I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file

Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes:

- having your computer alert you to things that come up

- being able to tag notes

- being able to add events to a calendar

- being able to set priority of tasks

- expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda

- being able to add recurring tasks

- full-text search (grepping)

- formatting features (markdown)

Some of the laborious (or, in my opinion, plain unholy) solutions include:

- feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter for the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications

- hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list

- running a script on a VPS to sync notifications

- set up cron job with git commit

- writing post-it notes by hand

I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings (though provisions exist for vim users), but _every_ item on the list above is handled out of the box, or is offered through a free and maintained plugin.

The author of the OP claims to have tried _every_ todo app, and has afterwards moved (regressed?) to writing notes in a plain text file, but there is a path extending from this point that the author has not walked yet. I strongly suggest that, especially for people with a computing or technical background, it is an undisputed upgrade. https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html being the bible, of course.

This certainly doesn't apply to all cases, and version control / history is very complicated, but I use a notepad and a felt tip pen and I just couldn't use anything else to keep track of my TODOs for the day! It has been my goto ever since my first job, and it's never failed me!

Sounds to me like you need something simple and quick. If the current system works for you I would suggest to keep using it. If you ever feel like you need something better I would recommend trying microsoft todo or google tasks. Google Tasks syncs with your google calendar so it's a bit more powerful. Apart from them both a pretty simple. If you are looking for something even simpler take a look at google keep. This is what I use personally.

I want to address the underlying philosophy behind your edit (and also your original comment). "Perfect is the enemy of good" is not just "all that." It is the thing, the critical design constraint. Computers are a hundred years old. If you believe all repetition should be offloaded to computers -- it sounds like that isn't working for you? I'm in the same boat, and I reacted by.. reducing my standards. I have a tool. It isn't perfect and there are no signs it's going to get perfect in my lifetime. So I don't wait for perfection. I get on with my life. Even if computers will be suitable for all repetitive tasks in another hundred years.

I do have a single source of truth, and it's my todo list. However, I manualate to keep it thus. When I add something to the calendar, I copy it over to my todo list as well.

I don't do this for everything, only stuff that improves my decision making. So an appointment with a barber can just be on my calendar. Long todo lists intimidate me anyway, so it would do more harm than good cluttering up my view of critical decisions I need to make. Stuff like, "what should I make next," or "how should this thing be designed?"

So if manualating seems like too much work, I'd suggest that maybe you're taking on too much in the critical decision category, in which case you might make better decisions by focusing on fewer things. But yeah, YMMV. This is how I think about it and it works well for me.

I suppose I'm boring and already in the Apple ecosystem, but Notes app has checkbox and indent support, works between laptop and phone nicely. Just works