to the top (or bottom if you append to the end :) of the file. Yeah, there's a bit of duplication there (I usually just copy a short description and a pointer back to the date of the original so not so bad..), but it works for me.
Surely this would be easy to fix with a simple script that runs on a VPS to alert you on a platform of your choice, maybe using something like Apprise (https://github.com/caronc/apprise). Get the notification as an email, on Discord, Signal, etc.
This does complicate the system a bit, but still low overhead in my opinion.
Congratulations you invented a calendar with notifications. Which already exists on every digital device, it existed on Nokia phones 30 years ago :)
I use the Unix way and multiple tools.
If something has a date attached, put it on the calendar.
If something is time sensitive add alarms as needed (calendar notifications have not been doing it for me in the last 5+ years)
20 years ago it was text file + Unix calendar + crontab + something custom.
These days it's text file + calendar + clock app + something custom.
I use a very basic system similar to this idea of running TODO.txt, but they are notecards i write every day. I sit them Infront of me and any timed tasks go onto the calendar. Outlook Calendar has notifications so those are my prompts for time based activities.
i realized either it's pen & or paper or .txt this was a 10+ year experiement and i wasted alot of time finding and building workflows and none of them sticks more than .txt file (i also had a more automated version of it in macos using .txt file and macros that time blocked my calendar but it was too restrict)
nothing falls my mind i can just add #note #<project> #idea or whatever consistent tagging or subnotes i can do the todo.txt and it'd be easier to even feed it to chatgpt/or what everllm to even remind of my most important ones in the future and send me notification in telegram or something.
It's a big upfront investment but it's one of the things that Org mode with its built in agenda view is fantastic for. I've really never needed anything else for note taking and scheduling.
All you need is cron.
<to the tune of "all you need is love">
If you sit in the browser most of the day, https://momentumdash.com
I just switched to printing my todo tasks on a receipt printer. I have an arduino connected to a receipt printer and a Python script that can send commands to the arduino to print tasks. Also just finished adding barcode scanning so the task gets printed with a barcode and I use an iOS Shortcut to mark the task as complete. Actually works so well! Having the tasks in physical form helps me stay more focused and scanning the barcode to mark a task as complete feels so satisfying. I have the code if anyone wants to delve into this but it does require arduino + receipt printer + a TTL to RS232 module, though! And BPA-free receipt paper if you are concerned about that.
Markdown with Obsidian is a good mix. Let's you add context and you could figure a way to sync with phone from my 2nd hand lenovo running linux to view; code snippets, documents, media, graphs, ...all due to the - in my own view the universal document format.
I am a tech creative so I am okay with this vice. Trying to finetune the above setup btw.
└── Dey well
I just use a Kanban board for my to-do's, and it has been working amazingly well for years now. I sort stuff based on four columns, starting with the most important that should be done "today".
I love Markdown files with editors such as Obsidian or Logseq, but found them to be suboptimal for to-do's / tasks.
A few years back a friend approached me with an idea to track todos in Google Calendar directly by adding #todo to event titles. If you don't mark them as done they will roll forward to the next day. We ended up shutting it down as a product, but I recently vibe coded it back as a Google Apps Script so it's free to run on your own. It works super well for people who live off of their calendar - https://github.com/slackpad/hashtagtodo-redux.
I use Joplin. I made a little extension which generates a file with Monday's date and then the days + dates as headers.
On Monday I copy anything I still want from the previous week and then just jot down notes as I go.
---
# Monday - 11
# Tuesday - 12
# Wednesday - 13
# Thursday - 14
# Friday - 15
I'm also a fan of the minimalist approach, having settled on a combination of Notes app and temporary paper lists. When I'm feeling overwhelmed and really need to knock out some tasks, nothing beats pencil and paper for me.
I recently came across the Analog product from Ugmonk and I love it. It's basically just a dedicated little wood holder for you desk, and different types of cards. I use the blank lined cards.
https://ugmonk.com/collections/analog
$70 for a cute wooden card holder. Holy moly!
What perspective are you coming from where that is a crazy amount? If it works for one it will become a part of their daily life. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Most pairs of pants cost at least that much unless you're of the "I only shop at Costco/Target" mindset.
I'm sure you could get a knockoff or DIY and save a few bucks but I appreciate the thought that's gone into their designs.
Couldn't agree with this more! Obsidian is my go-to. I essentially do the same thing but make look a little better with Obsidian's markdown theming/formatting. I keep a Priorities.md file and review that at the start of each day, making needed updates as I go.
I've found that a lot of apps try to micromanage me, my workflow, or how I use my computer.
I've grown to appreciate using simple tools, (spreadsheet, document) without the structure of an app.
I manage my 10-house HOA with spreadsheets, because the tools cost so much that I'd have to raise HOA rates.
Shopping lists are on whatever document app I'm using. (Currently Word, used to be Google Drive, used to be iPhone notes.)
I use a pretty similar setup. At the beginning of my day when I get to my desk at work I open a new .txt and enter all the tasks I'm currently working on (copied from the last day). I then mark them as completed or leave notes as needed. Works perfectly for me - no need for anything more fancy.
I do the same and I also find that it greatly improves how rapidly I can context-switch back into the work, even after a weekend away.
This is what I do with my "Daily Brain Dump". I use Apple Notes bc it syncs up nicely with my phone. Every day I add a new entry to the top of the note. Mix of TODO's and a journal. Actually have two files, one for my life in general and one for work.
Exactly this. I realized that full featured tools like OmniPlan made increased my anxiety because it is too easy the build up to do items that you would never do. Having a simple note pad forces me to delete unnecessary cruft every week since I have to manually copy it. Also the notes approach gives me one place to look for and summarize all of my activities.
For short term tasks (task-cache) I have ended up with essentially the same thing, just using *.md file + Notepad++ because of markdown syntax highlighting + snappiness of Notepad++ and I can then see it as a webpage using Markdown Viewer extension on Firefox.
For structured documentation of my projects + searching + writing notes down on the go via phone I am using Joplin.
For tasks to be done on a specific date I have calendar
For project management I have Redmine behind VPN so I can get on it from anywhere.
For personal stuff I ended up with https://mytasksapp.com/
It's simple enough for me to understand but has the following features I want:
nice simple UI where I can add stuff without too many clicks
syncs between phone and browser (requires $1.49/mo which I'm fine with)
Can make multiple lists
Can drag items around in the list
Can add a longer description and reminders
For tech side projects I use GitHub issues as TODO/wish lists
For work I use a Google Doc to plan out the days tasks and meetings (similar to todo.txt). Google docs is really nice for this because I can collapse headers to shorten yesterdays work and use checklists that I check off as the day passes. I can also scribble notes in a freeform fashion at the bottom. I dedicate a whole browser (Safari) just to this page so I can easily tab to it.
For work I use MSFT Todo for stuff I'd like to do "at some point when I get time" (it's approved by my company, unlike my personal Todo app)
Real shame that CalDAV didn't dominate the way SSH/email/whatever dominates.
I use Todoist which is the only one that actually works IMO, kicks ass, but I wish it wasn't one someone else's backend.
I find it most interesting that despite Notions appeal and fanbase, it continues to lead to failure of this function. I am one of those who has built not just one, but two two apps for this! But, for todo management, I still use a Notes file (.txt on iOS is hard). I suspect that the upcoming integration with AI/calendar in iOS 26 will make it less appealing to me however, because it will take away the control and simplicity of managing things myself manually.
Other benefits of plain text notetaking: perfect versioning, using favorite text editor (therefore spell checking and various tools), amazing integration with unix programs, support on any platform/device.
Two shortcomings are: figure out cross-device sync (ssh/nfs are good options), reinventing the wheel for rich text (tags, references, data tables, etc.)
Shameless plug of my journey of logging diary/todos:
I had tried a diary script that does the simple act of opening today's diary in vim: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman
Once things became overwhelming, it was less trackable across time and became messy - so I created tascli: https://crates.io/crates/tascli to centrally manage tasks and records with sqlite in a CLI app.
Think I'm in a sweet spot now having both of these minimal version logging - the lack of functionality is exactly why they are great.
I spent my 20s searching for the perfect todo solution but my search ended when I discovered org-mode. It's not that I'm the most productive person you'll meet, it's just that there's nothing further to look for. Should I decide to be my productive self for a while, I know org-mode will support me and not stand in my way :)
Oh, and I love the Denote package.
I swear by Mindmapping Applications (e.g. Xmind, Mindmanager) - one file every month (extractable with a python library for LLM evaluation).
One top-level branch is a prioritized Inbox with a Pending branch at the top (Item half-completed, but awaits external action, e.g. an order has to arrive).
One top-level branch with Done, which is a folder with a branch for each week, then day, where I dump completed items into
One top-level branch for ongoing subscriptions with alerts
Collapsed top-level branches for Hobbies and Family Ideas and things-to-do
With xmind, you can easily tag the task progress of each item.
Took me 8 years, including a really beautiful Android ToDo Concept which I build and ended up abandoning :D
I also do the text file thing. I use EditPad Pro. The only additional thing I've done is create syntax coloring in any file named 'tasks-*.txt'.
I added simple things like: - Color anything ending in a ? green, so when looking at a list of notes, so I know where the questions were. - Any line beginning with an all caps word is highlighted (e.g. TODO: ) - Any line ending in a : is highlighted light blue (e.g. title) - Any Line Containing "Error" is red
I do suppose I could be using Markdown, but I've had this going for 20 years now.
I was also frustrated with the current app offerings, so I wrote my own. Feel free to try: https://checkoff.ai
The only thing that ever really worked for me is taskwarrior.org. It is super easy to get started and can be made more sophisticated as you. I live in the terminal most of the time anyway so that makes it a natural fit.
Read this and you clearly want something like Obsidian.
Get obsidian and then set up - Syncthing for free open source syncing that doesn't go to any cloud, just replicates across your own devices
- You can just do a single markdown file instead of a single txt file if you really want to smoosh everything into one file (gross but you do you). markdown is portable and many software can render it easily, if they can't markdown is still readable raw plaintext
- But I would get some cool plugins like Periodic Notes and then set up either a Monthly or a Weekly periodic note. Basically the idea is the same as what you are doing, but instead of one lifetime markdown file, you split them up into monthly or weekly chunks. I do weekly (one note for each week), but its really your preference.
Now you get pretty rendering of your notes, generate sharable links to your notes, password protect them, all still free, open source, syncing, and portable (markdown plaintext)
The only note taking app I've been able to use is "Reflect" (https://reflect.app/) because it gives me a calendar view and allows linking with tags and backlinks. Plus it's encrypted and I can always export my notes.
The only downside is that it's only on OSX/IOS but the webapp is good enough for my use cases.
I use todo.txt on steroids. In fact, the file is called todo.org and is best used in Emacs' org-mode, which does the best of all worlds for decades now. I can have a plain ASCII todo list and some algorithmic magic that understands it, if I want that.
If you live in VS Code there is a notes plugin that lets you create and manage Markdown notes in the sidebar. I usually create one note per repo and then pin the tab in that repo. If you work on a lot of projects it is a great way to segregate your todos by project so you don’t get overloaded. I also have a todo folder that has multiple notes pinned (today, scratchpad and long term notes) that I keep open in my main workspace window. It works for me, YMMV.
just use google tasks? hello? it has notification and calendar integration
Amazing. It doesn't surprise me that the most simple workflows are the ones that work best. Probably because there is not a lot of resistance (keyboard shortcut instead of searching through a list of apps / no tutorial on how to use it; it's just a text file / it's easily readable and you get to choose the formatting and structure of your text).
As a developer, however, I have to scratch the itch of always having "wrangleable" data, and yet again text files are the best at it. I am already thinking of doing this and just follow a set of writing "guidelines" so I can parse the txt if I wanted to do some visualization stuff.
I tried a bunch of todo apps, task trackers etc and also tried a txt file. None of it really worked for me. I tried bullet journals, I couldn’t stick to it.
What did end up working for me is a clipboard with a sheet of paper that I replace every few days. I write my todo list on it and I cross done tasks off in red marker. I guess it’s kinda like the bullet journal but even more lite.
New todo apps have absolutely amazing UIs because people think the frustration of todo apps has to do with the UI. The thing is YOU WANT FRICTION in your todo app. There is something rewarding and satisfying about a UX where you've accomplished a task and you get to check it off.
The perceived holy grail of todo apps is the one that automatically creates tasks and then checks them off when we complete the task with zero interaction. This is wrong.
I do this too, but with a text file per day.
I have my 3 favourite bindings from vimwiki in my config and have used this 'system' for years without any problems.
https://github.com/peteryates/dotfiles/blob/master/nvim/.con...Shoutout to checkvist.com use them for years. Exactly enough bells and whistles.
It fits my brain of an endless deep list.
Have no affiliate with them apart from paying them each and every year.
Ironically, I ignored Apple’s Reminders app as an options for years. It’s now my daily operating system. Lots of simple table-stakes features out of the box that elevate the experience above just using a simple Notes app
Too much organization never helps, I've learned this with both note taking and with todo apps.
My workflow with ticktick is largely based on having all my to-dos in one "next actions" list. Tags are the one feature I can't throw away though, most of my to-do lists is tagged with a project name. My day to day view of Ticktick is usually some tag
I started using a text todo list at work just last February. I'd tried various things over the years and this has been the best so far. It's a combination of things to do, a record of what has been done since I started, in some cases a filling in of historical important things that have happened, and as a simple way of keeping track of different steps of individual processes, or individual items that need the same fix.
The top part is the todo list and the bottom portion is a list of days and what was done beneath each.
I have an always running session of Notepad++ with (currently) 356 tabs open. I can search through all of them if needed. This worked for me after also piloting several solutions.
I have a draft of a similar post to this one about lists https://gist.github.com/breadchris/683202bffd4463e517335ab3f...
Did you try todoman (which I wrote, like a decade ago)?
It stores todos in icalendar files, so it’s easy to sync onto a CalDav server and onto your phone.
I like Tasks.org for Android and I think it syncs with CalDAV that comes with my e-mail provider. That should just about do the trick, even with Thunderbird.
I love this article. The magic of todos is that it's really about the process, not the apps. An app can facilitate the process, but it's not required. I personally use Things and an ongoing Google doc. It requires me to copy between them every day, but I find that forces me to do the process of prioritizing and paring down, which is the magic part. A text file would work as well.
There are a few things I wish I could magically add to the text doc, though, like inline alarms and calendar events.
Same experience, but ending up with .md, sync-ed on Nextcloud.
I've built Wren (https://github.com/bjesus/wren) with a pretty similar idea of simplicity in mind — a task is just a file — but, it can also be whatever kind of file you want:
1. Drag an email to ~/Notes and it's a task
2. touch ~/Notes/get\ milk and it's a task
3. ln -s ~/Documents/something-i-need-to-finish-writing.doc ~/Notes/complete\ writing and it's task
Wren doesn't care about the format.
This is pretty cool! Is it still in active development?
Yeah - I mean I haven't been adding any new features recently, but mostly because the system just works. I'm using it daily and definitely fixing stuff if they break.
On similar note, I tested every grocery list app and ended up with papers and pencil
I guess the more organised you are, the better off with just a textfile. I'm not, so I use layers: - postit notes - google (I know!) calendar if it's time sensitive - paper or text file notes - if it's a longer thing, maybe obsidian (I know!)
The point is, I don't think one app, any app can solve all mankind's all scheduling problems.
In my case, I ended up using a simple note in Apple Notes, for each month/quarter, having a collapsible day heading and just adding tasks there. Bold indicates a bit of a higher priority, and I can move things that I don't complete from previous days.
There was a curses-based todo program that was totally awesome MANY years ago, source code posted to usenet I believe back in the day, but I have never been able to find it again. Anyone have a pointer?
shameless plug: I also got fed up with todo apps (and note-taking apps in general), so I built "Zettel"[1]. It's a simple piece of paper, but on your phone. It's amazing what you can get done with such a simple tool.
[1]: https://github.com/AlexW00/Zettel
For short-term (next few days), TODO.txt on my desktop is superior to every fancy solution I've tried.
For longer term stuff/backburner items, I use Google tasks.
I had the same problem and then built https://crom.ai/
—> htts://app.crom.ai/register
Side project - so don’t really actively market it, but it’s been my daily driver for over a year now
Same, but my text files are .md and synched for free between mobile/workstantion using Joplin + OneDrive.
I've cycled between a few low tech. solutions and have finally settled on Emacs org-mode. I don't use my phone to track TODOs and this works fine for me.
I gave up on to-do apps as well. I have a text file I started in 2017. It's on my desktop and always open in a text editor. I just add the following at the top for a new entry:
20250811 - Core API - deploy to production 20250810 - Customer X - call about upgrading to new version
Every day I move items I have not yet done to the top of the list. Order in the list is the priority.
Old or done tasks naturally fall down the list.
I've used a TODO.md for years. I prefer it to a .txt as I can get some syntax highlighting in Vim.
About a year ago I merged my TODO with my work journal. So now, instead of two files I just have LOG.md with the TODO stuff at the top, a horizonal line and the journal of what I've been doing each day below.
I also copy the file (e.g. LOG-2024.md) each year and clear out the journal to keep the number of lines down.
A txt (rtf in my case) is a notebook that doesn't get messy. Deepest parts go back to 2007. Cell phone alarm for reminders, also acts as a clotting agent for time. After you do what the alarm is for you have choice of setting alarm again or proceeding into the next item.
I had a similar journey, settled on a todo app that actually uses text files too https://www.taskpaper.com Save the text file to a cloud sync provider and you can check it on every device
This certainly doesn't apply to all cases, and version control / history is very complicated, but I use a notepad and a felt tip pen and I just couldn't use anything else to keep track of my TODOs for the day! It has been my goto ever since my first job, and it's never failed me!
Interesting here the author states
> Things 3: Beautiful. Expensive. Tricked me into thinking I had my life together. But I kept forgetting to check it.
Followed by
> The Secret Sauce… Checking the list regularly…
nvAlt must surely have been mentioned somewhere. It’s the best by far. Very simple markdown, searchable notes etc. there’s a new version in the works (and has been for some time) but the original is still great. The best thing is that the notes are just a folder of .txt files.
For personal, I've got the nirvana life plan. It's great, for work, it's TODO.txt on a network drive.
I’ve never found a productivity tool/to-do list app I use more than just sending myself a barely comprehensible email.
I currently have three editors open: nvim (because I've been using it since it was vi), VS Code (because that's what work mandates) and Emacs (for org mode only). Horses for courses, and all that.
I use a self-hosting Baïkal CalDAV server with Tasks.org (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.tasks/ ). The advantage of this is that it works with email clients.
This is a concept I tried to sell many years ago, it is not available, but I still use it and believe this is the most flexibility in todo list. Will be happy for feedback
https://youtu.be/RBBPbIkgWUU?si=S_JoNr4FLbqPMo5D
Kinda like a combination of OmniFocus and Hook (Hookmark)
I use Apple's native Notes.app
It is easy to create text with checkbox you can click on, and on macbook you can type fn + Q to open the floating Notes window, or use hot corners. It is automatically available on your iPhone as well, since it syncs.
I had Claude Sonnet make me a text-based notes/todo app.
I write all of my notes in plain text, but I can add things like:
#Note: title
This is a note
--
And the text editor will highlight the note and show it in another window that shows all notes.
I can edit this in any standard text editor if I'm on a device without my custom app.
I can also convert them into sticky notes that are each "always on top" windows that can be dragged/dropped to set their position.
The notes also have tags for background color, border color, font color, due by, etc... that are all set in the text. When shown as sticky notes or in the note list, markdown content can be rendered.
Using text for the raw content and having a tool that will parse and display the content in a way that works for me has really made for a great note taking experience.
I use Microsoft TODO as a reminder and to not lose thoughts, but I primarly use text files to organise work backlog.
I send an email to myself. Monday todo, Tuesday todo etc..
This is the best thing in a long time. Made me feel productive just by reading it. I've made my own list and plan to attack it diligently today. Most of the highly productive people I've made are just militant about
A bit hyperbolic. He tried very few Todo applications.
No org mode? No Taskwarrior? Both are apps backed by plain text.
I tried both Org and taskwarrior, still for me it takes more actions, more frictions and formatless nature of txt file suits me otherwise I will end up optmizing my org mode workflow lol
I do a combined TODO + Log in pure text. So the stuff at the bottom of the list is todo, and the stop above is a log of stuff I've done. I do one list per year.
I've always liked https://www.taskpaper.com/
It's one step up from a single txt file. You only need to use one text file with it. It's like a nice UI for a single todo text file.
The real shame is it has no iOS app
it has and it's called taskmator, used it for years, but now run linux.
I have an alias called "notes" which opens a file called "notes" where I write everything, including upcoming todos.
I never look back more than a day or two worth of notes.
i like text files for day to day lists that are easily discarded. what am i trying to do for work today, who do i need to call, other reminders
for longer term planning i’ve found todoist to be indispensable. UI and features haven’t changed much in years, great cross platform, pretty enable to different styles of planning, etc
you are forgetting the most goat/clutch better than .txt - pen on back of hand :) (being completely serious/earnest here. great article, read thru the whole thing. same experience, tho i do love things), but ultimately back to my tried true high school days, timeless, eternal: WRITE IT ON THE BACK OF YOUR HAND THEN WASH IT OFF
BONUS - take a PHOTO as soon as you write it (so you can check later if needed, 99% never. just cognitive safety). but BODY as POST-IT is FASTEST, TIMELESS
That's exactly my workflow but I use markdown txt file, and use vim + macros for auto inserting a new entry with date or marking things done. Plus some custom syntax highlighting for done tasks.
This. Working with plain notes during the last 10 years and it could not be better.
Did you try org-mode?
my slightly next gen todo is a notebook on my remarkable. added features are sharing between devices, and since it's eink its a good paper like alternative to sticky-notes. For me beating procrastination can be more important than organizing many subtasks.
FWIW, i only use this for work todos and differentiate todo with calendar(paper calendar and dry erase board for home, outlook for work calendar)
Yes, oh yes, it's so refreshing. You have got 217 points but you deserve more. One million. Let's not engineer things that don't need it.
MS Onenote? I have a page called "todo" but it never really took off. I suppose if the lesson here is "extreme simplification", then MS Onenote--> todo.txt represents an improvement.
Don't use a ToDo list. Just put stuff on your calendar!
Similar experience here, except I'm using the built in notes app on my phone and keep nothing more than a list. When I used various todo apps, I felt as if I was fighting against them.
My favorite todo app is "NotePlan.co" which actually uses .txt files for its data storage. The file is synced on icloud and can be used on iOS and mac OS apps.
Somewhat similar situation here, but I use a .diff file:
! heading here
+ item to do here
- item completed here
the !+- prefixes auto-highlight/colorize in editors. I use Sublime Text.
Obsidian + folders (done, wip, todo, trash) + one file per task (and all details and notes inside each file). That's been really good for me.
ToDo apps are a perfect example of coming up with solutions for a non-existent problem. Most of the tech solutions fall into this category.
When the consumer gets to take a hard look at their needs and gives a thrashing for sales pitch and doesn't give a damn to peer pressure, and demands for a bare-bones functional solutions only for their real and immediate needs, 90% of these solutions vanish into thin air.
Use a single .txt file for a todo list and set up a cron job to do a git commit on it every 5 min. This way you have some history if needed.
Org-mode is life changing, check it out.
Zim is actually exactly what you need. Txt files created with a really simple possibility of mark down like style added.
Another way to solve this is to use Fossil. Fossil has a built-in wiki. You can launch Fossil UI and use the built-in wiki with Markdown. Have legacy txt files? Just open a new fossil project and add them to it. And if you set up the admin and user correctly, you can mirror your notes to GitHub. So, it's not that text files are not a good option. There are many vastly superior options with almost no effort.
I'd be happy if I could define my own notification system on top of a text file tbh.
I can't tell you how many times I would have forgotten something if I had not made it a timestamped reminder.
That said, most apps all suck in various ways. So I feel the urge to just use text.
I'm currently using Reminders.app (the default on iOS) and it's nice that it's somewhat lightweight. But organizing things is clunky and the experience feels flimsy.
All throughout college I used Trello, and frankly it was better that way. I should go back, except every time I log in something new is different and I don't like change.
Next version, a pen and paper!
Next, next version, just commit everything to working memory, as in one's brain. To help with this, simply tell others what you are doing and give them updates. Practice can be gained by doing things such as shopping without a list. Hacks can also be used, so a list of code fixes can be called 'updating the specs', even though it is a list of things to do.
As for pen and paper, writing things down is a way of committing todos to working memory, the paper does not have to be referred to, just the act of writing means that it gets noted.
Forgetfulness is a feature. If it wasn't important and it gets forgotten, then forgetfulness has worked.
Joking aside, todo lists, in whatever form, are rarely going to be forever solutions, and, depending on the task and who you are working with, the solution is going to vary.
What is fascinating is working with someone that has all the tools for the day job and to work on another project, for instance DIY. They might have all of these fancy project management tools for work, but do they use them for renovating the house?
Of course not! They are back to either pen and paper or just working memory.
Spreadsheet programs such as LibreOffice are the next level. These are the most advanced and easily customized text files yet. Think of these as multidimensional text files that are all connected in an endless grid. Text files may seem ok, but managing tens of thousands of pages across sheets and books seems more straightforward with the spreadsheet format. But Vim is a great fallback when sheets are overkill.
why not use just a pen and a notebook then :) ?
To be honest, I have never understood the TODO "industry." Do people really have so many things to do, and is it really that difficult to keep track of them all? I do not know if it's just me but I feel completely alienated by these apps and articles.
What I have:
Work projects: typically on the order of a dozen
House projects: Probably over 20 distinct chores over the course of a week, plus currently two maintenance things that I can't do myself and have to call people repeatedly because 90% of contractors just don't show up unless you remind them to.
Kids: most things can be handled immediately (e.g. sign a form), but there are always at least half-a-dozen things in the air that can't for one reason or another.
Other: Resubmitting medical bills to insurance (can only be done during business hours, I typically open my mail after business hours). Contacting bank about something. &c.
Here's a fraction of what I'm doing today, including one from each category (except calling a contractor because my wife is doing that):
- I have to contact my bank during business hours because they sent me the wrong form (discovered while I was filling it out this weekend).
- I need to call a coworker because one project is blocked on them regarding an issue that they haven't replied to my e-mail sent Thursday afternoon.
- I need to pickup my daughter from a day-camp on the way home from work. Before dark, I need to weed part of the front yard.
- Tonight the trash (but not the recycling) goes out to the curb for a pickup tomorrow morning.
Yes, I have met people who can keep track of these things in their head. I am not one of them.
For someone with ADD, it can be extremely difficult to keep track of even 3-4 relatively simple items that need completed in a day. They will get distracted by something minor, and 8 hours later have completed 20 things in a highly productive manner, but 0 of the 3-4 important items they were supposed to do (and most likely, they will have forgotten those items existed entirely). For me what works is starting each day with a list of 3 items that need done that day, and to check that list about every 30 minutes all day long.
>Do people really have so many things to do, and is it really that difficult to keep track of them all?
I think you can find the answer to this question by looking at the comment thread of any TODO/notes/task-tracking submission on HN.
That's a fair point - but most of these threads focus on comparing systems rather than discussing whether they are necessary in the first place. I can see how folks with ADHD or similar challenges would benefit from a TODO app (or similar).
I'm more curious about a broader question: at what point does life complexity actually require a formal system versus just mental tracking? Tech people are, for the most part, the only people I encounter actively using and iterating on their TODO solutions, and I am skeptical that in general they lead more complex lives.
Maybe virtual tasks need better organization or reminders than physical tasks. I rarely forget to wash my dishes because the dishes are right there. I don't forget to go gather the eggs because I have to shut up the chickens every night and check their food and water, or living creatures could die. There are physical consequences and reminders of those things.
The need to update a piece of software doesn't give me any physical cues, and if I have a couple dozen tasks like that waiting on me, I'm never going to remember them all unless they're all popping into my head throughout the day. That pretty much is how I used to try to do it, and it wasn't good.
Same. There are tons of people are spend more time organizing 'TODOs' than actually doing them.
yeah, this is basically all i use Obsidian for...
A daily note, with a bunch of checkbox items
theres a plugin that automatically rolls every unchecked item into the next day's daily note.
these two features fulfill 99% of my 'todo list' needs.
Legit. Especially with the rise of LLM.
But I use .md files stored in a private git.
yeah...i have one neverending Evernote note...called "To do"
I also just began experimenting with plaintext. At the moment, I create regular apple reminders when I want to receive a notification, and for everything else I keep a markdown file `quicknotes-YYYYMM.md`, which I use also for some some throwaway notes.
Every month, I duplicate the file, remove what's been completed and the things I don't want to do anymore. The file is on iCloud Drive in the obsidian folder, so I can edit it also from my phone.
An example:
# TODO - [ ] todo ...
# NOTES
multiline note 1
---
multiline note 2
This is the way. Markdown does improve it a bit, though!
I respect using plain text for everything so kudos to OP. That said, I use Things by Cultured Code because I really like it. Does everything I want on my various computing devices.
I use obsidian with the tasklist plugin
I’d need markdown otherwise I’ll just use a small notebook
This blog post is wonderful and so accurately sums up my own journey through TODO productivity.
congratulations on the sane side
i use whatever notes app my phone has and sync that on my laptop. Sometimes my email apps have that feature.
Todoist. Unaffiliated but love the product and believe they deserve a shotuout.
I am not a fan of Emacs whatsoever (I find it a buggy mess where everything works only 80%), but org mode is absolutely fantastic for this.
Calling one of the most mature software projects on the planet a buggy mess is something, but yes, I would opt for TODO.org instead of .txt
>I find it a buggy mess where everything works only 80%
I don't want to be mean but calling Emacs a buggy mess sounds like a skill issue.
Probably. Cant get a good IDE with debugging for c#, can’t get emails with events etc to sync two way with all my providers, same with calendars, etc.
One of the most absurd comments I’ve seen here in a long time.
You should try org-mode
Everyone thinks I’m crazy for saying this, but I like Microsoft ToDo. And I’ve tried dozens of them. I’ve been using the Microsoft one for the past two years every day.
I liked that one when it was still called "Wunderlist". I'm still mad the owner sold it. He now makes "Superlist" but it's simply not the same :/
Microsoft ToDo has native apps for Mac and Windows, and a third-party one for Linux (https://itsfoss.com/kuro-to-do-app/). It has apps on iOS and Android and you can access it via the web.
It works very well. It even _finally_ (in 2023) made me switch from paper grocery lists to electronic ones.
things 3 is fantastic and access to it is an actual factor in what devices i buy
Things3 has also worked incredibly well for me for the past 4 years. My only wish is that they would roll out a version for Windows. I have been in the Apple ecosystem for quite some time so it was never a problem until I built a gaming PC that I also started using for work. As a result of this switch, I have to rely heavily on my phone to manage tasks. I still think this beats a todo.txt file that I would have to put quite a bit of effort in to manage every day and set up exactly how I want it, but is a big pain point for sure.
For work I use Logseq, but I treat it like a .txt file. 90% of my use is the daily journal pages, adding NOW and LATER todos, notes, whatever. The ability to link nodes to other pages or nodes is just good enough to beat out a .txt.
For my personal life I use Things 4. I bought the Mac and iOS versions. Despite the steep price for the Mac version, I think it's worth it. I appreciate how the app is organized. I like that the "Inbox" dumping ground is totally separate from the "Today" queue, that it pulls in calendar events to the Today queue, and the differentiation of Anytime vs Someday. I would forget to check it too, if I hadn't placed a large widget right on my Home Screen. It's the first thing I see any time I unlock my phone, it helps a lot.
I am also an avid user of post-it notes. I like to keep a stack of them on my desk. These are for things I need to complete _today_, if not _up next_. This is how I stay focused when I'm in deep work. "add test for new sort fn", "better name for site/tenant var", "need new fixture for sortables", that kind of thing. When I leave my desk I should have no sticky notes on it, whatever left ends up in Logseq.
Totally agreed - Things for Mac/iOS/iPad/Watch is a great ecosystem and Just Works™.
I started by reading the GTD book, and then tried lots of different apps, but Things for Mac by Cultured Code requires the least work and conforms roughly to the GTD approach. I don't use the strict GTD approach, but its approach to quickly writing down ideas and thoughts has shaped a lot of how I operate at work and even in my personal life.
I use a TODO.md within Obsidian, synced across devices with SyncThing. That's the sweet spot
I record stuff I want to have around in TXT files, by week every week over 10 years. The files lived on OneDrive for a time, but now on my desktop, backed up daily. Advantage is I can search.
My to-do list was sticky notes forever, moved to new ones when the old was getting too worn out to read. Now it's Rite notebooks as needed.
I use typora which is a markdown edior with folder structure. And AI to make the checkable lists.
Is this a joke?
In a typical todo list, I expect the following features (explained with examples of a typical school timetable:
What, When, Where, Who, Color, Some Notes, Completion checkmark.
1. Name of the event/task e.g. Chemistry
2. Day/Date/Time of the task (can either be specific weekdays or a specific date with time) e.g. Monday at 9:30am, Thursday at 4pm.
3. Person who the task will be with (professor name) e.g. John Doe
4. Location of task e.g. McKenzie Hall Room 504
5. Color e.g. red or hex code #FF0000
6. Some extra notes
7. Maybe ability to add checkmark before the task when it's done. This can be done using the unicode character.
We also need nested tasks (think Lab for Chemistry or some Assignment due for Chemistry). This can be done by adding tabs or hyphens before the line.
The format which works best is a text file containing:
-------------
Chemistry on Monday at 9:30am, Thursday at 4pm #green @McKenzie Hall Room 504 by John Doe //this comment can be a note
- Lab on Wednesday at 2pm by 8am #blue //don't forget to bring lab coat
- Assignment on Mar 9 at 8am #red
Dentist appointment on April 5 at 11am
/* Full block comment which is multiline. Lorem ipsum is placeholder text commonly used in the graphic, print, and publishing industries for previewing layouts and visual mockups. */
Reinventing the plan file!
I mostly do this too for personal stuff. Although on solo projects I have a neverending TODO.md I check in...
...and on multi-person projects I end up using github issues/projects and/or Forgejo's equivalent
Me personally I'm very satisfied by org-mode, but the main point is not org-mode itself but Emacs, or an integrated, end-user programmable environment. Org-agenda handle todos, but in the same notes I handle attachments, runnable live code, links to mails/threads, ... because of that and that's the point: we have a single brain, we need systems who are integrated as well.
Not a gazillion of independent apps lacking also unix CLI IPCs (only cut&paste), but a single integrate, moldable one. Modern software have ERPs as best integrated solution, Emacs is the most integrated one still alive and kicking, Smalltalk workstations and LispM was the best from the past.
Maybe in some more decades, a step at a time, we will be back at such evolutive levels...
I’ve been using a text file for years.
I wanted to make my own todo app. One thing that I would want is to reorder things, group and rank them etc.
For example, in my text file I usually put the number of minutes or hours something would take, and then order things by easiest first, to get things done. That way I have less things to carry over for the next day.
I also found that if I keep procrastinating on important but long things, it probably means I need to hire someone, or partner with someone, who is better than me in that thing. I don't believe in pushing myself more than I already am, or optimizing personal productivity, I think it's actually a sign that I need to work on recruiting people to a startup or join an existing project. I believe in optimizing the organization and its systems, not people.
Like the simplicity ... but this would never work for me ... I literally have thousands of tasks and ideas and notes and possible tasks and checklists and ...
The key is being able to filter all of your tasks down quickly to what's essential today. No way in hell I can visual-scan everything that's important to me.
I’ve always circled back to a shirt-pocket sized spiral notebook. A7 size, I think.
I write them on my hand
Nice. How do you filter?
Folding fingers over the ones you want to hide, obviously!
if I get really overwhelmed I get sweaty and my list completes itself
I went through the same process and now use a text file, or more accurately, I use a "canvas" in slack which is essentially a free-form text page with Markdown formatting (including check boxes that I can check). I make one page per month, with H1 headings for each day.
The reason I use this in Slack is that I already have Slack open all day and don't want to have YetAnotherWindowOpen. Also, I get sync between computers/devices for free.
This is just for the work I need to do that day. Otherwise we have YouTrack tickets; any meetings I set in Google Calendar.
"Todo?"
"It's mine, no company can kill it"
+ it's low friction, no special knowledge, no special tools, works offline is what does it for me.
Of course we use something bulkier at work, but for my own personal TODO I keep a .txt file, and It Just Works (tm).
For me it's still Trello. I used to have a .txt file, and once went back to it. But somehow, having these task cards is easier for me.
Trello here too. Has a web and mobile app so its slightly better than .txt file in that I can add to it on the run.
I suppose I'm boring and already in the Apple ecosystem, but Notes app has checkbox and indent support, works between laptop and phone nicely. Just works
Didn't try Workflowy though! (YC S10 and still not enshittified) (!!!)
I built a simple app a while ago to learn programming and it works for me
https://Simpletaskmanager.vercel.app
All the info is locally hosted.
I would take this more seriously if the title were: > I tried every todo app and ended up with a .md file
k
same
Yep. I lost all my notes to a proprietary format back in 2004. I've been 100% a notes.txt person ever since and it's never failed me nor been not enough.
I don't know what people are talking about not having notification or not being aware. Just make a habit of looking at it and put important stuff near the top with attention grabbing characters by it.
it's actualy simpler to text yourself a note and keep the "conversation" as a file would be nice if basic andriod allowed for a long press, and then create a file/document, like *** gasp*** a word processor
i often use telegram saved messages for this
tl;dr
Ready to ditch the productivity app hamster wheel? Do this:
My advice to anyone, is to start tracking stuff on paper, and once you've got some workflow nailed down, search for digital tools to augment it (or be fine with the current workflow). I prefer digital and have settled on org mode. It has the structure that I would need to implement if I was starting with .txt files.
Another tool I like is Things.app. But it's Apple only and I'm moving away from that ecosystem.
And it works really, really well.
We tend to overcomplicate things when it's not needed. Sometimes I think we like playing with tools more than doing actual work.