J. Hogue is Highchair designhaus

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Seeking the best To Do app for me

I’ve been on the hunt for To Do list management for some time now. I come back to paper lists again and again. There is something so satisfying about crossing something off, and then copying items over to a new list creates a positive tension as well — do I keep copying this item or do I admit it is not a priority?

Still, paper lists are limiting. I have so many various tasks — Work, Freelance, side projects, and family. My paper lists don’t contain the long term ideas I want to keep track of, or music to listen to, or movies to watch. Those things live in various places.

Evernote

I’ve been a free Evernote user for awhile now. Long enough that I came on board when they had a more generous free plan. Now the constant reminders and interruptions to upgrade are getting annoying.

I started a Zettlekasten with it that lasted for a few months but I let it peter out. It was too much work. I still read lots of articles and want to get back into the habit of taking notes for myself on the good ones, but a Zettlekasten was tough to maintain.

Things I liked and did not like

  • Rich text editing with Markdown. Start typing Markdown and it visually coverts to the style you intended.
  • Categories, tags, and folders for organization
  • Syncing between devices was great until the free plan update removed the ability to have multiple devices syncing
  • Rich text blocks are nice but I tend to keep my notes simple
  • The To Do list is useful but the UX of it bothers me. Activating a To Do list item reflowed the entire list to make room for all these icons and actions. I don’t need to schedule the task, or assign it, or most of those things. I just want to see it and do it or not do it. If I do it, I want ot check it off. Perhaps I should have used a checklist-style bulleted list and not a Task list.
  • The calendar is a nice feature but I barely used it since it was attached to Google Cal, and I have a browser tab open for that all the time
  • The constant (weekly?!) app updates got to be annoying

I decided to move off Evernote because I heard that since their acquisition, they have not been making as many feature updates. They laid off staff and moved operations to Europe. While they are back making updates, it seems like a product that is stagnating. then again, all I seem to need is something pretty simple.

Akiflow

A relative newcomer, I gave Akiflow a try, even purchasing a year subscription up front because they got me with a 50% for new users deal. As a new and modern product, it has many interesting integrations. Slack, Jira, Github, and Google Calendar are the ones I used, though it has many more. It has a web app, desktop app, and mobile apps that all sync together.

It aims to be a central location for any task, and a Calendar is well integrated as the way to schedule tasks. The calendar becomes the central interface component. Tasks are attached to time slots.

For someone who is very busy with lots of minute and discrete tasks, Akiflow might work well. But my tasks are larger items that need more than an hour to complete (an hour was the default block of time for tasks, though they could be dragged to be longer in the calendar view). Most of the items I need to work on are an hour here, and hour there as I find time between meetings. Maybe two hours at a stretch if I could manage it. Start, stop, poke at something, do something else while my mind processes and ruminates.

I even took advantage of the included with a paid plan benefit of having a one-on-one session with an Akiflow expert which the intention of helping you learn the different ways you can use the product and tailor it to your own needs. I really did give it a good try.

It also tracks what you check off and when to give you stats and a summary of “progress.” Again, though, that’s more than I need.

I abandoned Akiflow eventually. It wanted me to work the way it was designed to work, but my way of working is not very malleable. Again, my problem here seems to be that I need something simple but these tools want to do everything. The concept of centering everything around a calendar is a good idea if you are someone who lives by their calendar and needs to carve out small bits of time to do discrete tasks. Maybe I needed to break down my longer tasks into smaller chunks, but that seemed like too much work to just have a way to prioritize my tasks.

Notion

I’m digging the way Markdown syntax just works when typing. Starting a new bulleted list is as easy as typing + and a new To Do (checkbox) list is [ ] . Headlines use hashes, link the [text](url) syntax, bold uses asterisks and italics use underscores. All of this built in makes typing with styles in place quick — no need to fiddle with the mouse to select the right style from a contextual menu.