Todoist

I have had different versions of this post in my head, depending on what task manager I was using at the time, telling myself it was the one I was going to stick with. OmniFocus was that app for a long time. Then it was Todoist, then OmniFocus, then TickTick, then Reminders, then Omni…, well you get the idea. I would use an app for a few months then switch to another. It’s not very productive switching apps every couple of months, but I would only have a handful of tasks to move each time. I was using OmniFocus up until I got on the Fantastical v3 beta. Fantastical added Todoist support, so I installed Todoist thinking I was just gonna mess with it and go back to OmniFocus. I was wrong.

I have always liked Todoist, especially its natural language input, but there were minor things that caused me to not use it for long periods of time. I am 99.9% mobile only, so a good mobile app experience is a must for me. Older versions of Todoist would not allow you to create tasks from the home screen of the mobile app, only inside the Inbox or a project, which frustrated me. With older versions, there was no way favorite or pin items for quick access, which again frustrated me. When Todoist released the Todoist Foundations update last year, I glanced at it but didn’t try it because I was happy with OmniFocus. That update fixed all the shortcomings I felt using Todoist, though I didn’t know it at the time. ¹

Now, I can add new tasks from pretty much any screen of the app, which I really like. Todoist’s QuickAdd function and natural language processing is the best I’ve ever used, and something I always missed when using other apps. I love the new task view which makes it easy to adjust a tag/label, due date or time, reminder, or add a note to a task. With OmniFocus, I was using Drafts to create new tasks because I could type them in TaskPaper format using natural language and OmniFocus would parse the natural language. ² I do have a couple of actions for creating Todoist tasks via Drafts, though I find myself using the Todoist app to create the tasks more often than not.

Sections, and sub-task support were also added during the Foundations update, and both are something I am using more than I thought I would. I’ve got a couple of large projects going at home, and I’m using sections and sub-tasks to keep everything organized.

As I said above, I have always liked Todoist, but I love it more than I ever have since the Foundations update. It feels like “home” and I do not see myself leaving it anytime.