I am back using OmniFocus. I tried Things earlier in the year but found I missed the OF review system. I need to be able to reviews on a per project basis, with varying timing, otherwise I don’t get the right balance and I can’t review relevantly each week. My high workload means I’ve too much to review everything all the time and no other task manager fits my needs.
3 Likes
Apple Reminders + Remind Faster on iOS + a post-it note for the top tasks of the day stuck to my paper notebook.
5 Likes
I like this idea, but I need somewhere to keep all the various tasks (personal, family, work, projects) so I don’t forget!
I let my Todoist subscription lapse and went with Reminders for a few months (personal) and MS ToDo (work).
MS ToDo is good. It’s also free, and working in an O365 environment it made sense to trial it. I don’t have any major complaints other than usually once a day, clicking on the minimized window in the toolbar would do nothing and I’d have to restart the app.
I just found when things got busy at work and at home, it helped to have everything together in one app utilizing some of the things like filters and kanban view not offered in MS ToDo.
Also, with Todoist’s natural language input I can enter tasks much faster than with ToDo, so there’s less resistance when I’m in the middle of something and want to quickly enter a task during a meeting or something.
Todoist just has a bit more horsepower and since I’ve been using it for years, a lot of my workflow is burned into my memory.
I still use Reminders, but it’s more for the “hey Siri, remind me to switch the laundry in 45 minutes” tasks.
2 Likes
Is there a beta I’m unfamiliar with?
I use Reminders per these posts:
2 Likes
I definitely think we all need to hear more about Things 4
2 Likes
I could never get into Things. Beautiful app for sure, but no Windows/web versions was a non-starter. I also found the lack of natural language processing to cause me to take several additional steps when entering a task.
2 Likes
I think you’re confused with the things 3 beta.
I’m using methods described in Adam Savage’s book Every Tool’s a Hammer. I mostly use crappy paper and a nice pen for these lists.*
I’ve been doing this for maybe six months and my sense of what I have “to do” is so much more manageable. I used to be all in on OmniFocus and I’ve also used other digital approaches (nearly every one, it’s a hobby, really), but at least right now I see them as a waste of time. This is probably due to the nature of my work (design, research, writing, teaching). Turns out, I don’t need to put every little thing into a system.
I do forget some things now, but the consequences so far have been minor and my load is lighter, which improves my quality of life.
* It actually took me some time to find the right combo. I tried pencil, which is what Adam uses, but the ones that wrote super smoothly needed to be sharpened and that was a pain. I also needed something broader than my typical pen, but not as a broad as a sharpie. And I needed something I could write quickly and messily with but also write nicely with if I wanted the list to be tidy. Maybe I have just transferred my obsessions from the digital to the analog? 
10 Likes
This approach wasn’t intentional and isn’t for everyone, but I’ve ended up with a best of breed/the more the merrier approach.
Due: Sometimes you need a little nagging. Due is really good at that for ephemeral tasks. Only put in what you really need to do though, or it loses its punch.
Reminders: Shopping lists. Required when other people in your life don’t share your enthusiasm for learning new apps.
TickTick - For those tasks, >Due and <Projects, but I’m also spending time with the Amazing Marvin on the side right now and crushing rather hard. TickTick’s days are looking to be numbered.
Obsidian: Only use tasks for work, generally added to the top of meeting notes, typically action items, nothing too complex or multi-step.
Basecamp - Personal stuff (see above, for people in your life don’t share your enthusiasm for learning new apps, this is easy-peasy to use)
LiquidPlanner - Going off the deep end a bit here, but if you need something more complex, this one is clutch. LiquidPlanner has a scheduling engine that runs Monte Carlo simulations on all your projects and is nothing short of pure gold. Need to quickly prioritize one project above the others? Drag it to the top and in a few seconds, all your other project timelines are recalculated. Makes you look smart in meetings, “If we do X before Y, Z is gonna slip at least two weeks”, even though X may only be 1-2 days.
What’s nice about this approach, is that you don’t need to see everything, any time you check for or add something.
2 Likes
What is this task management of which you speak?
I tend to just do thing and look at my task manager every few days.Usually there are a bunch of overdue tasks that I completed days ago.
When I was last serious about task management , around Aug 2021, I migrated tasks from Reminders and Omnifocus into ToDoist. I liked the layout, the NLP, and the ability to remind me of a task “x days” after completion.
The only thing I don’t like is the subscription. But I dislike subscriptions in general.
2 Likes
I manage my digital and analog obsessions in tandem. The BaronFig Squire is a nice pen. You might also try index cards; Walmart’s Heavy Weight cards are wicked cheap, and handle fountain pen ink, even, reasonably well.
I have my long-term project management type stuff in apps (Scrivener and Bear, thinking about using Obsidian( but transfer the stuff for current tasks to paper.
1 Like
I have both Reminders and Microsoft To-Do set to sync with Microsoft 365 so I move between them.
1 Like
You do know there are now significant numbers of members in this forum shaking with cold sweats!
7 Likes
When I hung up the law practice, I thought I may be able to find an alternative to OmniFocus. I’ve tried several so far and I still like OmniFocus best.
I just finished a nearly month long Obsidian experiment. I made a video about it in The MacSparky Labs. Here’s a link for the sake of the folks in this thread. Obsidian is pretty good, but also felt a little too tenuous for me.
Please enjoy the link, but don’t publish it elsewhere.
24 Likes
I have moved away from task management. I tend to put things in reminders and notes. I get things done generally…no rush though…at my own pace…
2 Likes
Like others above, I’ve been playing with Obsidian for tasks.
I’ve found it so far to be quite helpful, in part it reduces the movement of tasks from my meeting notes in to a separate program afterwards but a big plus has been the cross platform nature of it, as it’ll work on my work Windows laptop without anything else needed, so that works well.
I was perhaps missing reminders, but on the other hand, that’s forcing me to do my weekly and daily reviews, which I wasn’t doing before when the tasks were in another program.
I’ll certainly be continuing to give it a go.
1 Like
This is one of my biggest issues with Obsidian. I need a task manager for alerting me to critical due dates, repeating reminders, etc. The missing element for me is the inability to share a task in Obsidian with Reminders or other task manager. I don’t want to manage my tasks in Obsidian. I want to “note” the tasks there and then select and send them to the task manager for actual processing. I can do this easily in Notes and Craft but haven’t figured out how to do so in Obsidian.
I’d love to have this issue resolved because at that point, I’d seriously consider putting all of my work and personal notes in Obsidian.
I use Apple Reminders and the PARA method in Obsidian (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive).
Anything under Projects (tasks with a deadline) gets a Reminders entry, and as I check things off I (manually) move the notes to Archive. Not all Reminders have a Projects note though, some work just fine as one-liners.
I don’t see the need to install and depend on an Obsidian plugin maintained by one person in their spare time to manage tasks when I have so many well-made todo apps at my disposal. To quote the Unix philosophy, “Make each program do one thing well”.
5 Likes