Welcome back, reporters! It is a new year, the holidays are long gone, and the work is piling up. Anyone on here who has followed me for years (and some of you have!) knows I am on a never-ending quest for the right To Do app. It’s a burden.
I recently gave it another serious shot, and here are the current winners:
There’s a special place in my heart for TeuxDeux, which has a delicious lightweightness and a Marie Kondo aesthetic. You click to type, click to cross off. No attachments, images, collaborators, calendar alerts, etc.
But that’s also the downside: no calendar integration means no reminders to punch you in the side of the head until you get something done. Sadly, I had to leave TeuxDeux behind. (Fair warning, it’s also $2/month.)
And migrated over to Todoist, which is heavier than I want. Practically every To Do app seems to have those folders and subcategories on the left, and I don’t like them. Overcomplicating things actually stops me from getting things done.
But ToDoist does have Google Calendar integration – and it’s good. You type “call JC tomorrow at 5” and it creates a gcal event – notification included – at the correct day and time. It’s a better natural language interpreter than Google Calendar itself, tbh.
It also does recurring events, and does them correctly (“write the TFR newsletter every other Tuesday”). But those reminders show up in your list all the damn time, whether you have to write the newsletter today or next month.
That leads me to Wunderlist, which Taylor Blatchford’s newsletter brought to my attention. Not only will it handle recurring events (though not as intuitively as Todoist), it will pop them up in your To Do list when they actually need to be done that day. Good.
The downside: Microsoft is actually taking Wunderlist down, at some point (this year?) and replacing it with Microsoft To-Do, a poorly named and unattractive app. Sigh.
So, these days I’m vacillating between Wunderlist and Todoist, but the quest continues. I hope some of these help y’all out (maybe you’re less picky than I am?). Get some work done, reporters!
P.S. Add to-do’s to your list using Alexa / Siri / Google Home.