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

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

#801

Post by egypturnash »

nosianu wrote: post #759
egypturnash wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this sounds like an apocalyptic amount of work to set up

Yes, building something new is a lot of effort. And? We have been doing it for a few thousand years, again and again and again. Cities were a lot of work. Irrigation was a lot of work. Farming was a lot of work. Castles were a lot of work. Roads. Aqueducts. International trade. And that was before the even more complex problems of modernity, after the industrial revolution. I don't understand the attitude behind such…

I mean yeah sure but "I'm going to make a brain mesh so I can have an AR cartoon be my to-do buddy!" makes Knuth taking a multi-year detour from writing TAoCP to build TeX look like nothing.

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

#802

Post by lencastre »

imranq wrote: post #735

People basically want a life coach, someone by their side who can tell them what the best next thing to do is at any given moment. Everything else are just approximation of that ideal. The author's .txt file works because its simplicity forces a daily ritual of self-coaching. The tool demands that the user manually review, prioritize, and decide what matters. There are no features to hide behind, only the discipline…

> Ultimately, the best system is the one that removes the most friction between decision and action. For the author, that meant stripping away everything but the list itself.

this ↑ a 1000x ↑

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

#805

Post by v3ss0n »

Cebul1234 wrote: post #796
v3ss0n wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Not everyone like EMacs , i am not going to open up another editor just to use orgmode .. it needs a lot of preparations. - Orgmode format itself is a mess , it only good because Emacs's orgmode extension is very good working with Orgmode. What would be really good is a Markdown-Compatible Todo System , with notes linking and tagging , and status/progress integration. There was Dandrite, it was quite close to what…

Check Obsidian: https://obsidian.md

Not opensource. If you checked dendrite it had features of obsidian

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

#806

Post by taude »

hhmc wrote: post #472
Aurornis wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them I think this is a vocal minority. Outside of internet comment sections, most everyone I know doesn’t care that much about their todo list software. The most productive people I ever worked with all had really minimal productivity software. For one person…

There’s a now quite dated comment from Merlin Mann: "Joining a Facebook group about productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.” It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.

I think he had a blog called LifeHacker and/or 36 folders (I don't know if they were his or just a writer, but I remember following him back in the day).

It's wild to think that was almost 20 years ago when Getting Things Done was going through tech circles as the organization method dujour. (I also equate the same time period with learning Ruby on Rails.)

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

#807

Post by burnerRhodo »

I essentially did the same thing... wrote a program, tried them all, went to emacs, back to a text file, then i started just writing down the 6 most important things for me to do that day. If i don't finish them, I write them back down at the start of the day. It was incredibly liberated because only after i finished those 6 things could i think about doing any other thing besides those 6 things.

Now i just prompt ChatGPT to recall my todo list and usually am working with the model to do whatever coding task, call prep, random analysis anyways, so it knows when i complete the task.

tried Everything -> emacs/ .txt -> top 6 on paper -> top 6 through an LLM.

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

#808

Post by lvturner »

Igrom wrote: post #92

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 prioriti…

I've taken to using an LLM to organize my Todo list (self hosted interface with a little MCP server I wrote and a postgrss db on my network), it's still very simplistic however for someone with ADHD just having fast and unorganized data go in and structured data come out, is a real win.

It isn't perfect, and still lacks a lot of features that other people may consider a must have, but so far it's been the best Todo app I've ever used.

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

#809

Post by runjake »

taude wrote: post #806
hhmc wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a now quite dated comment from Merlin Mann: "Joining a Facebook group about productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.” It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.

I think he had a blog called LifeHacker and/or 36 folders (I don't know if they were his or just a writer, but I remember following him back in the day). It's wild to think that was almost 20 years ago when Getting Things Done was going through tech circles as the organization method dujour. (I also equate the same time period with learning Ruby on Rails.)

Merlin ran 43folders.com[1]. That domain name was a reference to GTD's tickler files[2].

Merlin did not have anything to do with Lifehacker.com. Gina Trapani[4] founded Lifehacker[3]. But, Lifehacker often covered and was inspired by Merlin's work.

1. http://www.43folders.com/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifehacker#History

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Trapani

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

#810

Post by willlma »

Igrom wrote: post #92

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 prioriti…

How do you check your todo list on mobile?
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