Ask HN: What's missing in today's crop of todo apps? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's missing in today's crop of todo apps?

1 pointactinium2265 comments

You've tried a bunch, I've tried a bunch. What do you really want to see in a todo list app that no one is currently offering?

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Along with the "normal" todo items, I want recurring ones, and I want todo items that consist of a (user-defined, reusable) checklist (it is done when all subitems are done).

Trivial example 1: every morning my list gets updated with a "morning routine" checklist that includes subitems for brushing teeth, taking a shower, eating breakfast, and packing lunch.

Trivial example 2: when adding an ad-hoc research todo, I want to use a checklist that includes subitems for both reading and for taking notes.

Trivial example 3: I want a recurring todo every other weekend to trim my dog's nails.

There are a bunch of other features that existing apps do reasonably well, with various tradeoffs (eg. features around urgency and/or expiration, or categorization, or ...), but I haven't found an app that does the core I described above (checklist apps don't do ad-hoc todos, for example).

What exactly do you mean by ad-hoc todo? I get the idea of wanting to add an item with multiple sub-items, but when you say checklist apps don't do ad-hoc todos I feel like I'm missing something.

By "ad-hoc todos item" I mean an ordinary todo item that consists of an arbitrary label and a checkbox. Checklist apps have more or less formalized themselves out of supporting the simplest todo use-case (you have to define a list, add an item to it, and then instantiate the list before you can actually mark the item as "done", and you generally have to edit the master copy of the list rather than the instantiated one).

All of which is great for making sure you do something the same way without skipping steps every time, but prevents you from completing both checklists and less structured todos in the same context.

That sounds onerous. Google Keep doesn't require instantiating the list and you can pull completed lists out of the archive if you want to reuse them.

Right. If Keep supported "make an uncompleted copy of this completed list", that would satisfy the main "checklist" use case.

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