I’ve stuck the longest with Things 3. Nothing beats a native app. Things for me has the right blend of features and simplicity. It’s the only app that has allowed me to see the wood from the trees.
I do think that no matter what app you use, your set up is absolutely crucial. I switched task apps constantly until I realised that my setup and workflow were the issue. Now that I’ve I nailed that down I could use any task manager.
A good indicator of a poor setup and workflow is when we think a different app than the one we’re using will make us more productive.
True, for now. As seen before, legacy editions (not subscription versions) won’t see future feature integration. Eventually, they will probably discontinue the legacy version and offer only the subscription version. I understand the business decision, but I already own GoodNotes5 so I’m using this for now.
Cheers,
Bud
Thank you for this recommendation! Until I tried Marvin I didn’t know I needed a floating task bar in my life, but I really do! Minus is great, I’ve set it up now and it works so easily!
Marvin has been eye-opening for showing me what I’d like in a task manager. I need to do time-boxing, and I need a floating task bar. @Focused has helped me with the task bar - Minus.app can provide this functionality for free, and it’s customisable (and works with various task managers!).
I haven’t quite solved the task manager riddle yet, and have possibly made it more complicated for myself -SIGH- My main source of friction right now is that Reminders doesn’t have a Zapier integration. I use Slack and Trello at work, and they’re set up so that they automatically send tasks to Todoist, and I can’t find a way to recreate that in Reminders.
What I’ve ended up doing instead is moving all my non-work tasks out of Todoist and into Reminders, and the plan is to keep Todoist just for work. I do not like this - my job is a “vocation” and there’s a huge amount of overlap between actual tasks I need to complete at work, and “recreational” tasks I want to complete, like reading X paper, etc. I do not like having them separated. It also makes time-boxing a pain because I need to refer to two apps to plan my day.
I actually don’t need much technical stuff with my to-do lists though I’ve found - I really just want a list I can browse and use to plan my day, I don’t need labels, priorities, etc. The only thing I like is having tasks separated by project, and any system can do that. Because of this, and because I’m a Markdown user, I did briefly contemplate just keeping lists in different Markdown files. I quickly dismissed this because it’s ridiculous (I’d have to copy and paste tasks from Slack and Trello, and that is not happening), but it’s nice to dream of a world of plain text…
Living the plain-text / markdown life takes some effort, but it is possible.
In your case, it sounds like you could use NotePlan, which is plain text and built on Markdown. It has a URL scheme that, with some of the tightly integrated plugins, will let you add a task to a specific note (eg, tomorrow’s daily note, or a particular project) and even put it under a specific headers of the note (eg, under the Inbox section of today’s daily note).
It should be possible to connect that to Trello, Slack and so on – at the very least you could select the text of a task and send it to the appropriate project or daily note (and even the right place within that note), using Shortcuts or Keyboard Maestro. But using their APIs you might be able to do it even more elegantly.
So as someone who does as much as possible in plain text, I can tell you that what you want to do is probably possible – with some effort, and you may need some apps or services that you aren’t going to get free from Apple. Only you can decide if it’s worth it.