I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file
al3rez.com
al3rez.com
- 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.
Emacs will happily run in the background.
But living in Emacs is more the sort of thing you get to do, not the sort of thing you'd need to do ;)
I use orgzly revived with it.
Org mode could do with a bigger non emacs ecosystem, though.
You start using it for the agenda and TODO lists, learn it has spreadsheet functionality that ties in with the arbitrary-precision calculator, start taking notes and exporting them to PDF via LaTeX, writing reports in it with your company letterhead, merging your contacts list, migrating your email into Emacs, and next thing you know you find yourself fifteen pairs of parentheses deep in a custom elisp function that tweaks the date format for that one manager that insists on yy/dd/mm whenever you send your weekly progress report.
Not that I'd know anything about that.
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.
Reminders basically does have this: you can set a given item to alert when you are arriving/leaving from a specific location.
Ehh. The thing with a calendar "reminder" is that calendar apps assume that any such reminder is irrelevant once the time you set for the reminder goes by. They exist to remind you that some time-sensitive real-world event is starting, in time to be ready for it; but once that event has ended, you must have either done it or missed it — so either way, the calendar forgets about it.
Whereas a reminder / "todo with a date" object in a reminder/todo app, makes a different assumption: that you still need to do the thing, even if you didn't interact with the reminder when it first popped up. So the reminder is still there, glowing brightly, and often pops back up with further notifications, until you complete it.
Three examples from my own calendar of the type of reminder I'm talking about here, if you can't yet picture what I mean:
• It's time to replace the filter in my cat's water fountain [and take apart and scrub all the parts of the fountain while I'm at it.] (This isn't urgent — there's no particular need to do it exactly when I'm reminded of it — but it grows more urgent the longer it is left undone. The persistence of the reminder helps me to remember to do it, if I was busy when I first saw it.)
• I've gotta either pick the specific meals going into my meal-box subscription service box by midnight Saturday, or skip the week (or the service will pick randomly for me, giving me things I really don't want to eat, and I'll torture myself trying to motivate myself to cook those meals anyway, because I don't want to waste money/food.) I set this one to go off with two explicit "pre-notifications" twice — once at 7PM on Thursday, and again at 9PM on Friday. It then goes off again on its own, a little bit before midnight, and that's the final warning. (And, of course, if I check it off before then, the other notifications associated with that instance of the reminder won't fire.) I also usually just leave the Friday 9PM one unacknowledged + open as a toast on my computer until I've picked it, to ensure I won't get distracted and forget about it.
• Pay my credit card bill. (I have monthly autopay set up, but my understanding is that they still get to charge some minimal amount of interest for any charge that remains posted + not paid down for 21 days. So I set a reminder to pay the card down every 14 days. Again, not urgent per se — the worst that happens is that the 30-day autopay kicks in. But I find it a convenient time to review the last 14 days of charges for any strange activity; and the longer I go without doing that, the more of a schlep that starts to feel like — so biweekly is actually good here.
To be clear, I had all three of these set up as calendar events before — and they didn't work very well that way! Repeating reminders have much better semantics here.
I used to use an org agenda view for this, now I just use a caldav calendar and trillium. In the morning, I check my to-do list, which has been being created for this day over the last couple weeks or months, I look at my agenda to see what meetings or appointments I have, and I slot todos in between them. I might even be doing so for the whole week or month, moving tasks around as needed. I take a look at my week and month todos and see that something is due in two days so slot it in for today. Similar to how a project manager might do with sprints and tickets I guess.
I think the critical aspect of any functional Todo system is active review, at least daily if not more so, plus regular weekly and monthly cleanups.
I'm a big fan of automation, so half of the fun with that project is setting it all up.
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.
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.
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.
As for tasks tracking, it’s all lists. And a daily/weekly/monthly review is enough for me.
Hence it makes it easier if theyre all under the same roof.
If you put non-date-specific TODOs in your calendar, then as soon as the number of TODOs in that system becomes overwhelming, you stop looking at your calendar and start missing appointments & truly date specific reminders.
If you put date-dependent TODOs in your task tracking system, then every time you look at it you see a bunch of stuff you can't move on and you quickly lose effectiveness.
If something is dependent on a specific date or time, either because it is an appointment or because it is nonactionable until then, put it in a calendar or tickler file. If not, keep it the hell away from your calendar and put it on a TODO list (plain text file is fine). This keeps both systems effective.
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.
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.
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!
-------------------------
```
└── Dey well
"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 worked in this space for some time. Solving the backlog problem is the holy grail of To-Do systems. I am convinced it is a solvable problem.
The reason there are a bajillion To-Do apps and strategies right now is because a working UX for a digital task-keeping system is still not figured out. To simply put it, no To-Do app 'works' right now. Many of them work well enough for some people to depend on them to some extent.
One of the major reasons for failure is the backlog problem. It's surprisingly difficult, it's at the crossroads of human psychology and the varying real life tasks and responsibilities of real people. Real world is messy.
You'll see To-Do apps "work" out-of-the-box for most people and be hugely beneficial when:
- You see research papers comparing different strategies for To-Do task scheduling, cognitive load of different UI views, etc.
- Popular To-Do apps converge. They'll likely look nothing like the scheduled-checklist style apps of today.
- People start depending on them in managing most areas of their life.
Right now the To-Do app industry is competing on who has the shiniest UI. Very few players are even acknowledging the backlog problem.
Personally, I tried everything under the sun from using a single .txt file to custom-designed software. I have ADHD. Right now the thing that works best is a physical Bullet Journal. It works because of the friction of paper and pen. It mostly solves the accumulating backlog problem.
Or if you don't catch them before they fade, the task must not have been important..
What benefit does your digital sticky note have over a physical one?
Unfortunately every piece of software seems to think its message about some new feature you don't care about and will never use is worth crapping all the main premise of what alerts are for.
You would love this project! https://littlesignals.withgoogle.com/
"Little Signals considers new patterns for technology in our daily lives. The six objects in the series keep us in the loop, but softly, moving from the background to foreground as needed.
Each object has its own communication method, like puffs of air or ambient sounds. Additionally, their simple movements and controls bring them to life and respond to changing surroundings and needs."
I've been wanting to build these since the project came out, but never found the time. Has anyone else here built them with success? I'd love to hear your story about how you used them!
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.
> 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.
I finally hired one two months ago for 500 bucks a month and it was a life changing increase in productivity and decrease in stress.
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.
Here, Gall's Law provides an accurate explanation for why so many of us have returned to paper, pencil, and brain cells. It is also apropos of your comment's sibling comment regarding how tech folks frequently and mistakenly believe that they can improve on a solution that has worked well for thousands of years of human civilization (e.g., paper + writing instrument + human thought) in just a few weeks. For all the talk of Emacs's being relatively ancient and mature software, handwriting is orders of magnitude more mature and sanded down.
With software to "solve" the problems of thinking, remembering, linking ideas, or deciding what to do … now you have two problems, as we say.
Syncthing?
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.
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 ;)
What's interesting is AI is going to change this. Entering a prompt for an app that has all the features you want is already pretty trivial, and will only get better.
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.
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 read about all these complex systems for notes and second brains and whatnot.
All procrastinating imho.
I also don't need my immediate todo list on a calendar. I organize my to-do list simply as "Immediate", "Future", "Distant future", and then put things under heading. Sometimes I add a due date if there is one.
I just had a few markdown documents in a "todo" folder, eg <work>.md <project1>.md etc. Recently I changed it to org-mode because that's a syntax designed for the purpose. https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/ works excellently.
Never been an emacs user in my life. I spent about 5 minutes perusing https://orgmode.org/org.html and was able to do the same.
I use syncthing to sync it between my devices. https://www.orgzlyrevived.com/ works great on android.
I understand the privacy concerns, I can host a nextcloud in a secure location if I need it.
DESCRIPTION: not secret
DTSTART:with week
X-mydata:
ENCODING=Ascii85;FMTTYPE=application/octet-stream
<~6q($A;Fs\a8P`)B+EM+(Eb0>"6r[)a5uLZCGA2/4+D>\9EcVQ~>
DESCRIPTION: secret
DTSTART: with hours
It was helpful to create new mental models, but I now much prefer using my actual brain to organize my thoughts.
The way you chose to describe keeping engineering notes as "second brain fad" is telling. It says you mindlessly tried to follow an organization scheme even though you felt no need to adopt an organization scheme.
In other words, you somehow hopped onto a solution searching for a problem you didn't had.
That's perfectly fine. Fads are defined by those who, like you, onboard onto something for all the wrong reasons and without spending any time thinking about what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Of course, those who end up searching for problems that fit a specific solution end up not finding it. That's the fad part.
In the meantime, engineering logs are indeed time tested and a tried-and-true technique. Those who use it to solve problems they have will naturally see their problems solved by them. That's why you see blog posts like this, and people commenting on how they scratched their itch.
Regarding productivity/to-do systems: on one hand I agree -- I know a few people for whom it's clearly a form of procrastination and really just need to get on with it. On the other hand, I myself was one of those people, but in hindsight I just hadn't found the right system yet and had real, legitimate issues with the systems I had been trying. Turns out, YouTrack is damn-near perfect for me. I use it both for work and for my personal life and I really, really love it, even for basic to-do lists. The things I was missing from standard to-do lists was the concept of relationships ("depends on," "blocked by," etc) and the ability to schedule multiple projects together on a Gantt Chart. Put those two features together and what needs to be done when and in what order is pretty much inarguable, which is precisely what helps me stay productive, as looking at a huge list and feeling overwhelmed about what to do next -- especially if I'm trying to be efficient or strategic -- freezes me in my tracks.
Regarding second brains: I completely disagree that they're not useful. My Obsidian vault is genuinely one of the single most useful things I have ever done for myself. There's nothing fancy about it, I don't use most of the features, but having a massive vault full of notes is truly indispensable in knowledge work.
The stuff they, and many smart people like them, are putting in their public notes are sometimes becoming the authoritative bibliographies of little specialized subjects. Their notes get referenced in journal articles.
edit: also, as far as I know, the goal of having a Zettel system is to be as lazy as possible. To have all your notes extremely networked so you can find them pretty quick, you can get surprised about what's in them because old stuff gets surfaced, and you can always find a place to add the thought you're having or the notes you're taking. You save all of that time digging though stuff and filing stuff and losing stuff, which you can use to take a walk in the park or something. To accidentally write a few books just because you had all your notes about some goofy subject you're obsessed with in one place and one day you're like "that must be about a quarter million words."
edit2: also, also, this conversation is very quaint. 10-20 years from now we will all have zettelkasten and we will never look at them at all because we will use AI to interface with them. I'm sure thousands are already in that world, I'm certainly working on getting there.
It's like a special extra bad form of procrastinating too, because they've essentially gamified procrastination to make it feel productive.
It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.
It's wild to think that was almost 20 years ago when Getting Things Done was going through tech circles as the organization method dujour. (I also equate the same time period with learning Ruby on Rails.)
Merlin did not have anything to do with Lifehacker.com. Gina Trapani[4] founded Lifehacker[3]. But, Lifehacker often covered and was inspired by Merlin's work.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file
Like the old joke about the programmers spouse who died a virgin because every night all the programmer did was sit at the edge of the bed talking about how awesome it was going to be when they finally did it.
Generally the tool isn't the problem: NEVER put ticket numbers into long term storage as in a few years you won't be able to reference them. That is version control, design documents, and anything else that isn't the ticket system itself. You can talk about who is working on ticket 12345 and the problems they face, but if anything is going to be written down you need to summarize the ticket without a number.
What about quality? Often, people are very productive, because they sacrifice quality for speed, especially the "annoying" longterm-values of products/decisions.
> They seemingly spent as much time doing productivity rituals and rearranging their productivity software stack as they did doing actual work
It's a different kind of productivity. Just not as valuable for the company.
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.
org-mode though... It's called Emacs' killer app for a reason. Even if I only used Emacs for org-mode it'd be worth it. And I don't even use the productivity features.
Change your editor and rebuild two decades of optimisation in order to use Emacs, two Emacs tools, and also every other Emacs tool out there. Org Mode, TRAMP, Magit, gptel, eglot, flycheck, elfeed, ERC, Emms, EWW … there are a ton of reasons to use Emacs.
Or you can keep using less-capable systems and being annoyed when folks recommend that you upgrade.
For example, I'm perfectly content to use nvim as my primary editor, and this was born out of having to develop for and administer literally tens of thousands of linux servers professionally. I have all the plug-ins and configuration necessary for productivity on my development machines, and when I'm on a remote system ad hoc editing a configuration it already has a built-in lightweight version of the editor I'm already used to.
If I switched to Emacs locally, I'd still have to maintain a working knowledge of vi and context switch when in a remote shell. Changing to Emacs would require more cognitive bandwidth when the whole purpose of "switching for org mode" is to reduce mental load.
Even ignoring the possibility of installing Emacs on remote systems, there are still alternatives:
1. You can run remote shells within Emacs, and edit files remotely using TRAMP. When you are editing a remote file, shell commands run from Emacs run on the remote system.
2. You could use Evil, the Emacs implementation of vim. Then you would use the same bindings everywhere.
3. I have been running Emacs locally for literal decades now, but I still remember and use vi frequently, both locally and remotely. It’s really not a problem.
I feel like there must be an editor version of the Blub Paradox.
Or I get to choose the most logical option yet: keep being annoyed when haughty people keep trying to push a downgrade on me as a supposed 'upgrade'.
Fair point on the surface, it's missing the key aspect of what Emacs actually is. Emacs is not just an editor - to a degree it's philosophy is that your computing environment should be malleable. Those two decades of optimization don't get thrown away; they get encoded directly into the system. Instead of learning to work around the limitations of separate tools, you're investing in a platform that can absorb and amplify all that accumulated knowledge. The question isn't whether you want to abandon your workflows, but whether you want to be limited by them forever.
The key insight is reframing it from "starting over" to "finally having a place where all that expertise can compound indefinitely."
I mean, I get it - not everyone wants their editor to be infinitely customizable; sometimes you just want something that works out of the box. Yet I do honestly think every programmer should give Emacs a serious try at some point in their career - not because they'll necessarily stick with it, but for the same reason why everyone should learn at least one OOP language and get introduced to an FP language. It expands your thinking about what's possible.
Even if you go back to your previous tools, you'll understand computing differently, having seen what a truly malleable environment looks like, the idea of a truly personal computing environment - one that grows with you rather than constraining you. Dismissing Emacs as "just another editor" misses what makes it fundamentally different.
I completely understand your impulse (been there myself), but I'd encourage you to keep an open mind about what Emacs actually offers. When you get a chance maybe explore the philosophy behind it. You might discover something unexpectedly rewarding.
Not true I use the Neovim plugin https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/. It supports everything I tried from the official org manual. https://orgmode.org/org.html
I use syncthing to sync it between my devices. https://www.orgzlyrevived.com/ works great on android.
The only reason why I still use Emacs daily is org-mode.
This is also why it's so difficult to get teams on the same page about project management in their respective workplaces.
And possibly regret it 3 months later...
Todo software is too opinionated. It’s not flexible enough to allow you to break rules. You can’t move things around in a way that allows you to control visual white space between entries. Everything “is something” (a task, an event) vs just being (text.)
There are apps that support it on many platforms and it is easy to sync across devices.
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.
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.
man 5 user-dirs.dirs
"I recommend people read this 30,000 word technical guide"
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.
Swap src and dest as necessary (could use other options but this is compatible with OpenBSD openrsync): rysnc -rlpt --delete notes/ user@lanip:notes
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.
- What platforms are supported? - What is the business model? - Does the editor support customizable key bindings? Are there presets for Emacs, vi, or others?
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.
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.
It is hard to sell someone on a solution to a problem that they don't have.
The only unwanted feature you're likely to encounter is automatic sub/superscript conversion, and that's documented and easy to turn off.
I'm not recommending org-mode. I personally don't care if you use org-mode or not. I never understood that mentality. But the type of software you're describing is crap, and org-mode doesn't fall into that category.
I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings...
He's literally recommending that everyone who doesn't use emacs should install and use a different text editor.
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.
Which one did you use? I use https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/ and am happy with it, it's fairly modern written as a lua script.
I did see an older one https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode but i don't think that's maintained anymore.
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 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.
The most robust, stable solution for me has been to use foundational tools with proven longevity:
= bash
= git
= ncal
Which one writes post-it notes for you?
You can make an art form out of procrastinating on real tasks to create the most perfect todo system ever. We got LLMs now. It can query your text file, categorize, etc.
The mobile experience is somewhat lacking but good enough with Orgzly on Android.
However with org mode I had the same issue I had with all my to-do list systems, wherein I tended to record too many todos. I needed granular prioritization and gtd contexts and scheduled and deadlines and repeaters to keep track of it all. I needed to install org super agenda to get useful views.
I switched to trillium and nuked 90% of my todos in the migration as out of date or just kinda vague things that'd be nice to do and chucked those into a future projects note. Trillium's to-do UX is slightly better than a markdown document because you can click to check the boxes, that's about it. It's high friction. I have to go to today's note, go to the Todo section, and then put my to-do in the list. Or the week Todo section, or month or year.
What I've found is now I actually do all my to-dos because now they're all actually worth doing. I'm not scrabbling down every single thing and cluttering up my list.
Was regretting it a bit in the 2020-2023 range when Evernote was going downhill, but it's improved a fair amount since the acquisition. Almost (but not quite) to the point where I'd recommend it to others again.
What I would recommend is spending the time to learn some system beyond just a text file. I've ultimately found it well worth it, to the extent that I couldn't imagine going back now. It is definitely an investment up front though.
If you need an ALERT for something important, it likely isn't important in the first place.
I’ve now happily used a paper-based bullet journal instead, and am about to transition to a Rocketbook for this use.
The problem is that a GTD-style workflow requires a lot of discipline to stick to daily/weekly reviews, where you prune or reschedule tasks, and it requires you to be strict about deleting tasks you’ll never do. If not, you just get an endlessly growing list of stale tasks, and for me personally the list becomes so associated with guilt and stress that I just burn out and get paralyzed unless I regularly throw it all out and start from scratch. (Is "TODO bankruptcy" a thing?)
Surprisingly, this led me to the conclusion that being able to forget tasks is crucial for me to remain focused, productive, and mentally stable. Being able to start each day with a blank page, write or transfer tasks that I can realistically do today, and letting the unimportant ones silently disappear on old pages without having to consciously delete them, somehow works better for me.
For notes however, Org-mode is great. I’ve found great value in rediscovering old ideas and knowledge 5 years later, whereas finding 5 year old undone tasks is rarely something I want.
I use a plain text app on phone for TODOs. I hate notifications, do not use full text search.
I have been using it for 5 years now and I hate the notes apps with their clunky buttons, limiting software, where you cannot write or do what you want to.
I see apps often as regressions toward freedom of note apps.
You can even do that, _and_ do stuff from your unholy list.
I have my org folder synced via syncthing to every device I care about. I used to do automated git commits on that folder, but eventually stopped it years ago as commit messages like "daily automated commit" are not better than regular backups.
But thanks to LLMs I went back to that - now I have a systemd timer which calls a script that calls Emacs (because I have all the LLM bindings set up in there already) with the git diff to generate a commit message. That does a pretty good job at summarising my changes.
The best todo app ideally should be a smartphone app, which you'd have always with you. I think Microsoft Todo is a good choice for Android. It is mostly functional, free of cost and does not have any ads.
So close! People building snowflake software is a consequence of it not being a generalizable problem, not the cause of it. Everyone organizes their notes/todos differently, and though the variations may seem slight, they are best solved by a blunt and unopinionated tool.
> It takes some time to get used to
Non-starter. A text file is the hammer of the digital world
- Orgmode format itself is a mess , it only good because Emacs's orgmode extension is very good working with Orgmode.
What would be really good is a Markdown-Compatible Todo System , with notes linking and tagging , and status/progress integration.
There was Dandrite, it was quite close to what needed but that project was abandoned.
It isn't perfect, and still lacks a lot of features that other people may consider a must have, but so far it's been the best Todo app I've ever used.
I pretty much don't want any of that stuff though.
The author's .txt file works because its simplicity forces a daily ritual of self-coaching. The tool demands that the user manually review, prioritize, and decide what matters. There are no features to hide behind, only the discipline of the process itself.
The impulse to use complex apps or build custom scripts is the attempt to engineer a better coach. We try to automate the prioritization and reminders, hoping the system can do the coaching for us.
The great trap, of course, is when we fall in love with engineering the system instead of doing the work. This turns productivity into a sophisticated form of procrastination.
Ultimately, the best system is the one that removes the most friction between decision and action. For the author, that meant stripping away everything but the list itself.
But I do feel very strongly that people only jump into "the great trap" because they feel that they were let down by their system, or that it didn't quite model their life accurately. A lot of todo apps are opinionated and those opinions, if incompatible with the the person using them, will lead to frustration. The quest for a more perfect life model often continues when this incompatibility is found.
That's why I personally just give some instructions to an LLM and create a simple scrapy HTML app that does exactly what I need.
this ↑ a 1000x ↑
> Why This Actually Works
isn't anything the author lists under that heading. It's actually what he says above:
> Every night, I check tomorrow’s calendar. I dump everything into the next day’s section. Scheduled items get times in front. Sub-bullets hold notes or reminders. Finished tasks? I delete them or add what happened. Still on the list? Not done yet. That’s it.
That's why it works. He can build a simple ritual around it. The medium doesn't matter. The ritual does.
The important difference is automatic recurring tasks, and daily task will show up outside the app as that red bubble on its icon indicating how many things "need" to be done today, the rest is optional.
Crucially, you need to commit to it, and use it everyday - even if just a little. The authors notepad works because it's a daily simple thing, like you said.
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).
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.
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.
- 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.
Clicked around a bit and found nothing describing how "todo.txt" is better than todo.txt (great branding), and seems to offer no solutions for iOS.
I too went through the phase of using Dendron and Obsidian as well as more common todo list tools (and tickets)... and here I am back at Apple Notes, whose sole advantage over a text file is that it has enough capabilities to store a screenshot. That's all I really needed. My notes are like the classic notebook: a lot of the time it's write-only, a lot of the time it only has to be able to be understood for a week or two before the information is too old to matter anyway.
Don't overthink it.
Unfortunately for him, the HMI is air-gapped so getting screenshots is cumbersome. He'll have to make do with my notes.
Takes like two or three seconds to add; then I continue doing what was more important, and flip back to this with a decent context jumpstart later.
This meme has taken on the character of the "Einstein was bad at math and school" urban legend. Yes, you can overthink it, but you can also under-think it if you picture yourself to be some romantic-era genius sitting in a heap of notes. If you want to go meta you might as well put the usage of that meme on the middle of the curve.
You don't need 15 note taking apps but it does pay off to invest in at least a bit of a system (I'd recommend https://johnnydecimal.com/ because it takes about an hour to set up), because you're not actually the 150 IQ guy and you probably benefit from a bit of structure (as do most very intelligent people in real life)
Sorry, but the whole point of the meme is that you get stuck in this mindset and you think you're talking to the grug side making your argument, when you might actually be talking to someone who's emerged from the far side of this particular Dunning-Kruger test.
As I said, I've been through the systems, I've been mindful, I've made connections and structure, I wrote my own wiki software half a lifetime ago... and in the end... there's just not that much value to it, I found. I don't really find much in my old notes that ever helps me enough to be worth the additional effort.
For a while, when I had an office, I enjoyed a post-it note based "system" where I'd just stick notes in places around my monitor, which is ugly and I hate seeing them, so they get done in order to help me clean up. I'd do that again if I had an office again...
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.
I ended up building a very simple scratchpad [1] (initially iOS and MacOS, then of late, a PWA version for everyone else...).
Which is why for jotting done some quick note, or some oh remember to do this later when i am back home is just best done on a phone.
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/
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 try to treat my setup more like text files I'm editing in Emacs, rather than me specifically using Org Mode.
I like the extra niceties I get with Org Mode in Emacs, like marking things as done, making checkboxes, etc. I never venture farther than that.
The most complicated thing I do in Org Mode would be making tables and recurring tasks - and I only do recurring tasks because BeOrg makes it very easy to set that up.
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.
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.
> 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.
Only thing to add is that I like the "inbox" feature in Todoist (plus a single catchall project). I get overeager during the day and add a bunch of stuff. The inbox makes it easy for me to mostly just remove things I won't actually do but then file away the stuff I might for later.
I've put weekly chores into a single recurring task and do them on Sundays or kick back another day or two (or just skip) if I'm busy.
Weekly chores should be on a printed checklist on a clipboard kept in the kitchen or similar. These are wholly predictable items and are just clutter in a todo application, which should be devoted to making sense of the “everything else” in life.
Todoist's API is pretty good too, so I've ended up building my own little webapp that fills some of the gaps in Todoist's functionality (e.g. finding a list of the projects that don't have a next action defined).
A bash alias so I can run `todo` and have the file open:
alias todo='nvim "$HOME/.todo.txt"'
inoremap <Leader>date <C-r>=trim(system('date "+%a %B %e, %Y %H:%M:%S %p"'))<CR>
nnoremap <Leader>date :put=trim(system('date \"+%a %B %e, %Y %H:%M:%S %p\"'))<CR><ESC> inoremap <Leader>date <C-r>=strftime("%a %B %e, %Y %H:%M:%S %p")<CR>
nnoremap <Leader>date :put=strftime("%a %B %e, %Y %H:%M:%S %p")<CR>
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)
* 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.
I do with Things3 supported nested areas, but I just use Projects that I never complete to achieve the same effect.
Currently, the UI is a bit ugly, but I have hired a professional UI designer to redesign it, and it is currently in development.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I’ve also used a variety of EAs over the years, and in my experience reliability is highly variable. The great ones are amazing.
These are basically dead man’s switches to remind me to check on someone else’s progress vs a timeline - ala @patio11’s “dangerous professional”
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.
20 home todos could be wrapped into a single check list that you do once a week.
The master todo says "do 1 hour home checklist".
Then in that hour you analyse what you will prioritise, drop, defer and delegate.
The idea being your mind is then free of "repair the gutter" in general life, but you know you'll visit that on Sunday at 4pm.
The problem with a once weekly checklist of [all the house things] is how do I track when I last did a specific action so I make sure it doesn't drag on too long?
As a concrete example - I live in a steep, hilly area. So I schedule making sure that my drainage is clear about every 3 months. When I bought the house, drainage was a significant problem because it hadn't been attended to and a lot of stuff needed significant cleanouts. Do I strictly need to do something about it every 3 months? NO, but if I let it go for too long then it becomes a problem.
I've used Todoist for the last few years. It's not perfect. But it's been game-changing in terms of reducing anxiety because I never worry that I'm forgetting something.
Like you, I don't know how folks in similar positions manage. I think a lot of people just drop the ball on a lot of stuff or wait for stuff to become suddenly urgent. I don't think that's a terrible approach -- I still drop a lot of balls because there's just too much. I just try to do it more intentionally.
I'm not knocking folks with other systems, text files or otherwise. Do what works for you!
I remember the days before I had this much complexity. Frankly, it’s forced me to get a lot better at stuff.
Back to school was a blizzard of forms, meetings, drop offs, etc. each with their own unique timelines. Sandwiched between all the rest of life.
Investments and Property I see as kind of essential to having much of a retirement, but these things need knowledge and research to get a handle on initially and to closely manage going forwards, such that they could be a part-time job on their own.
How does that fit around a full time job plus kids school and sports plus maintaining a healthy diet and exercise?
The one thing that all of the above does teach a person, though, is: filtering of bullshit; ability to say no.
Big fan of the Rite-In-Rain notebooks, myself, and Fisher Space Pen's Cap-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.
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!
I'm a pencil person, though.
My extravagance was a corner punch.
https://ugmonk.com/collections/analog
I love it! There's a disc-bound version for on-the-go as well.
I get them at my local stationery shop for €0.80, but theirs don't have brass discs.
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.
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.
Forgetting to check TW is the big reason it didn't work, but the secondary reason is that I take a lot dev logs on context and the `annotate` command is too clumsy to be practical for that.
I like the idea of a CLI tool for todos, but it needs to integrate with my notes.
This is also key for me. Striking through an item that's on my list for some time and that I just decided doesn't matter feels just as good as marking some item as done. Undecided items indeed go to the next list, and just the act of writing down the same item on a new list forces you to reconsider it.
List done? Timestamp it and throw it in the archive box.
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.
Where "spontaneously disposed of" is sometimes abbreviated L-O-S-T, right? <g>
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.
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.
There were certain apps which would give the user a lot of options to customize the lists and the items in them. Customize in ways that would make the TODO item the most unique TODO item in its requirement and its quality. Such apps made me think a lot. Or should I say, overthink a lot. I would spend a lot of time trying to find the ultimate, most specific, custom setting for a TODO item that would make it unique and give it a life of its own. Looking back now, I am not sure how useful it all was. Ultimately, I ended up doing some items and not doing others. I cannot quantify what additional productivity they brought to me.
Now I dont use any TODO app at all. I just try to remember things, and I don't feel any different from the time when I was using those apps. Makes me wonder! Was I trying to invent a problem so that I could use these apps as a solution.
Perhaps that's why so many people come back to the old plain paper or a simple text file approach. Perhaps we all realize that it was perhaps not a problem after all and we would still have achieved most of what we set out to do. And even if we didn't, in the end, it doesn't matter all that much because life still goes on regardless.
That resonates with me.
I also think that OP tried to use his TODO app for habits:
>> 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.
I use a very simple habit tracker to track the things I want to do regularly, it has no gamification, just a simple notification once per day per habit.
These days I don't use a TODO app regularly; everyday tasks such as groceries, household tasks etc. work fine without it. When lots of tasks pile up and I struggle to keep track, I use a text file. Those are usually short-lived.
I also have a shared Todoist list with my wife, but we mostly use it for as a shopping list, not really a TODO app.
The "tasks" are only meant for the day, maybe drafted daily and be disposed of and forgotten in a post-it notes fashion.
The issues, then are more like a backlog of requirements, a call to duty, like "briefs on the mission."
The "issues" are the question; and neither todos, nor tasks are the answer.
It is robotic to compile and keep track of a set of "actions to be done" several days into the future, but those todo.txt's as a database can be treated as valuable asset, as a "documentation of scope," for a team-of-one, or many.
Hence the treatment of those not as "todos" as issues, with their shifting nature of requirements and many ways of resolution.
Such a database deserves reinventing because nothing else can be as tailored and as diamond-cut as the one that's been built by you.
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).
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.
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.
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.
At least with todo list apps specifically.
I have a pretty bad memory, so I’m the target audience for todo lists. But I think what’s worked for me has been a combination of:
- Keeping things simple. At work I try to only focus on one thing at a time. I have a bug tracker that’s used to track larger items (everyone uses the same tool), but it’s not a personal todo list in a more granular sense.
- Reminders app on the iPhone. I use this just so I don’t forget to do things that aren’t naturally top of mind. Or, at least things that should become a priority, but only at a later point. And I don’t have many times that I need these. Maybe a few times a month, and a few recurring ones.
But other than this, if it’s really that important, I’ll remember it anyway. And if I don’t, and it’s not tracked with a bug (work) or reminder (home), it’s not that important.
So unless you count the occasional use of the Reminders app, or our work bug tracker tool, then I’m currently not using any todo lists, and it’s been working fine.
My to-do list just helps a bit with my ability to be productive. If I'm at a loose end, I can refer to it and remind myself of X, Y, or Z that either should be done or that I'd like to have a bash at.
Without it, I'd 'float unproductively' more.
(And it's not necessarily about productivity, more about purpose, where I'll feel much better having completed a task that I'd previously set myself - like mulching the dead leaves or tidying the study or weeding the vege patch that I'd otherwise have not done in favour of 'floating' scrolling HN or whatever).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I will add, there is no right way to do things in life in general. Experiment, and do what works for you.
- 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?
```.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
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 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
function todo
vim "$HOME/<todo-directory>/"(date --date=$argv --iso-8601)
end
$ todo # opens the today file
$ todo tomorrow #opens tomorrows file
$ todo '<anything --date command accepts>'
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...
For the rest, I just use plain files that are encrypted locally and stored on GitHub and Google Drive.
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.
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.
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…
I've seen folks using vim get way more done than some of these Youtube addicted professional tool testers.
Todo lists of any kind in a team context usually fall down and kanban is the way forward.
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.
I've been experimenting with this at work too. I created a separate internal git repo for the team with 4 never ending files:
- in-progress.md
- up-next.md
- for-future.md
- done.md
So far it's been easier to use than trello or any other project management platform.
Personally I use a single emacs org-mode file for my private work which is 30K lines as of today, but I'm not sure how other people's editors (vscode) handle big files like that.
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
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.
Except I create a new file for each new day, to have peace of mind (as opposed to having a million-line-long file). Instead of Ctrl+F, I use grep. The format is Markdown.
My typical TODO file has 3 sections: TODO, Pending, and DONE. If something is done for the day, I move it to the DONE section. When I create a new file for a new day, I copy over everything except the DONE section. The Pending section is for something I can't act on immediately (say, waiting for a coworker's response). I look there less often.
Every morning I also re-prioritize the items in the TODO section.
The only problem is that if I'm away from the work computer, I have to add items in a separate app on the phone (Notepad Free) and then manually copy them to the PC.
This system is something I naturally came to over those 7 years via trial and error, something that works well for me. I had other formats that didn't catch on.
Just my two cents.
I struggle at home though. Because there's not as much pressure to do one task until it's done... so my text file gets forgotten about. Then I start a paper list. Then I forget that... rinse and repeat.
In the same way we build around Redis for whatever tasks we need, you see engineers build around the concept of the note, complaining every other solution isn't exactly what they're using it for, and they're right, because on the other end is another engineer building for their niche use pattern.
By unpacking the use cases and slicing the right niches there might be a better notes app product somewhere, but I think it takes a very strong product person, not an engineer, to figure that out.
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
I love Markdown files with editors such as Obsidian or Logseq, but found them to be suboptimal for to-do's / tasks.
I don't use it all that often but it's a good companion, for example to make checklists for packing, etc.
It's the best out there for sure.
- 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
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...
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.
In Obsidian, open the daily file amd copy the contents from yesterday. Anything big gets its own folder.
Screenshots...etc can be dumped into the Obsidian document.
OneSync app can sync files to OneDrive so I can read it on my phone.
What's the point of this? Isn't it easier to just keep reusing the same note?
Inspired by https://www.laurieherault.com/articles/a-thermal-receipt-pri...
And
Hoping it will make chores more visible and fun to complete for the whole family.
I picked up a used star tsp100 printer and usb 2d barcode scanner.
Still looking for a backend though. Idealy with Homeassistant integration for automating todos that already have sensors and data such as taking out the trash.
https://www.donetick.com looks promising.
Could you share some more technicalities on your setup?
You can get everything I've got here: https://github.com/gerardocardenasgomez/printed-tasks
For my setup, I have a couple of different components. I have a very mediocre and super vibe coded HTTP server running on my Arduino which is connected to the receipt printer. It just has /print and /barcode endpoints. I'd like to improve on this by using an ESP32 instead of my Arduino so I can get MicroPython instead of C++. The Arduino is connected via serial to the receipt printer with this: NOYITO TTL to RS232 Module.
I then have a Python script which will send requests to the /print and /barcode endpoint to actually print out the tasks, and it hooks into Supabase to get the task into a DB and Google's AI Studio to also print a little encouraging message. Both should fit in their free tier for this kind of project.
And then I have a small API written in Typescript which hooks up to Supabase and marks a task complete when my iOS shortcut sends it a message.
The whole workflow for me is: Print receipt with the Python script, mark it complete with an iOS Shortcut. I have a whiteboard for the receipts themselves and magnets to stick them on there. Get fairly strong magnets because the ones I got start to lose their hold at the end of the day once I've got a number of tickets stacked up.
Honestly the barcode part is the key IMO. It makes completing a task so fun and rewarding. If you / your family has iPhones you can create an iOS Shortcut that will scan the task when you complete it. I was also going to go with a usb barcode scanner because that sounds really satisfying too! For this you might need a dedicated machine hooked up to the usb barcode scanner because they typically act as a keyboard and just type in whatever they scan, so you'll need a script running constantly that's just waiting for input.
I'm not too familiar with Homeassistant and it looks like donetick would work better for you as well than most of the stuff I've got but I'd be happy to help with anything if you'd like. My contact info is in the GitHub where I have the printed-tasks code.
Lastly, I've been using this manual for the ESC/POS stuff: https://pos-x.com/download/escpos-programming-manual/ Just in case you end up wanting to manually print yours. There are some libraries already that do this, but I can't use most of them because of the Arduino situation.
OH! Get BPA-Free receipt printer paper.
I'm now using Vikunja, and Tasks.org for the Android side. That setup has worked for me wonderfully for a couple years now. Vikunja has a ton of features I don't use, and that's fine. They don't get in the way.
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...)
This started out in my quest to be sure that i can not trapped by an app, and so i can safely export my data...but, nowadays, it has extended a little into the tinfoil hat thinking - fairly or not - where i ask myself: "why does this app not disclose where its files are stored, *what do they have to hide!?!*" ...which feels like the universe is nudging me more and more towards either text-centric methods, or the simplest, open source style apps, etc. :-)
I mostly use text(markdown) these days.
Plus Apple Reminders for deadlines. The Org file still exists, but for recording history rather than a scheduler.
The problem was always about finding a process that fit with my needs, a process that worked for me, and then having the discipline to stick with it.
I finally settled on bullet journaling. I like books, I like writing, I like journaling, the simplicity and adaptability worked for me. There was value for me in being able to tailor the system to my needs, rather than me trying to fight with UIs that forced me to change, or didn't quite do what I wanted.
If you are resisting or fighting your system, it will fail, regardless of the tools involved. Go with what works for you.
Personally, I have my own "notes" script, a combination of shell and vim script for general note taking. I can organize things in folders, have a todo file, tags and indexing of tags (a folder of tags, each tag is a folder that contains symlinks to the related notes). If I just run it without a file, it opens a new daily note with the current date. I use that also for work tracking and TODO, I create a new note each day, add my tasks, tag it with the sprint. I can freely grep anything, I can quickly create a sprint summary from the tagged files, etc. I can back up or sync with git or any other software that works with plain text files and folders.
This is very simple and hacky, but haven't had to touch for years and it works for me - only me, only on my laptop, I don't need it on mobile. To carry around a list I use post its. For other purpose I have a physical notebook.
It is definitely not for everyone and that's fine. There is no one fits all. This is what I found working for me, minimal overhead, I can change/fix anything anytime, works with standard command line tools.
MS OneNote* for all longer term to-dos, or writings I wish to archive.
Paper or notepad.exe for ephemeral to-dos.
: one large synced notebook with folders, sub-folders, and w/e nested levels it offers, but I use search anyway.* *: this can totally be replicated with documents/files, folders, and a git repo. (and maybe some markdown editor)
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 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.
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 have a Calendar for appointments, which provides reminders as notifications and or email. That's outside my scope for a to-do app, although it's complementary.
I have two 'tiddlers' that open up front by default, one is the regular weekly schedule of things (with some calendar overlap) and the other is my (now very long) bullet pointed to-do list. It doesn't matter (to me) how long the to-do list is because the more important things are very near the top - merely by the passage of time if they haven't been done yet then they weren't important enough. But I keep them on the list as reminders of things I wanted to do and may still pursue at some point in the future (retirement perhaps?).
It's essentially a text file, but I can access the current version from any browser anywhere in the world (maybe not China) as long as I remember the URL, username and password. (It's more like multiple organised text files)
It's a joke but there's a lot of truth to it. She maintains our social calendar (which is mostly our kids social calendar and we tag along tbh) and I just ask what's happening tomorrow each night. For anything she's not telling me where to be, I have a Post It or just remember it. If there's something I want to do, I make sure she pencils it in well in advance or I look for gaps in the day plan she's built.
You’re saying you have an unpaid secretary?
Surely there’s a better way you could present this?
> At work, I use my calendar. At home, I have a wife.
Then you're talking about your partner as if they were an appliance of piece of software rather than a person. You're objectifying them, even if in jest. This is the sort of language that makes many people feel unwelcome on HN.
To be clear, I don't believe you meant for your remark to be malicious! I just wanted to point out why it might make some people feel like outsiders in this community.
> This is the sort of language that makes many people feel unwelcome on HN
Really? How do you navigate as a functional person IRL if your sensibilities are so easily disrupted? I feel like if that's the case, you need to work on yourself first. Expecting the world to alter their stance and sugarcoat every word or POV is insanity. You're literally living life in hard mode by choice. I'm not a big fan of appeasing fragile people, I'm sure this is a generational thing but here's the thing, that cohort is going to live a majority of their life alongside my cohort and they're choosing to bring friction into the mix.
I think HN is a place for adults to talk maturely and generally "we" read past this stuff. Places like Reddit are places for kids (or immature adults) to talk, they would gladly turn the entire conversation into a dissection of word choice based on whatever is trending in the offends-me-today cult. This is a what keeps HN community, and our discourse, high quality.
I don't think this will be a productive conversation. Let's just agree we feel differently about how words affect people and move on.
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/
Well guess what. Microsoft created Notes and Journal bceame a "legacy app." It was not possible to migrate. The deprecation of the .PST file in Exchange Server left me no way to transfer when I lease-rolled to a new laptop.
Enter Notes. As in, "notes.txt", which is exactly the same idea as todo.txt described here. Works. If this text file ever becomes machine unreadable, file compatibility will be the least of our worries.
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...
Requires little to no thought and has unparalleled security and privacy out the box
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.
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.
This does complicate the system a bit, but still low overhead in my opinion.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
Then I plan my todos semi-yearly using epics and backlogs. I spent a whole lot of time carefully deciding what I'll do day by day in 4 months, so that I can use it as a baseline I can ignore and re-adjust it day by day.
Every week I review all my todos and assign them point. I usually involve my partner so we can have a healthy discussion on how many points a todo is worth, and whether we should switch to tshirt sizing instead. I usually plan between 1.5 and 2x the amount of todo I'm actually capable of doing, because I like stretch goals. Then I spend the week working on the todos. I built an automation that sends me messages to ask why such and such todos are not moving fast enough. I also built automation to spice things up a little and ask me to get a privacy review on some of the items, or to start the process on those todos again because I forgot a step or something.
I start every day with a 1/2h to 1h meeting where I explain what I didn't do the day before, and what I won't do today either because I'm blocked for some reason. I used to do it with my dog but nowadays I use copilot chat because its reassuring tone gives me the impression that it matters.
At the end of the week I put back the todos I didn't do in the backlog. At the end of the week I build a status report that I then present to my partner. She's usually asleep when I do that but she insists that I go on and give that weekly status, that she usually closes with "bottom line, you underachieved again". Helps keeping me humble.
! important thing to do
~ something already started but not finished
- thing to do
- another thing to do
x something done
x already done
? needs more thought
* Don't forget to add your todo.txt to .gitignore
- add todo.txt to global gitignoreThe 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.
- Ideas for businesses I never started
- My eyeglass frame measurements
- Tips for maintaining battery health
- Concepts for tattoos I never got
- Specs for my ThinkPad T400
- Passwords to websites I don't use anymore
- Rough calculations for home solar buyback time
- Instructions on how to edit a video for a seamless loop
- Inside jokes
- List of antivirus tools
- List of browser extension
- Motivational quotes and bits of personal wisdom
- Dimensions for small subwoofers
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. */
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.)
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.
'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.
Now i just prompt ChatGPT to recall my todo list and usually am working with the model to do whatever coding task, call prep, random analysis anyways, so it knows when i complete the task.
tried Everything -> emacs/ .txt -> top 6 on paper -> top 6 through an LLM.
Two shortcomings are: figure out cross-device sync (ssh/nfs are good options), reinventing the wheel for rich text (tags, references, data tables, etc.)
I have two categories, todo and done. I separate them by project. I use markdown checkboxes. A checked item on todo means doing. Moving it to the done section means… well… done. Git is used from time to time to have a copy elsewhere. Basically kanban on a text file.
Sometimes I’m doing lots of small tasks and need it to keep track, sometimes I’m doing tasks that span for days and don’t look at it. I’ll look at it when I want to think of the next step.
Around once per month I remove things from it, cleaning up and consolidating tasks. I think it’s important to let go of tasks that are there but never done, they can be a source of stress. If they are that important they will find their way back there.
I also use an online calendar for tasks that have a clear start and end time. I consider it separate.
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)
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 am a tech creative so I am okay with this vice. Trying to finetune the above setup btw.
└── Dey well
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.
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.
I was lazy the images are converted to base64/stored as such so like 30% growth in storage vs. hosting/url.
What I still have to setup is a centralized store/preferably statically encrypted and remote/syncing.
cheers
If I want to get fancy then I have a couple of bookmarks to custom myNoise.net multi gens configured to run for 25min.
I also have some pretty notebooks and a cheap fountain pen, this combo makes me feel like a witch when I write in them and that’s fun.
I have tried a ton of apps and they all fall by the wayside. I have to buy a new bottle of ink once or twice a year and the occasional notebook. Simple. Gets out of the way and never requires me to open up the Attention Sink and lose a half an hour getting distracted by a Telegram message or whatever.
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.
˜/todo.txt
My system has a few minor differences:
- I don't use dates/time in TO DO lists (anything with times or deadline are what calendars are for).
- Done items are never deleted, they are merely moved from the TO DO section to the DONE section.
- I use the todo.txt from one machine only (main laptop). While I use many other machines, I don't bother with synchronization, I just open it on the main laptop if I need it. [It's tempting to implement some distributed P2P or C/S sync protocol somehow, but I view this as procrastination, because in the same time I could generate more value in other ways.]
> “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?
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
- 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.
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.
It has exactly what the author was saying:
"Every night, I check tomorrow’s calendar. I dump everything into the next day’s section. Scheduled items get times in front. Sub-bullets hold notes or reminders. Finished tasks? I delete them or add what happened. Still on the list? Not done yet. That’s it."
This app automatically moves what hasn't been done to the next day, it's pretty good to manage work and it doesn't add any extra workload to manage the TODOs. Can't recommend it enough for just 1 buck a month!!
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.
I'm working on local-first collaboration for Obsidian (https://relay.md), and there's something so nice about editors and then collaboration as layers of "progressive enhancement" over files on my own machine.
I want me-centric software that treats life and work as just folders on my device. IMO git/github is a model experience for this kind of thing.
It's great to have text files that I can use vim, rg, fzf, etc on my laptop, then switch to use the best writing tool (Obsidian IMO) on any of my devices, and then sync the content and collaborate in-real time with my team.
If your'e after more for yourself across more than one device, 2do was one of the dozens that worked well for me - one of the few that used text files on a drive share to get maximum fields and functionalities instead of being limited by a caldav or something.
Beyond this Logseq is starting to be a quick capture champion. Technically text files.
The question comes down to how many areas of life, major initiatives, projects, tasks / sub tasks you might have on the go at any time, and how much you are waiting on whom.
Having something that could start as simple as a text list and absorb complexity as it comes up (dates, context, follow ups, etc) is really valuable.
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 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.
Since it's always in my pocket, I see it spontaneously during the day, and as a result, I manage to focus on it more. Have tried apps, but the fact I had to click the app would make me easily forget it, and get distracted on other things on the phone.
I look at it every evening and write the one for the next day, and have the last few lying around near my bed. As one of the other comments mentioned, this ritual may be more important than the medium but I find keeping a ritual with paper has been easier.
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 agree that complex todo apps are a bit of a waste of time.
And yes, you can combine that with something like Obsididan at any time.
But I've also built a simple chooser program for multiple todo files and notes. A very simple cli program that does basic fuzzy search over file names.
For example, I can type `mem mov` to open a `movies.note` file in notes directory. If I use a full name with `.note` extension and it doesn't exist - it will create a new note with that name and open it in editor immediately. It makes it easy to create new notes on the fly and open them in a few keystrokes.
For editing I use neovim with auto-save enabled, so I can keep editor open all the time without forgetting to save.
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
[1] https://productivitycast.net/2020/07/07/080-perfect-time-bas...
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.
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.
My last and the one that ended up working more for me was Microsoft TODO because it was simple and synced with my phone, and actually worked seamless with IOs Reminder app. I sticked with it for a lot of time, but in the end, after a hell week, most my tasks where red with due dates long passed. It just added to my stress seeing all that red.
Today I just carry a small notebook and a pen I like in my back pocket. If I have to do something I start with a task like
- do something.
After done
+ do something
Every start of day, I just grab some coffee, sit for 5 min and go through the last day, what I done, what I could not finish, and create a new todo list for the day.
I also now just carry the notebook for quick notes. Notebook for temporary stuff. If is something more permanent stuff that I need to remember, I just add an entry in my OneNote. If is a event, in goes to my outlook Calendar.
OneNote is hardly ideal, I used to run my life on Notion, but it works well enough, but there where some problems.
* Too much cluter. I did not use 1/3 of what it could do
* I run out of space, and I did not wanted another monthly payment to get premium stuff
* The search in One is reasonable, and does the job
* I can draw in my tablet, for simple diagrams
* Tt syncs with my phone independent if I'm using Android of IOs without me have to think much about it
* is already included in my Office 365 family plan.
* works offline, different from Notion.
My only grip is OneNote don't have a Linux desktop app, just wrappers for the web app, and pasting code on it is a fucking disaster. Other than that, it does the job.
The only thing now that would make me switch is Obsidian, but the IOs app is a fucking disaster. you cannot open vaults outside the Obsidian folder, and I was using git to sync it, but IOs dont have a good free Git app that can sync folders anywhere I want it.
Also, having to sync manually and solving merge conflits for my notes is kinda a pain in the ass.
Org-mode could be perfect, but sync and mobile apps are PITA. Reminders are good, but limited. However, they are well integrated with calendar. OmniFocus is somehow in between, has own scripting engine, complex, limited at some places, but will surely get it done.
As much as I am with the idea of writing, bringing the pen and notebook with you me all the time get old pretty soon. And, such are the details of modern life, a lot of information arrives per mail or links. Also, no meaningful context can be saved with task. What would happen is that I would have to maintain 2 system - short written tasks and digital information storage for them, and somehow link between them.
But why I commented here: indeed, in the end the system itself does not matter that much. The regular review, in GTD terms, does. Cleaning up junk tasks, plan the day, process the inbox - it can be done with anything.
I have my 3 favourite bindings from vimwiki in my config and have used this 'system' for years without any problems.
<leader>ww = go to diary home
<leader>w<leader>w = go to today
<leader>w<leader>d = go to list of days
Basically it's a TUI app that operates on new line separated text.
Insanely simple. can only operate on the top 3 todo items. All one shot keypresses to manipulate.
But I absolutely love it. Use it every day. Those one shot keypresses to manipulate may not sound like much, but it's always 1-4 less keypresses than I'd need in vim, and the limitations free up a lot of mental space.
(I'd give a link but it's posix only and I you'd have to compile it yourself, and also I don't want to implement your features).
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.
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.
Turns out this was my problem. I just wasn't serious about keeping track of things to do, and doing them. No app in the world could solve that. Once I started to take it seriously, it doesn't really matter what you use to keep track of things. If it's there, you'll do it.
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.
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.
I just kept peeling back to that because for each product I tried to build I still ended up reverting back to a big ass text file to manage my building of my product!
Only the current version is the one I have been able to stick with. It starts with text editor as the foundation and then adds features (that are hidden) on top of that.
Hoping to release to some friends in Sep.
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 keep my tasks in textfiles (markdown) as well. Not one, but several, for all kinds of projects. And I view my files in Obsidian, although I open them in neovim as well, searching via ripgrep, finding via fd, fzf, viewing via bat. All in terminal.
Textfiles are great.
Emacs + orgmode is also an excellent choice, but that’s all tied to Emacs. And Orgmode files do not render nicely in other editors/viewers. Besides it‘s overkill. Trying to do everything in one app. I prefer the Unix way. Do one thing and do it good.
The top part is the todo list and the bottom portion is a list of days and what was done beneath each.
* A list of daily tasks small and quick too many to remember
* Tasks to do or check every three or four days ie about twice a week
* Tasks to do about once a week eg hoovering.
* Tasks to do every three months like wash house windows etc
Sometimes I ask ChatGPT to order my todo list by importance.
There are a few things I wish I could magically add to the text doc, though, like inline alarms and calendar events.
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
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.
Yeah that’s my problem here, I never see my desktop :)
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.
So it is cheap, easy to extend, portable and my only concern is that using it on my phone is not the best.
I have notes for target dates too
It works very well. It even _finally_ (in 2023) made me switch from paper grocery lists to electronic ones.
> 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…
It fits my brain of an endless deep list.
Have no affiliate with them apart from paying them each and every year.
Such an efficient to-do list that has progressive enhancement of some sorts where you start out with a list and if you want more features they just kind of are there but they don't get in the way unless you want them. I love how I can do everything with keyboard shortcuts with Checkvist!
For longer term stuff/backburner items, I use Google tasks.
Just use tasks.google.com
Add your todos, when finished, type DONE in front of it, this way it' a journal and you get to feel good about all the things you've done since you're always looking at your list. Anything without a DONE needs to be done. You can write details in each entry, too.
No subscriptions, no fees, accessible from your phone, computer. etc. Keep it simple, folks.
The only downside is that it's only on OSX/IOS but the webapp is good enough for my use cases.
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.
- Ordinary dot points (on a 5x3 lined card, for me)
- But instead of dots, you draw a little square
- When the task if part way done, you colour in half the square, corner to corner
- When the task is completely done, you colour the whole square
It gives you partial progress, and the same satisfaction of crossing something off when done, but without obscuring the text you originally wrote.
* Native Mac, iOS, and Android apps, plus access via web
* Reminder notifications for native apps
* Start/defer dates AND due dates
* Option to recur from start/due dates or completed date
Todoist doesn’t support start dates. Things and OmniFocus support nearly all of these things, but aren’t available on Android. Nirvana doesn’t support notifications on desktop.
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.
https://github.com/arendtio/witfocus
Ultimately, it is simply a folder containing text files. The witfocus script helps manage those files.
I don't think it is for everybody, but if you enjoy having your todos in a text file, it might be for you.
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.
Oh, and I love the Denote package.
It stores todos in icalendar files, so it’s easy to sync onto a CalDav server and onto your phone.
No idea except knowing if I can crack this my life would be better
Nice, mine is called todo.doc, as I can easily copy screenshots in it.
Currently setting up [DAVx5](https://www.davx5.com/tested-with) to be used with [jtx Board](https://jtx.techbee.at/sync-with-davx5#setup) and [Radicale](https://radicale.org/v3.html). It's quite a bit of overhead at first but then I can trivially manage my calendar and contacts afterwards.
CalDAV has provisions for [vTODO](https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-6-2-to-do-compone...) and [vJOURNAL](https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-6-3-journal-compo...) so my hope is that this is a durable FOSS solution to aid in getting out of some Google services.
I used for years M$$$ todo, but I am afraid of lock-in.
Migration is WIP.
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
The point is, I don't think one app, any app can solve all mankind's all scheduling problems.
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.
! heading here
+ item to do here
- item completed here
the !+- prefixes auto-highlight/colorize in editors. I use Sublime Text.
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.
The more things I have in my todo list, the less things I accomplish. If I'm in a rut, I just write down a single thing. It works for me.
In addition to my own text file I use the Clear app for quick lists. Recommended.
I have a shortcut for example on my Home Screen that opens a text dialogue - anything that I type is appended to a text file I specify with a timestamp, for example
Highly recommend for this type of stuff
OP was drinking 2+ liters of water per day. It may not be productive work-wise, but it's productive health-wise.
So... win?
I can rearrange, nest, denest, move up or down in hierarchy, just focus in on one hierarchy, mark as completed, filter search.
All with keyboard shortcuts!
No org mode? No Taskwarrior? Both are apps backed by plain text.
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 think you can find the answer to this question by looking at the comment thread of any TODO/notes/task-tracking submission on HN.
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.
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.
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.
I have to wonder if some people use these systems to make themselves feel more important than they actually are.
Maybe I'm dumb but another thing I never understand is how the hell you think org-mode is the best way to do this? An org document is one of the worst things I have seen in my life in terms of readability. How do you read this and properly interact with that mess? I am really eager to understand...
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.
Org-mode has TODOs, Agendas, tables, nested/collapsible headings, mind-maps etc. You can also generate richly formatted PDFs/HTML/DOC files as well.
—> 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
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.
+ 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).
The best one is https://taskwarrior.org/ , which was missing from this list.
There are hundreds of todo apps. Possibly 1000s. Including mine, which isn't mentioned. ;0) So all is something of an exaggeration.
There's finite time in life, and productivity tool "improvements" have a diminishing ROI, why waste time improving what they already said is very good for them?
I am surpised, that no one here seems to use it, since it seems like an obvious choice.
https://Simpletaskmanager.vercel.app
All the info is locally hosted.
> t stats | grep -E 'Oldest|Total' \n
Total 7675
Oldest task 2014-07-24Syncs the notes across devices without forcing how you structure
I never look back more than a day or two worth of notes.
Rows can be very flexible and I've been using it for years for my to-do list (also issue tracker on smaller projects) and it works very well.
Works well on mobile as well.
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)
I have Obsidian set up to create a new week file every week, and then I add things to do there, I also move things from previous weeks if I still feel they are relevant.
Works like a charm.
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)
"I tried every new zany method but our tried and true classic is what I selected!"
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
This is such a strange conclusion. Just... stop using the points system? I've been using Todoist for years and I've never intentionally done anything with the points or looked at them. That said, I've learned about myself that checking things off is surprisingly motivating. Having a discrete task, even for a tiny thing, makes it much more likely that I will do it.
If a text file works for you, great! But it's strange for the bar to be "the tool must not have any features I find useless".
Also, the Scratches feature in jetbrains ides is great.
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.
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.
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.
I believe it has been discontinued.
It simply has two list: the “inbox“ where you would add anything that should be done, and then a “tomorrow” list.
As you went through your day you would either swipe to delete any done task, or you would swipe it to the “tomorrow” list. At the end of the day, the “tomorrow” list would be merged with the “inbox”.
Simple and effective.
1. Done in the morning before starting work. Helps to take glance at yesterdays todo before it. 2. It only covers task achievable at the end of the day. Gets updated through the day with twists and turns and possible completion notes. 3. Very important! It gets evaluated at the end of the day: pass-fail.
The goal is not to pass or fail at the end of the day, is to help tomorrow's todo list creation.
Done diligently. Sharpens my brain.
But I use .md files stored in a private git.
Can Apple read the notes?
Can Apple switch you off?
Is it easy to edit from a non-Apple device?
- Presumably yes, but unlikely
- No
So you definitely have to be in the ecosystem, like I alluded to.
[X] Task 1 [] Task 2
Its enough for me
i use whatever notes app my phone has and sync that on my laptop. Sometimes my email apps have that feature.
I've been using GNU emacs since the beginning, when I switched from Gosling emacs. The first few years had crashes, but since it's been one of the most stable pieces of software I've ever used.
Your claims are just preposterous, especially without any substantiation.
I don't want to be mean but calling Emacs a buggy mess sounds like a skill issue.
I've never tried debugging C# from within emacs (though eglot with omnisharp solves all the other IDE needs like goto, see references, renaming and such). I think you're more likely to find help on r/emacs or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79516308/how-to-debug-c-... or something for that.
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
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.
Mentions just 5
Does not mention Markdown once.
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
For more complex TODOs and lists, I have my own bespoke note taking web app that syncs with S3.
Either way I'm not paying for a TODO app!
I mean, we all have feet, right? And we all want to protect the soles of our feet, so there's really no need for all the bells and whistles like laces or padding.
But sure, a physical notebook or post-its would work just as well.
Ready to ditch the productivity app hamster wheel? Do this:
Create a file called todo.txt
Write down what you need to do tomorrow
Do those things
Add notes as you work
Start a new date section when neededAnother tool I like is Things.app. But it's Apple only and I'm moving away from that ecosystem.
We tend to overcomplicate things when it's not needed. Sometimes I think we like playing with tools more than doing actual work.
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.