Comment by ahnick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahnick | Hacker News Reader

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I currently use Google Tasks for Todos and I honestly have never been happier. To make Google Tasks work you have to be using Gmail and Google Calendar (which may be a non-starter for some people), but if you are using those already then Google Tasks is worth taking a look.

The beauty of Google Tasks is it lives alongside your email, integrates seamlessly with the calendar, and automatically synchronizes across devices. The interface is super simple and intuitive (drag/drop for prioritizing and simple completion), yet powerful enough to allow for things like setting up recurring tasks.

I especially like scheduling tasks for items I know I have coming up a week or so out. When I know I have something coming up, I just enter the date/time and a description and I'm done. (Maybe all of 10 seconds?) It's so much faster than trying to put something in a calendar and I find myself offloading all of these things I have to remember from my brain and just rely on my device.

It has been very freeing. :)

My issue with Google Tasks is that notifications don't stay on the screen until I dismiss them. That kills it for me.

I like tasks in my inbox too, so I setup a filter to label all emails to & from myself to be labeled "ToDo". Then I just send myself an Email and it's unified with the "ToDos" that other people email me.

I like how you can drag tasks directly to Google Calendar. Do you know if it is possible to drag them as events, not reminders? I prefer to block entire time slots as events in my calendar because it helps me better manage my time. For example, I would add a 3 hour long event called "refactor hello_world" or a 2 hour one "find lost socks" and dedicate these time block to these specific activities. Unfortunately, you cannot change the length of reminders.

Alternatively, is there any other software with this feature? I have been looking for one for a while but no luck :-\

Scheduling tasks as calendar events with duration is indeed critical to actually getting them done for many people (including those with ADHD)

That (and scheduling suggestions) used to be the main feature of Timeful, an app started by behavioral psychologist Dan Ariely. It actually got acquired by Google and shut down. Sadly, Google Tasks still pales in comparison.

The only todo app I’ve found which allows you to do this and has desktop/mobile versions is TickTick. I used to be a fan of Things which is nearly perfect, but the authors stubbornly refuse to implement this, so I’m gradually migrating away from it.

I also prefer to track todos this way because it shows me how much free time I can realistically commit to new things. There was a calendar app that did this very well called Timeful, which Google acquired a few years ago. Some of the features from Timeful have been rolled into GCal, but this one doesn’t seem to have made it.

That's indeed not possible. The Tasks calendar is a separate calendar and the 'events' on it have no duration.

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