After many years of use I have migrated over to Todoist from Things 3. This is mainly to do with Todoist’s filter option (and because they are increasing their prices but I can lock in my current price if I subscribe now).
Although I’ve liked the simplicity of Things, it’s not allowed me to slice and dice my tasks. I’ve found that my workflow with my tasks is not always the same and needs to change dependent on other factors, for example if I’m exceptionally busy for or if I need to review my complete list.
The filters in Todoist are really really powerful. I like using Mark Forster’s Final Version Perfected (see my post above for the link), so I set a simple filter with the query, “view all”. Now all my tasks are listed. I then sort them by Project and all tasks are listed under their project. I now have one long list I can scan of every single task. Of course, I could also look at the project list for an overview.
I’ve also set up a view following Michael Linenberger’s 1MTD & MYN priority approach from a post on his site. This allows me to work from a priority base when that’s most appropriate.
The final thing I like is that you can filter by the age of the task in Todoist. Task managers are great at quickly adding tasks, but there needs to be a mechanism to remove tasks we’re never going to do. This is why I like Mark Forster’s system. In Todoist, I can set a filter to show me all tasks that were entered so many days ago. I set a filter for 365 days and can see tasks that are older than a year. This allows me to think long and hard about these tasks.
Todoist has really grown on me as it is simply so flexible.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll look into it but I’m hesitant, given my lack of coding/programming knowledge, to make my project workflow dependent on two integrated plugins. Should something change or break I’d be back to square one.
I think that’s my problem with Obsidian. Much of the functionality people want are individual coders creating there own plugins. Relying on them is not a good idea, there are already a few that have been abandoned.
I think what they mean is they don’t have to actually see the task until it’s due. That’s the good thing about OmniFocus is you can defer until you actually need it and it’s almost out of sight. Reminders gets too cluttered if you do this.
I’ve not found that to be the case, but I may still be misunderstanding, if so, my apologies.
I have a Reminders list for each major project and projects are grouped under “Areas”. I don’t see recurring tasks, or any tasks for that matter, until they show up in Today the day they are due. Obviously they are all available to review when I review a particular project list, e.g., during my weekly review, which is what I’d want.
It has been a while since I’ve used OF, but don’t deferred tasks still show up when one conducts the review or if one scans through a project with its tasks and they show up when its time to work on them? In Reminders, I use the Flag to indicate that I need to be working on the project(s). This flagged list is updated each week during my weekly review. As you can see, I only have 6 items due today (three of which are log my meals–a daily todo) and 7 flagged out of 267 tasks. If I’m correct, I’m not sure how OF is different than what I described above about how Reminders works.
Also, I can filter my lists using tags, e.g., you can see that I have two smart lists: “Waiting for” and “Week” (meaning tasks due this week).
Here is a screenshot of Today in Reminders. This is a Sunday so I don’t have much showing up for Today.
I’m in the process of switching to Todoist from Things, too.
I’ve also started using a daily note in Obsidian, and there’s an Obsidian plugin that does bi-directional sync with Todoist. I have a Todoist block — pointed at the Today list — in my daily notes template. I’m liking the setup so far.
I’ve been using Reminders for shopping lists, mainly, and hadn’t paid much attention at all to the due dates. When making a new reminder, there is a field to add a date. You don’t see that repeats can be performed until you added the reminder and go back to edit it. (A design flaw, IMHO). So I didn’t realize that I could have it repeat! That said, for most items, I want the next date to be based on the date I check the item off, such as for household chores, and not the next calendar date, such as for tax payments.
Sort by due date will always keep the most pressing items on the top of the list.
So it does look like I could use it with only a minor inconvenience of having to reset the date. That should work. But I’ll continue to use OmniFocus until the version stops working.
I’ve been on Omnifocus for years but I’m trialing Obsidian for larger project tracking just to keep all my stuff in one place. Most of my projects, checklists and recurring projects are staying in Omnifocus for now. Just testing Obsidian with a couple of projects before deciding whether to go whole hog or not.
OTOH even folks that have made extensive use of plug-ins have been able to test how to go about without them and you can get almost the same results in plain vanilla Obsidian. It just takes more clicks. Eleanor Konik gave a great presentation on how she has tested a no plug-in version o fher vault. She is/was a heavy plug-in user and I believe the etest was just an experiment to have ammunitin to combat the perception that plug-ins somehow make things less useful in future.
I don’t think that plugins like the Dataview plugin, Style Settings or Advanced Tables would be possible in vanilla Obsidian. Low level stuff perhaps, but these plugins run code in the app, which an average user would be unable to replicate. The reason these plugins exist is because Obsidian does not do these things out of the box.
I don’t know about Style Settings or Advance Tables. According towhat I saw Eleanor Konik demonstrate you can get most of the same ends results that Dataview provides without it. Just it’s a lot more work.
I was surprised but her demo was pretty convincing. I’m still going to use the plug-ins I find useful but I like knowing I do have an out if one quits being developed.
Agenda, eh? As a recent convert to NotePlan,I just want to note the similarity in appearance and approach (in my mind at least ) of NotePlan, Agenda, and Obsidian (Obsidian with the Calendar plugin installed). Would you or anyone else care to comment on the origin and evolution of these apps? Thanks!
