evaluating todo systems

summary

The ideal todo list is the one you always have with you and, no matter what happens, you can’t lose. If you’re looking to manage projects (which todo lists are kinda projects), Trello is great. If you just need a todo list that works everywhere, Tick Tick is a sharp, simple todo list app that runs in the browser and on all mobile phone/tablet flavors.

criteria

Solutions to managing todo and tasks items were considered along two dimensions:

• Reliability: is the tool readily available, and what does it take to lose data?
• Collaboration: Is it a tool you use by yourself, or can you collaborate with friends?

recommendation: tick tick

For task tracking, Tick Tick is an excellent choice. It can be accessed from any computer via a web browser, and can be accessed on all flavors of mobile device. As icing on the cake, it supports shared task lists, so that you can coordinate work with friends, family, and colleagues.

  quadrantChart
    title choosing a todo system
    x-axis solo use --> collaborative
    y-axis unreliable --> reliable
    %% quadrant-1 We should expand
    %% quadrant-2 Need to promote
    %% quadrant-3 Re-evaluate
    %% quadrant-4 May be improved
    Tick Tick: [0.68, 0.8] color: #f1c928, radius: 8
    Trello: [0.9, 0.85]
    Notebook: [0.1, 0.9]
    Google Docs: [0.9, 0.95]
    Outlook Tasks: [0.2, 0.25]
    Whiteboard: [0.8, 0.2]

simple interface

Tick Tick has a simple interface. It has an inbox where items can be added quickly, or they can be added to any number of project-specific lists. In the screenshot below, we see my “Work” list, where the task “pick up milk” has some additional notes attached to it. Recently completed tasks are also visible, but grayed out.

However, Tick Tick is not simplistic. There are labels (allowing for categorization and color coding), features for adding notes by voice, notifications, multiple ways to visualize the tasks (lists, timeline, etc.), integration with calendar systems (Google, Office 365, and others), and more.

browser and mobile

Tick Tick is available in the web browser on the desktop, and there are apps for both Android and iPhone/iPad.

The fact that Tick Tick is available in a web browser is important for one simple reason: any computer can be used to get to your to do list. Did your computer catch on fire? Use another computer. Did your hard drive fail, or were you hit by a virus? Use another computer.

The fact that lists can easily be accessed (in sync, automatically) between computer and phone also means that you never have to be away from the ability to check or update your tasks.

collaboration

Are you trying to coordinate activity between multiple people? Are there a set of tasks that need to happen for a project, retreat, or perhaps every week/month that you want a group of people to help you finish?

Lists in Tick Tick can be shared amongst a group. At no point does anyone get out of sync on the work that remains, or the work that has been completed.

alternatives

trello

Trello is in the category of “kanban”-style, or “project board” work management systems. Trello shines for work that goes through phases (from “idea” to being in a “to do” list to being “in progress”), and when you need to coordinate that work amongst a team or teams regularly.

When you outgrow simple todo lists, Trello is the next step.

a notebook

It is often the case that a physical notebook is the simplest and most reliable way to keep track of things that need to be done. There are many articles online to help you think about how to use the notebook effectively.

They’re cheap, come in lots of colors, and short of leaving them somewhere, they’re robust. Not good for collaboration, but the humble notebook cannot be all things to all people.

• My GTD “Get Things Done” Moleskine Setup
• Bullet journal, the bullet journal reddit…
• Using notebooks for todos

google docs

Although lacking in many features, a simple Google Doc can serve as a powerful todo list manager. It works in the browser on all computers, is easy to use to collaborate with others, and you are unlikely to ever lose the data.

It is, arguably, the most robust and collaborative tool you could choose from this list, but it is not really a todo system/application. That said, you can find many templates and approaches to using both GDocs and Google Sheets for task tracking and todo management.

• Google todo list template
• Using GDocs/Sheets for productivity
• Two ways to create a todo list in GDocs

outlook tasks

Outlook Tasks are rated as unreliable and non-collaborative for two reasons:

1. They live on the computer. If you have an Office 365 account, they should be synchronized elsewhere. But, if you are using them on your own, then they might only live on the machine you have Outlook installed on. This means it is hard to collaborate with others on the tasklist.
2. They live on the computer. This means that their reliability is as reliable as your backup practices.

A separate evaluation regarding backup strategies would be needed to explore how to improve the reliability of Outlook Tasks. At the least, you should be comfortable with backing up your computer; for example, if you have a Mac, the Apple Support article on how to back up your Mac is required reading. If you have an external drive, you would want to read about Time Machine. You might have iCloud (which might back things up automatically), or you might choose to use a service like Backblaze to back up your machine.

The point here is that any solution that lives only on your computer is fundamentally unreliable. It can’t easily be shared to your phone, you can’t collaborate with others on tasking, and you can easily lose everything in your task tracker.

conclusion

If you’re collaborating with a team on projects, I consider Trello and other task boards to be a gold standard. It makes it easy to keep different projects seoparate, to work with others on those projects, and keep track of complex work at every stage, from idea to completion.

If you’re looking to track tasks for yourself, and maybe occasionally with a few others, Tick Tick is an excellent todo list manager. The free tier is incredibly feature-rich. It is available anywhere you have a web browser, and there are apps for iPhone and Android. (I’m personally a fan of the habit tracking feature.)

If you’re looking to keep things simple, a plain old notebook can go a long way. If you want the resiliency of the cloud, using GDocs or similar to create todo lists in a document gets you reliability and the ability to share without strictly learning a new tool. If you want to use a tool that lives on your local computer, then the question of how robust it is comes down to your own data management, backup, and recovery practices.

musical postlude

They Might Be Giants have been around for a long time. From their first album, Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head, with the (somewhat) relevant lyric: “Memo to myself: do the dumb things I gotta do; touch the puppet head.”