Marvin – Customizable Task Manager and Daily Planner | Hacker News Reader

Marvin – Customizable Task Manager and Daily Planner

amazingmarvin.com

55 pointstekacs16 comments

Marvin is one of the better todo apps out there in my opinion. I don't use it now but whenever I feel stressed out or anxious because of how much work I have to do or I've picked an ambitious goal for myself, I read their blog (especially this page) https://blog.amazingmarvin.com/break-large-projects-tasks-bi... which contains a lot of useful information.

Nowadays I just use a notebook and a pencil and feel that is infinitely better than any app. Every time I've decided to start using a new todo app, or productivity app, I get this burst of motivation. It feels like I've already made progress. Especially if you pay for one, it almost feels like you're buying productivty at first "Yes, this is the start of me being super organised and super productive!". In reality, you can't buy productivity. Pen and paper for me, for now.

Marvin purports to fight distractions and procrastination.

And yet it lets you customize and tweak things to get it "just how you want." Sounds like a dream and a nightmare in one for OCPD people like moi.

I used it for a few months in 2018 to get out of a mental jam. Basically, I spent an afternoon reading through all the options and enabling a few combinations until I found something that worked. Once I got up to speed keeping my tasks in Marvin, I disabled a few options I thought I would use. It’s fiddly but it needs to be to solve the particular problems of the user, and that afternoon wasn’t going to be productive anyway. :)

(I used task notes, sub tasks, smart lists, calendar, duration estimates, planning ahead, time tracking, time blocking, sidebar, autoschedule due tasks, daily time targets, email to marvin, time block sections.)

Man I don't know how am I supposed to feel about that...

I've moved from Todoist about 6 months ago to manage most of my personal tasks, and so far, I'm happy with it. It certainly have aspect that's overdesigned, and rough edges at times, but it provides me a room to adjust to the style of tracking I want.

It doesn't offer any collaboration feature, and is really a personal task management tool, so it doesn't scale to use in business let alone for collaborative projects, but I feel it is a great tool for what it's designed for.

The pricing ($12/mo) is rather steep compared to other productivity/planning/todo apps on the market (Trello @ $0, TickTick @ $2.79, Any.do & Todoist @ ~$3, etc.).

While this product looks great and I'd generally think it would be worth a try, that price sets it as a non-starter for me as I don't get the impression that the advantage would be so large compared to other task management tools.

This is Hacker News. Always talking about being against big tech and for the little guy. Trello is owned by a company approaching $50B valuation. The rest of the apps you mentioned are funded or were early on and first to market like Todoist and get pretty big press relative to Marvin or most indie stuff.

Meanwhile Amazing Marvin offers 50%+ off Black Friday deals. Year free trial. And is bootstrapped solely by a husband and wife.

A good product at a good price is a good product at a good price, developer notwithstanding. If the point of his post was to say he's paying this team or that team because of the team vs. the product, then maybe this would be relevant but otherwise I don't see it.

It’s relevant to a huge vocal majority of HN as I stated the principles of said vocal majority. Thus it’s relevant, no?

I would think the advantage of a more useful productivity tool would be worth much more than $12/mo. Prices in that software industry are kept low by so much competition, not the value they generate for their users. (And kept low by the difficulty of getting new users to try their systems thoroughly enough to evaluate the advantage.)

I just gave this a 15-minute try. Their overall design and marketing is pretty good and hooked me into seeing if I could give it a go. $300 Lifetime isn't too bad either.

- the initial tutorials are video-only, and the videos have a lot of filler and so move quite slowly even at 2x speed.

- it's about 20% over-designed (they have their squaresponge mascot ready to be an MS Clippy in the corner)

- I couldn't edit a todo item title/text. There's a little toolbar on each item with 5 little icons, one of which is "edit", and you can edit everything else, but you can't edit the text. This makes no sense to me given the rest of their design is so slick.

So I stopped then because it seemed a little flimsy, and I don't want to get my productivity cycle invested in a slick and flimsy paid service.

The perfect to do app is the one that forces me to use it after I forget about it and lose interest.

This app works pretty much like that: https://www.goarmy.com

It even fills in the todo items for you. But you should read the EULA carefully. It can be difficult to uninstall.

Is this a hilarious autocorrect or did you mean to link the United States Army homepage? Because in a funny way, even if you didn’t the description you gave is kind of fitting and is a bit amusing as veteran (cue: “that’s the joke”?)

Pretty sure it's a joke straight from r/outside :)

I tried this briefly but ever since I discovered Roam Research I haven't looked back.

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