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?
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
""If emacs is the kitchen sink, emacs is the rest of the house.""
sounds a little recursive
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