The search for a better todo list

I had been using Trelo for my todo list for a while now.  After hearing CCP Grey talk about OmniFocus on his podcast, I wanted to give it a try.  It’s Mac only though, so I spent a couple days trying to get a virtual hackintosh up and running, which made me remember why I hate Macs so much.  That’s another story for another day though.

I came across MyLifeOrganized, which seemed awesome at first, and spent two days transferring everything from Trello into it.  As far as desktop apps go, it was pretty good.  Not exactly what I wanted but good enough, better than Trello for a GTD system anyway.  The trouble came when trying to sync it with phone apps…. it was the height of palm pilot technology.  You can only sync to one device and you have to kick it off manually, or pay for a fairly expensive cloud sync.  The app isn’t cheap either at $50, and then you have to pay $25 for the mobile app, plus the monthly cloud service to make it all work.  Way too expensive.

I tried some cloud services… IQ-something, Zen-something, and some other web2.0-ish names, that try to implement GTD by far too simple or far too complicated methods.  All I really need were an inbox, projects, and recurring tasks that don’t still show up as a current task if they’ve already been completed today.  Task ordering and next task by project would have been nice but it turns out that’s rather difficult to find.  And it had to be reasonably priced, which is another thing that’s difficult to find in a GTD tool (I guess the thought is that people who use them are manager types and can be gouged).

I settled on Todoist.  It’s cheap at $2.50/mo (cheaper than MLO’s cloud sync alone), the apps are free (and available on every platform), has a really good filter system, plus gamification in its karma feature.  The only thing it’s missing is a project next task feature, but it’s pretty fast to manually set a few tasks as high priority and include them into the dashboard.  It might even force me to think about my day more, so it might turn out to be a plus.

I’m actually kicking some butt, ticking off at least a dozen things from my todo list a day (and only adding about 10), so by the end of summer I might actually be caught up ;).