The Apple Ecosystem has some fantastic Apple only task managers: Things 3 and Omnifocus comes to mind.
I have been using Things 3 for over 5 years.
I am curious why people who are exclusively on Apple platforms are using Todoist, which is a web first app and as such do not have native Apple experiences.
After wandering around task managers like I suppose most people here, I finally settled on Todoist. Mostly it seems they Get It when it comes to task managers, and the workflow is both flexible and simple once you settle into your own way of doing things.
The integration with things like GMail is also very nice.
And despite not being Mac native it doesn’t feel bad to use at all. Guess it all comes down to vibes. For me, Todoist has good vibes.
I’m primarily on Things 3 but when I used Todoist it was the API that was the determining factor. It can connect to so many services and in ways that really help to manipulate your data in ways you can’t with apps like Things 3. Although now with the Shortcuts integration it’s almost moot at least for Apple devices.
I’m a long time Todoist use. I’m everything but a fanboy, plenty of issues with the app. But over the years I’ve tried many other task management apps and have always come back to Todoist. The primary reason is the unrivaled natural language data entry. No need to click on any buttons or select values from popup. I can simply say “Take trash out every Friday starting next week #personal !!1 @chores”. I also like how projects and subprojects can be stacked. Again, it has flaws like any app and I’m not a fan of how they appear to be catering increasingly to business customers with sharing features that I have no use for, but for me it just so much simpler to enter new tasks than anything else I’ve tried, so I’m sticking with it. In this day and age, I don’t even understand anymore what a “native” app is supposed to look like (the days of a standardized UI/UX on the Mac seem long gone), so it doesn’t bother me that Todoist isn’t one.
As outlined above, the natural language data entry is superb. You can add tasks that are due ‘every second Monday starting 15 June’, ‘every last day of the month’ and similar. Priorities and labels are also quickly assigned, as demonstrated in the example above.
All projects get their unique email address so I can easily forward emails to projects to create tasks. Integration with Spark, Outlook, Fantastical, BusyCal, etc. There’s a Chrome extension to add websites as tasks.
All of these help me get my inbox to zero and quickly add tasks to Todoist.
Reminders can also be activated by geofencing, which is extremely convenient and works great.
Yes, the Mac app is not technically ‘native’ but once you get used to the shortcuts there are no major issues with it, and the iOS/iPadOS apps are good (they’re not web wrappers).
Otherwise I’ve clocked up about 36k completed tasks over the years, which in Todoist gamification language equates to ‘Enlightened’ (yikes … and there is no next step upwards from there even if I feel less than enlightened most days). But then I run everything out of Todoist, from my academic work life, mundane personal tasks not to forget such as daily stretching, or the Saturday morning grocery list.
Lots of things to wish for. In my case, better integration with Mac Outlook (I want links to locally stored emails rather than to the online Outlook, but I get that is not a Tidoist problem!); or a way to link into ToDoist projects directly (via the x-ref… links) in the same way that I can link out of Todoist for instance to DEVONthink or Obsidian.
But I can’t ever see myself leaving it because I know it so well. I have very little friction getting tasks into it (directly on Mac and iOS; and occasionally via Drafts) and task organisation is very quick, and so a move to any other task manager is likely to create more pain and overheads than time won. I do occasionally peek across the fence, so to speak, but quickly return to what I know and which has never disappointed.
Like @fuchsr I don’t really care about this ‘native app’ business (I’m not enough of a purist).