'I Tried Every Todo App and Ended Up With a .txt File'

Posted by satis
Aug 12, 2025 at 04:29 PM

The software dev who wrote about this is kind of ridiculous. He gave up on Todoist because he lacked the self-control to turn off an optional gamification feature in the app, “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.” He gave himself B.S. tasks so he could gamify a *completely optional* points-based system in the app.

Not really impressed with text-only todos except for very limited personal use.

Todo.text is cumbersome for sub-tasks or hierarchical structures, it lacks notifications, has no automated recurring items, you can’t easily deal with large notes (which makes the file difficult to scroll through and stops visual flow), you can’t automatically group higher priority items for a given day, and there’s no linking to a calendar - which is incredibly useful. And no location-based reminders, also very useful.

When I’m on the go I can tell my phone to remind me to do something and it puts it in an Inbox in my todo app where I can later triage and categorize it (personal, home, work etc), I can add a due date, I can can set one or more notification alerts including sophisticated repeat todo (eg every 3rd Wednesday), I can optionally set a priority level (which affects where it appears in a list on when viewed in Daily view), and I can see a rich web-preview for attached URLs. And when in apps and web browsers I can easily share info and links into the todo app (and even choose what categories or folders to put them in). And dated/timed events can show up in my calendar, which offers benefits when planning or sharing open availability.

And that doesn’t even touch on collaboration features, which I don’t use but many people find useful.