Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best To-Do/Task List Software?
Albanach writes: Despite searching, I have not identified a good solution for managing to-do lists, a problem that can't be unique or unusual. For a variety of reasons, I need something I host myself, which allows me to organize tasks, give them due dates and/or priorities and to easily reorganize. I'd prefer a web interface so that I can access my list from home/work/mobile. My searches generally turned up hosted solutions that don't work for privacy reasons, or very old software that has shown no sign of updates in years. What are other Slashdotters using to manage their real-world task list?
Self hosted on a FreeNAS machine.
Accessing it from the outside web requires a login/password, it's not password protected from the LAN.
Why are your todo lists so top secret? What are you planning? I'm forwarding this to the authorities.
Run an eGroupware on Apache with CalDAV Turned on. Tasks lists are just another form of Calendaring.
On Linux and Windows: Configure Mozilla Thunderbird with the Thunderbird Lightning extension.
On Android: Configure DavDroid From F-Droid with CalDAV resource.
Before Yahoo, with their longsightedness bought and killed it for absolutely no reason, astrid tasks was effing glorious. The old sources are still up https://github.com/todoroo/astrid and this for is still being worked on https://github.com/tasks/tasks there is also an android app for this second one.
... or very old software that has shown no sign of updates in years.
How is that relevant? I understand if the software has outstanding major bugs or is not feature complete. However, as you point out, the todo list is basically a universal problem that has been around since the beginning of time. So what if some application was last updated 10 years ago if it does the job and is essentially bug free?
I also get it if you really want a nice responsive mobile experience and the only tool you find was "completed" before responsive design was a thing. But, the point still stands: a lack of recent releases does not automatically make a piece of software unsuitable or undesirable. Lack of responsive design would be an example of a missing feature, as opposed to an outright bug.
I would be interested to see what came in your search that you deemed "too old". Assuming that age is the only problem you found with them, I suspect that one or more are actually still quite useful.
Right there you’ve eliminated 95% of the applicable software.
Do you actually need to self-host, or is it just necessary due to your own philosophical predilections?
#DeleteChrome
Does not fulfill all of your requirements, but it is simple, and has web and mobile apps:
https://trello.com/
Made by https://www.joelonsoftware.com... , who has a style that most, but not all, developers like.
I am one of those who moved to emacs because of org-mode.
Give it a try. If emacs is the kitchen sink, emacs is the rest of the house. And it is especially good as a (human) task manager
Despite the purchase well over a year ago, and the existence of Microsoft ToDo, Wunderlist has still been available for download. I reinstalled it on my phone since it's still the best available. Maybe the number of installs will make MS hold on to it.
On a Mac I like OmniFocus.
Though lately I've been using a self-hosted GitLab instance to manage projects and tasks. It is overkill for a SIMPLE todo list. I find it helpful to be able to manage other files with projects, along with code when I am doing a coding project, it also allows me to manage tasks/issues which I can run through a kanban board, and tag tasks in various different ways, comment on tasks (remind myself where I was with it) and do all of what I used OmniFocus for. Though to be fair, I've never used the full extent of OmniFocus features. The nice thing about gitlab is that once hosted, it can be accessed from any platform with a web browser.
Seriously, my phone. It goes where I go, and if I keep the list in apple notes, then it's cloudified and i can hit it from my PC or ipad or from any browser, really.
Alternatively, a... a.. *GASP* I can't say it in this day and age!
A... s small spiral-bound notebook, be it hinged at top or at the side, and a trusty old Pentel .5mm pencil. Like a really, really old one like the P225. I have at least half a dozen. Yeah. One of them dates to 1978 or so. That one has a place of honor on my piano, it's from 4th grade.
Hey, you asked. Sometimes the oldest of tools are still the best...
Truth be told, I prefer paper and pencil..
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
TaskFreak? http://www.taskfreak.com/origi...
Yeah, it's old. But also you can host it yourself, it's simple, it has a web interface, and it works. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's bad. Especially if it's a solution to "a problem that can't be unique or unusual"
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I have tried a bunch of TODO lists of various types. There are tons of them and many of them are great pieces of software; marvels of design and user experience and technology.
But all of them have the same critical fault: they require you have discipline. If you don't have discipline they quickly turn from a handy list of all the things you need to do into an extensive catalogue of your failure to get anything done at all.
The thing that made the biggest difference to me was to stop listing things and start putting them into my calendar. Give them an actual slot in your life like any task you have to do at work.
Obviously this still requires the exact kind of discipline but I found it way easier to get things done - both at work and at home - if I'd already set aside a time to get things done. Plus all your time management and task management and TODOs are all in a single application.
It's not perfect but when I started putting my entire life into my calendar - 'extreme calendaring'! - I found that I was more effectively able to manage my time for the drudge tasks that otherwise I'd just put off inevitably. Of course you do end up 'snoozing' items, but if you get in the habit of this meaning 'move it to another free slot' it takes a lot of the boring overhead out of trying to figure out all the things you have left to do.
The downside is you end up feeling a little bit ruled by your phone and computer constantly telling you what to do. But I found this better than the constant background radiation of dread knowing all the things on my TODO list that I kept procrastinating about.
I just use Google Keep. It's not great. In fact, it's utter crap, but I don't need anything too fancy. When I do (e.g. sorting), I weep silently in my corner, clutching my knees tight.
If you like kanban, Kanboard is great. Is a web application but it's simple to install. If you can self-host a webserver, installation is really simple and has both kanban methodology and all the features you pointed out.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
I'm honestly not really sure what in my todo list would be considered critically private, so in my opinion, I'm not too worried about hosted solutions. This also makes it easier to use from multiple devices, and keep them synced. Unless people are really all that fascinated with when I make my shopping lists, when I schedule groups of tasks for work, or whatever, and want to take the trouble to hack in, I hope they have fun being bored out of their skulls.
That being said, I use todoist. I can nest things, I can use templates (which is great as I have a lot of things that have multiple similar tasks, and I can just drop in a CSV to autocreate them) , color code certain topics, etc. The only nitpick I have is not being able to more easily order them my day view, but I can just drag and drop if I need to. The ability to have easy date/repeat parsing goes a long way too.
Second Wunderlist. Multi-platform, all the features I can hope for, great UX, fast and easy to use.
Microsoft To-Do, which is being implemented by the Wunderlist team after they were bought by Microsoft, is slowly, very slowly catching up. Once To-Do implements nested projects / lists, I think I'd be ready to jump ship.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I've only had my schedule.todo.txt file for 19 years now.
ftp, download, edit, upload, done.
grab a quick web site, dropbox, one drive, or any other file hosting service if you don't like ftp as a protocol for transferring files.
start lines with a date stamp or two, and you can sort it in any reasonable text editor, or manually in mere moments.
make it a spreadsheet instead of a text file if you really think you're productive enough to get through that many todo items in the first place.
why are you making it difficult? whatever solution you use, it won't complete the tasks for you. Why does it need to be in active development? You think your todo list is any more complicated than your grandmother's was 50 years ago?
https://taskwarrior.org/
I doubt anything better exists. It is CLI, but third party GUIs are listed on the web site.
Suggestion: Learn the CLI first. Then install the syncing server "Taskserver" once you gets used to its awesome power.
Multi-platform, mobile apps, Android widgets, web version, offline mode, priority, date, category, flexible recurrence, sub-tasks, notes, delegation, powerful, flexible (better on both the latter counts than the anemic Wunderlist).
Only thing wrong: it lies about tasks without a "due time". In fact, such tasks have an unstated time of midnight on the due date. Which means that when you cross a time-zone boundary, and your phone's clock gets a new time zone, all your time-less tasks are hopelessly fucked until you return. Any time-less tasks from the new time zone are then fucked when you do. RTM have known about this for years, will not fix.
In all other respects, it's the best one I've found, after trying dozens.
...pencil and paper. They take effort to use and it takes effort to stick to a plan.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Jut because something hasn't been updated in a long time doesn't mean it's abandonware.... it could just be stable and feature complete.
Until the internet connected platform you are running it on REQUIRES a security or other update that breaks it forever. Old software that is not open source is always one upgrade away from useless. You just won't know which upgrade... but you do know it is coming....
Why invest your time and data in software that is guaranteed to fail? Probably, at that most inconvenient time.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
I use a custom LibreOffice Database with a single table: fields for Header, Priority, DueDate, Done, Body. Simple, but it's been my most critical tool for years; the first thing I open on my desktop and leave there every day.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
You can rather easily host an instance of Nextcloud on rather modest hardware in my experience. It just needs to be able to run apache/nginx, php, and sqlite (you're supposed to use mariadb/mysql but don't absolutely need to if you're just running it for yourself). Activate the tasks app and you're good to go. The entire infrastructure is all open source and you get a whole lot more benefits than just self-hosted tasks.
Everything is accessible with CalDAV so you can use the built-in sync from the iPhone or DAVdroid and OpenTasks on Android. For desktop/laptop you can access it from the web interface or through your preferred groupware software.
Since security is an issue, if you don't want to pay for an SSL certificate you can self-sign one or get one from Let's Encrypt.
I was recently looking for a good todo app as well, turns out what I really needed is actually akin to a project management/list management/mind mapping tool.
I need a mind mapping list with dependencies and resource management. Project management tools are too ridgid (no wonder nothing ever gets done by PM's) and mind mapping tools just become an unmanaged web of semi-interconnected things.
Ideally I would have something that takes speech and associates it with the right "project"
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Same here, I use a text file. But I edit it with vi, you insensitive clod.
Self Serve: CLI server and free local mongo DB integrated with install. Modify to heart's content with JavaScript
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
socket.emit('task.get',{page:{skip:skip,limit:limit,max:max,sort:{date:-1}}},function(e,tasks){ //display
if(tasks){
tasks.forEach(function(task){
});
}
});
Not exactly rocket science, honestly did you seriously ask for software from a 3rd party to handle what you could do on your own if you would just put on your big boy pants? Grow the fuck up you lazy brainless twat and do for yourself instead of being spoon fed like a goddamn giant 6 foot tall baby.
I think the entire problem is that anyone would reach for a 3rd party in the first place for something so banal. How do you live with yourself if you see yourself as so crippled and incapable? Are you a child or a man? Where the hell are your testicles and your ability to create?
Fight club might have been on to something, because right now I want to punch you right in your cornflower blue tie wearing throat for being so utterly incompetant.
... allows me to organize tasks, give them due dates and/or priorities and to easily reorganize.
Use index cards, wrapped with a rubber band; carry them in your pocket.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Horde has a web client and can sync to phones. Does lots of stuff that you probably need done on your phone anyway - email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, etc.
See that "Preview" button?
Wife and I ended up with a habit of taking a picture of the dry erase board on the fridge before going to run errands.
Or asking the person at home to text a picture of it.
It's a mix of old and new school. Not great, not even good, but it mostly works.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
For some reason I forgot about it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I use a text file in the todo.txt format (http://todotxt.org).
I keep the file in Dropbox, and use SimpleTask to edit it on Android.
It's relatively low tech, but I've tried just about everything over the years and I always come back to using a spreadsheet. I use a Google Sheet, but only because it's super convenient to have it "sync" to every computer and device I use, but there's no reason you can't just store an actual spreadsheet (ODT/XLS) file on a server. I have some misgivings about using Google for this, but the utter convenience of it trumps those concerns.
A huge consideration in any sort of task tool /has/ to be the "cost" of the most basic CRUD operations. If it takes 20 seconds to add a quick task or reminder to your todo list, or to mark something as done, etc., then you are almost certainly going to stop using it before too long because the tool will be too much in your way - you need as close to a frictionless experience as possible or it will feel burdensome.
A related issue is that any tool you use /has/ to very closely fit your organizational needs. If you have to adapt too much to the way the tool works or the way the author of the tool conceived its use, then again you will almost certainly stop using that tool before too long. This is especially important because your needs will almost certainly change over time. Sometimes I need to put subtasks into buckets and move tasks between them, other times I just need different areas to track tasks for unrelated projects. Sometimes I need prioritized lists, other times I just need to jot down lists of items whose order is unimportant.
I am always on the lookout for something better, but a spreadsheet comes closest to hitting the sweet spot of flexibility and power at a low cost. It is just free-form enough to make it trivial to add a quick, unofficial or temporary todo list (and columns make it easy to add multiple lists to the same page), while also supporting more structure via tabs, sorting, and text formatting.
Support for formulas is also surprisingly useful - for some lists I want to attach a time estimate or some other cost, and so it's nice to be able to include basic calculations like the total estimated time or the estimated completion time/date and have all of that update automatically. Or in the case of priorities like the OP mentioned, it's a trivial matter to constantly adjust priorities or add new ones and sort the tasks in whatever ways make sense.
My spreadsheet ends up being a combination of my todo lists for work, personal life, etc., my daily/weekly/monthly calendar, and also the thing for tracking goals and progress. Since those things are all sorta related anyway, it ends up being really nice to use a single tool to manage them all.
It has everything
http://saveie6.com/
Not web based but a fantastic GUI based python program:
ETM: Event and Task Manager
http://people.duke.edu/~dgraham/etmtk/
It's an analog system that allows yearly, monthly, weekly planning and daily planning and logging. It also includes an app.
http://bulletjournal.com/compa...
Still haven't found anything as nice to use as Progect for PalmOS
https://progect-manager.en.sof...
There was a Linux desktop version as well that could sync. If someone could port that interface it would be awesome.
I've more or less given up on the self-hosting requirement and have embraced... Google Tasks (somehow buried in the gmail sidebar) with the Gtasks app/widget. It's not ideal, but it's simple enough for long-term stuff, with due dates and alarms.
For short term (daily) stuff, call me old-fashioned, but I still use a pen and small notebook that I carry around. I draw little checkboxes. If a task falls too far behind in the queue, I copy it again on the current page and cross out the old one. If I get tired of doing that, I usually finally get motivated to either complete or drop the task. It works for me :/
Old school dead trees. I've got to physically write the words or it doesn't stick.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
. . notepad.exe or vi if you have linux. I spent a long time writing software the manages todos (https://oggflow.com) (among other things), but nothing beats notepad.exe (or any plain text file editor.) I use the following notations:
- this is an unfinished task (due date: Apr 1 2018)
- this is a subtask (note: don't forget to whatever)
o this is a task I'm currently working
v this is a task I've finished
Nothing beats this for me. I sometimes even do this on paper instead of the computer.
A to do item is the same as a defect, so use defect tracking tools, like Redmine.
I've found nothing better than Outlook tasks. Tons of flexibility in how you use them. Already integrated with Calendar and Email. They're pretty darn good.
I don't respond to AC's.
Write the up requirements, rank them by importance, and submit them for a custom software quote. Keep the UI simple (close to standard HTML) so that you minimize screwy JavaScript dependencies.
Everybody has different ideas for what they want and don't want in schedulers such that no existing product will be a sure fit for you.
Table-ized A.I.
I use radicale (http://radicale.org/) as a calendar/todo list server. It even supports committing all modifications to a git repository if you want to keep history. It supports caldav, so I then access it from thunderbird on the desktop; on android a combo of Davdroid(https://www.davdroid.com/), to add the caldav account, and OpenTasks (https://github.com/dmfs/opentasks/blob/HEAD/README.md), to actually view tasks.
I recommend OpenTasks, its open source, can be downloaded from F-Droid as well. It has nextcloud support so you can host it yourself.
On Github
On Google Play
Org-mode. If you use emacsclient then you can basically access it from anywhere via ssh.
The OP didn't specify collaboration, which is org-mode (and Emacs') only real weak point, although if you control the list and only need others to view it then org-mode will export to HTML and you can slap that on a server or whatever. Emacs and Org-mode are cross-platform too, as regards desktop OSes, and there's a mobile client too although I've not used it so I don't know how good it is.
The time-tracking and reporting is very good too and since you'll be doing all your other work in Emacs too (obviously), it's very easy to put together time sheets and billing etc. as well as seeing where you went over estimates and so on.
It's also very actively developed and supported by about a million tutorial videos, wikis, blogs, and a couple of reddit forums (there's a fairly quiet org-mode board and a much more active Emacs one which tends to draw in the org-mode traffic).
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Http://getontracks.org
If you want it self-hosted, just use todo.txt (http://todotxt.org/ and https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt) and put it on whatever you want to. Use whatever you want to interact with it - CLI, Vim, Sublime, Thunderbird, whatever. Want to use it on a phone but self-hosted? Use SSH, or an editor that's able to connect to whatever method you're using for making files available, or fork one of the clients (e.g. https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-android or https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-ios), or use something that'll download a local copy to your device, let you edit it, then sync it back up.
The "Best" to-do list software is the one that you're actually going to use. Looking for "The one True Task Manager" is just a way to avoid actually doing anything productive.
fencepost
just a little off
I use OSTicket.
It meets all your criteria, and it has a lot of features you probably do not need, which are aimed at large organizations. I use it to track multistep tasks. After a year's use it has not given me any trouble.
Simon's Rock College
I find that the principle value of a computer based todo list is for infrequent tasks that I might otherwise forget -- change the oil in the cars, pay local taxes, run a quarterly blood pressure profile ... Yeah, for a daily todo list, pencil and paper would likely be fine.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
todo.txt is (probably) fine if you are comfortable with priority ordered task management. I prefer date(/time) ordered management as it allows me to schedule tasks like buying birthday presents months or even years in advance and have them pop up when it's time to tackle them. My impression is that is difficult or impossible with todo.txt.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I used to do that, but it was too easy to ignore the notes. Now I create to-do list items on my phone and set reminders at key times. It works better for me. I know too many of us are slaves to our phones, but sadly the truth for me is that a pop up on my phone is far more likely to be noticed and far more effective than a paper note.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Strongly recommend these products! Toodledo - As a to-do list Dynalist - Deep-dive hierarchical planning
I second the old-school methods. I'm using sticky notes on a a4 notebook. The visual representation is very quick to grok what needs doing (particularly when the notes are ordered), the ease of creating a task and moving tasks between categories is unrivalled (IMO) and the satisfaction of peeling a completed one off and chucking it away is unparalleled :)
https://opensource.com/alterna...
With web and iOS and Android. Sign up with Google account.
It's geared toward software development, but it has several display models that could accommodate normal task lists and it's pretty nice to use.
Todo lists can be viewed as bug lists. Redmine is an issue tracker, and works wonderfully for that task. Its main drawback is that it's written in Ruby. But if you don't want to dig into its internals, it is otherwise great software.
If you are thinking about lists with due dates then you're already in trouble. The best method I've found over many years is the Getting Things Done (GTD) method, though you don't need to take it to the extreme like he does in the book. If you follow that method, it'll change the way you think about to-do lists, for the better.
Now at home I do have a system to organize papers by *when* we need to deal with them (think bills, permission slips, registrations, etc.). I made a stack of 183 (=366/2) plastic sleeves held together by 3 big binder rings. I labelled each sleeve with two days (the first is Jan 1 and Jan 2, etc.). Total cost about $50, and well worth it. The top sleeve has today's date on it. When you get a new physical thing that you need to deal with at a later date, you stick it in that date's sleeve. Every 2 days you just flip the top page over. Now you only have relevant stuff on top to deal with.
For other things that just have to be done on a certain day, you just need a regular old calendar app. Google calendar is great because you can share it with your spouse. The GTD method talks about calendars too.
A good companion to GTD is still the whole "time quadrant" chapter from 7 Habits of Highly Effecive People. If your time is in demand, you can't possibly do everything people want of you. The quadrant idea help filter out the crap.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
How about pasting gpg blocks in pastebin like I do? I don't host it but it is nice and secure and sufficiently nerdy you can still use vi and cool math. Maybe you want your list to sing and dance, then don't do this, but happiness - gpg + pastebin
Retro iPhone... Spiral bound notebook... Vintage mechanical pencil... Piano in your house....
I just realized that it's pretty hard to tell a nerd from a hipster now. Do you even own a TV?!?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The todo.text format https://github.com/todotxt/tod... doesn't seem to have a simple date field. The closest I see is a FINISH START pair, each specified as a 10 character YYYY-MM-DD string. That's a lot of typing for a number that can be specified as YYMMDD. It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure I looked at that and decided that the format was intended for someone with more patience than me.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The site serves a Coinhive miner, apparently.
I use a hardbound notebook, one page per day, for to-do lists, meeting notes,and project tracking. It's cheap, portable, doesn't need to be backed up. It helps with day-to-day continuity and is permanent, providing a good future record of what actually happened if I need to CMA. I have found no software that is is convenient and accessible at this, and I have looked.
I recently tried Google Keep after years of Wunderlist, and it suits me better.
My main usage is just monthly reminders to do around the home maintenance (1st Saturday, Car Maintenance, 2nd Yard work, 3rd change filter for heater, clean the Garage, check light bulbs, fire extinguishers and smoke detectors) 4th Other miscellaneous things), and taking the trash out every week.
The one feature I wish some task list would offer would be to remind after a certain amount of time since the last time I completed the task. So If I say remind me in 30 days to give the cat her flea medicine, and I put it off for 2 weeks, I'd like to be reminded 30 days after that, not 16. Instead, if I select the 30 days, it only starts counting for 30 days from the original reminder date.
When I used PalmOS, I used DateBk3/4 from Pimlico Software. The author has kept up with the times and has a feature-rich product for Android: http://www.pimlicosoftware.com...
OneModel (text-only) would work over ssh. You can host it (AGPL) for yourself, and I'd be happy to provide setup tips & answer questions (I'm the author).
It is very stable and the best (at least for my work-style), that I've found. Details & contact info are at the web site in link in the sig.
A Free, fast personal organizer for touch typists: onemodel
http://mytinytodo.net/ has simplicity that appealed to me even after looking at a lot of various host-able task management/organization applications. An online demo link is present on that address. The look-n-feel and simplicity overcame my angst about its no longer being actively maintained.
My absolutely hands down favorite task manager for Android: http://www.tinjasoft.com/ . It allows creating tasks in a tiered tree structure. When I was looking for an application to use years ago, I didn't ever find another that let me create sub-tasks of tasks on my phone. I've kept using it even though I've changed phones several times. I suspect most won't care for the fact that it was pulled from the Play Store because it's name irked *oogl*, but I liked it so much I paid for it on multiple devices before it was pulled, and I would pay for it again...
It is self-hosted and highly responsive. It runs on Java. I'm interested in finding beta testers who are also located in the US.
even though "TodoMVC" shows that a todo app is kind of a cliche, it's interesting how many of the same (incorrect) assumptions so many things make. (Also, many people make idiosyncratic lists of their own requirements, see below ;-)
Table stakes is having good "repeat" events, and some choices for stuff like "Final Friday of Month" or whatever- as well as a crisp "this repeats when task is marked complete vs this repeats when task was dude" I've found some apps that do this pretty well (Appigo Todo - but it hasn't been updated in years) but too many either don't support it or bury it in the UI.
Of course even Appigo makes very-engineery (vs. human-factorsy) presumptions like "everything with a date is more urgent than anything without a due date" and "the more overdue something is, the more urgent it must be" while the opposite is most likely true.
One other thing I haven't seen in an app (at least not one less than $20) - I want categories for my todo items, but I don't want to have to navigate back and forth to view the various categories... way too many apps treat these as separate lists for some unfathomable reasons, so trying to skim both urgent and less urgent stuff (less ugent might be stuff that needs to be done in a certain place, like at home or a store) requires clickng back and forth. I just want a big old list with subcategories inline
I'd also like tracking and charting of how many things I have pending vs get done, so I can do a little self-gamification if i want - but that's not as important as a categorized-but-browsable-as-single-list
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I use a pen and a piece of scratch paper. It works during a loss of power. It doesn't require batteries. Even if exposed to many types of disruptions (including one wash cycle) it can still be read. Updates are simple. When all the to-do items have been executed, it can be easily discarded with little landfill acreage required.
/.ers, for some things you don't need a stinking computer.
If security is an issue, dispose via a paper shredder. Use a cross-cut variety for additional security.
Backups are as simple as your nearest xerox machine. Hosting is via a convenient pocket.
Sheesh,
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
I have been using ActiveInbox for several years now.
https://www.activeinboxhq.com/
It connects to a gmail account. You can set due dates, keep track of items you need to take action on or you are waiting on other people for. It uses the Getting Things Done methodology and has helped me stay on top of my life in an organized fashion. You can even create custom categories. Its worth the money in my opinion. You can use it with extensions for most browsers. They also have apps on ios and android I think.
Probably should have logged in before posting... oops.
Srsly?! At least be nice enough to upvote the parent of a comment like that.... sheesh.
Most apps need an "always on" connection to the web to work correctly - and more often than not are just interface tools to access some datastore on the web. At that point, why not just write a decent JAVASCRIPT app and host it on a web page and save the memory on my phone? There are even datastore solutions for JS now so you can buffer data between your script and the online datastore.
Since we're hawking our own wares.... take a look at this one: tlog the structured logger
Browser based access - self hosted - multi-user - and reminscent of the good old days when we were taught to take notes on 3x5 notecards - one fact per card - but with the added benefit of searchable arbitrary tags. Use it for todo's, project management, shopping lists, or any of a million other things. Fast, responsive, easy. No goofy convoluted interfaces. Type, save, go. Add, delete, edit, search, sort.
The constant need to rewrite the lists - and sort through pages and pages of crossed off items everytime I needed to clean things up was irritating. While I like the sentiment - and for quick short term lists, pencil and paper are VERY helpful - it's very difficult to cross reference lists and tasks and items that are related across several pages. And if you have a need to switch contexts regularly (home, job1, job2, etc,) keeping those lists manageable becomes a nightmare - and you spend almost as much time updating your lists as you do getting things done (ok, a bit of an over exaggeration, but it's kind of like those bosses who want time logs of everything and get ticked off that one of the entrys each days is, "spent 15 minutes filling out time log").
Quick, easy, searchable, flexible, self-hosted, and multi-user these are my requirements.... I ended up rolling my own - and ended up VERY happy with it.
Anyone who can set up a publicly accessible webserver running PHP can download it and give it a try. (Working on a public demo - watch the github README for details).
TLog - Based specifically on your post, I rolled it up into a publicly consumable form (the tool is in production - but there may have been some errors in the "cleanup" as a public project - so feel free to submit bug reports if you have problems - I did a quick test install, so I'm pretty sure it should work out of the box).
If you wish you could put your todo lists and project notes on 3x5 cards and search/sort them by tags and keywords... this is the tool for you. If you're looking for a flashy UI with drag/drop and where you have to click a million things and scroll around here there and everywhere to put things in the right list, use Trello or something similar. If you want something as simple as pencil and paper, but with searching, editing, sorting... this is the tool for you.
It's being actively developed/maintained for my uses (bug reports and issues and feature requests will be considered - but I didn't create it as a public project, so, honestly, as long as it continues to work for me and my purposes, unless you're willing to issue a pull request or front some $$... only things that are "interesting" to my purposes will be further developed). It is also undergoing expansion for use as a general remote logging tool.
In any event, it's simple and effective - easily purposed for "todo" lists and a million other things.
Personally, I would love to have a version of Dynalist or Workflowy that I could host locally, for similar use - tracking tasks and task information, but not out there on the Intertoobz. Anyone know of such a tool?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Frankly Covey Daily Planner which uses the "Getting Things Done" methodology. Technology isn't always the best thing! It works because it's effective, and, when you're working in your planner you're not distracted by anything else be it email, websites, etc...
Your primary objective when planning is to have a singular focus on your tasks to prioritize them and follow-up on them. In my opinion, that is easier to do when you have a singular item devoted to that planning that is physical in nature.
That being said, if you absolutely want something on your computer. Check out Taskwarrior, it's open source and is based on the "Getting Things Done" methodology as well.
ed ~/todo.txt
https://www.tuleap.org/
I use Tuleap and make a Kanban board for each of my categories (Work, Honey-do, Personal, etc.). It runs CentOS 6 or RHEL 6. I run it on CentOS 6 within its own VM. I have it hosted myself as I'm not crazy about putting all of my tasks on some cloud service. After quite a bit of searching this is what I settled on. I've been using it for almost 9 months now and I'm quite happy with it.
https://www.pagico.com/
Used it for quite a few years now, supports Linix, OS & Windows. very responsive dev team.