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Todo apps are meant for robots

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Re: Todo apps are meant for robots

#21
post #10
post #4

Are there potential solutions to the problems mentioned or is building a great todo list app not possible? I’m leaning towards it’s impossible, but would like to hear what others think.

Different activities and different personalities require different approaches I guess. I for example do not get most of the arguments from the writing. Perhaps because I usually need to deal with few big tasks not millions of small ones. The few important ones are easy to keep in mind, need to manage only the less important externally (and strive to get rid of the marginal ones). Others live differently. I guess the…

Tbh that is the way to go. Be in a position where you have to tackle a few very important tasks, and outsource the little ones to others.

Re: Todo apps are meant for robots

#22

I use a Todo app every day, starting in the morning. Almost all of my tasks are recurring, well defined, and relatively short. E.g. "triage email inbox every day", "vacuum house every week on Saturday", "upper body workout every second day", "renew passport every 10 years". For me this works well, because: * I don't forget to get things done * I don't have to think about what I need to do, the app shows me a daily li…

Todos and reminders are different things.

Re: Todo apps are meant for robots

#23

I use a Todo app every day, starting in the morning. Almost all of my tasks are recurring, well defined, and relatively short. E.g. "triage email inbox every day", "vacuum house every week on Saturday", "upper body workout every second day", "renew passport every 10 years". For me this works well, because: * I don't forget to get things done * I don't have to think about what I need to do, the app shows me a daily li…

What do you use as a daily task list app? I'm using TickTick on Android, but daily tasks is not its strong point.

Re: Todo apps are meant for robots

#25
post #23

I use a Todo app every day, starting in the morning. Almost all of my tasks are recurring, well defined, and relatively short. E.g. "triage email inbox every day", "vacuum house every week on Saturday", "upper body workout every second day", "renew passport every 10 years". For me this works well, because: * I don't forget to get things done * I don't have to think about what I need to do, the app shows me a daily li…

What do you use as a daily task list app? I'm using TickTick on Android, but daily tasks is not its strong point.

Not op. I've been using "habits" for recurring things

Re: Todo apps are meant for robots

#27
I’ve tried a number of apps but I just keep on going back to a pretty notebook and a pen. I might need something different if I had more deadlines, I dunno, I have gone to great effort to generally free my life from those.

Habitica is a gamified todo that does well enough to be around for many years. Never worked for me.

Re: Todo apps are meant for robots

#28

>3. Sense of accomplishment is important but rare in the digital world. When you mark a task as done in your TODO app, it just hides it. That’s it, no reward, no sense of accomplishment (unless you make your own). I think that’s why some people like Trello or pen-and-paper TODO list: when you get something done, you can see a card moved or a text crossed out. An artifact that proves there was a task here, and now it’…

Asana used (c2013) to have a unicorn that would fly by after N tasks marked done - didn't work on Linux, only saw it on Mac.

Re: Todo apps are meant for robots

#29
post #8
post #4

Are there potential solutions to the problems mentioned or is building a great todo list app not possible? I’m leaning towards it’s impossible, but would like to hear what others think.

I think there are solutions, but whether or not they are the same for a large enough market is hard to tell. I use a leaky bucket metaphor in my todo lists... if a given task sits on a list for too long, then it should more or less fall off. It wasn't as important as you thought. But this is anathema to how most of these systems work.

I do: punt, punt, punt, dead.
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