This postBeing somewhat obsessed with productivity, I’ve long been in search of the perfect to-do list killer app. For almost a decade I’ve jotted down to-do items on sticky notes and index cards, later transferring them to more long-term storage. I first used text files (back when I ran Linux), and that was good. Then I switched to Backpack for a while. That was also good, but for my needs it ended up being a bit unwieldy, so I migrated to my own wiki (running DokuWiki), and that’s what I’ve been using for the last several months.
Until today. So, a few months ago I tried out Todoist, but it didn’t captivate me. Then today I saw Tom using it. It looked more useful than I’d remembered it being, so I logged back in again and gave it a whirl. And hot dang, I’m in love.
Coming from using a wiki, I’m finding it so useful to be able to edit/add/delete items individually, without having to switch into edit mode for the whole page (or section). I’m surprised that I thought doing it this way would be better, frankly.
One of the reasons I did want to use a wiki, though, was that it’d save my items for me. (I’m big on preservation.) But you know, today I realized that I don’t really need to save a history of those to-do items — after all, I have other logs for tracking the important stuff. Impermanence is okay by me. (But Todoist does save a history, so it’s kind of a moot point. :P)
Perhaps most importantly, Todoist is really lightweight, and it’s Ajaxified so you can nicely use the keyboard to do most tasks. And I love using the keyboard. And while at first I wasn’t too keen on the ultra-minimal look, now I rather like it.
Conclusion: I’m a fan. Now I just need an empty hour or two to transfer all my to-do items over from the wiki. Hey, I can add that to my list… ;)
Update: After using Todoist a bit more extensively, I’m now really, really, really liking both the priority setting and the view-by-date functionality. In the past I’ve had “today” and “tomorrow” sections of my to-do lists, but now I don’t need to do that manually anymore. It’s beautiful. And I love how the higher priority items get bumped to the top. Todoist is bliss.
