For reasons I won’t bore you with, I’m having a mild task manager crisis. I work in a large organization that uses Microsoft products but I’ve been using Todoist for years to track work/personal projects. I did get approval to use Todoist at work a while back, but I rely heavily on their Add-In for Outlook which has been a mess for over a year now. It’s created a huge amount of friction getting new tasks (emails) into the system.
I’m tempted to switch to Microsoft ToDo as I do like it for work, but it raises a few issues/concerns.
The natural language input doesn’t work on iOS. This is a dealbreaker
I like having all my tasks in a single app. If I use To Do, I can only seem to use my work account. It’s not a big deal, but I don’t like the idea of having my personal tasks tied to my corporate Microsoft account.
So it seems to be either; use Todoist for all aspects of life and deal with the add-in issues OR switch to a two task manager set up (e.g. To Do and Reminders).
Unless I’m missing something here?
I know To Do and Reminders speak to one another but this functionality isn’t great. I’m also not a huge Reminders fan. I also don’t like Things, don’t trust TickTick, and would never consider using things like Notion or Obsidian for tasks.
It’s been so bad the past few weeks I have actually been barely looking at Todoist or adding tasks to it because I know it’ll be a hurdle every time I touch something. At the same time, entering a personal task manually into To Do isn’t appealing either.
Perhaps you are trying to over-optimize you workflow? For example, is natural language input such a dealbreaker? Now that’s a matter of preference of course. But I think the interesting thing is about the dual task manager issue. Is that a bad thing per se?
I have been chasing the perfect calendar setup to mix my Reminders, personal calendar and work calendar for quite a long time and found that with Busycal + Reminders just to find that… it does not really matter that much to me. In the few times per month I have something personal during work hours, I just simply duplicate the event or task and be done with it. Outlook Mail + Calendar + MS To Do is, in my opinion, not a bad combo at all and it gives me the ability to have clear app buckets that help with work and personal life balance.
Another option along these same lines with BusyCal+Reminders. I use Fantastical and have a “work” and “personal” view. I activate the work calendar set to come on at 7a. So, I only see that unless I manually change. I activate automatically the personal calendar to come on at 5p. The times are non-essential except I coordinate them with work hours. Within each set I have certain Reminder lists that are work related show in the work calendar set. Same with the personal calendar set. I even have reminder lists that show up in neither. I just open the Reminders app when I need to review them.
BusyCal might have this activation feature also. However, when I turn on my computer during work hours, I see work related events and reminders. Same, when I turn on during personal time.
I think you’re right. It might be the biggest issue – fighting to get tasks into the list. As @pantulis mentioned also – I may be obsessing too much over the little feature that does work (NLI in Todoist) vs the major ones that don’t (getting items into the list in the first place).