Todoist, Omnifocus and Things 3 review

I’ve been playing with various task managers / personal life management tools. These are some of my notes and thoughts.

Todoist review

Pro:

• Filters (custom perspectives)
• Smart task editor when adding tasks
• Great web interface and decent mobile apps
• Super flexible recurrence (“every third…”)

Cons:

• No review: discovering stale tasks is fairly low
• No way of marking tasks as “ready” or “available” unless you go into filters and tags religiously
• No postponing/deferring of tasks
• No scheduling of tasks

Omnifocus review

Pro:

• Projects and subprojects
• Tasks and subtasks
• Deferring of tasks until date
• “Waiting” tag to mark tasks as currently unavailable
• Built-in Review
• Custom perspectives (pro version)
• Projects and tasks can be marked as “parallel” or “sequential” so that only one tag is “ready”
• Possible to create views with tasks that are currently ready to pick up

Cons:

• Mac only
• Pricy (10/m, 99/y or pricy app one-time purchases (major version upgrades extra))
• No/crappy and expensive (subscription) web interface
  • edit: It works reasonably okay, it’s just not as slick in terms of UX as the competition’s
• Not extremely flexible recurrence like Todoist
• Interface is quite click-heavy (maybe I don’t know the shortcuts yet) – missing Todoist’s quick-entry with “@foo +foo due:date” inline
• Tags are all the same colour
• Edit: synchronizing between the various clients is quite slow. Sometimes it just breaks and you’re starting at the app for a few minutes.

Things review (Things on Mac)

I’ve not played with Things for as long. I’ve quickly realised that it’s mainly a lot like Todoist.

Pro:

• Simple and clean look
• Areas and projects (which are tasks)
• Subtasks
• Scheduling ability

Con:

• Mac only
• No web interface
• Pricy (desktop: 50, ipad: 20, iphone: 10)
• No deferring of tasks
• No blocking of tasks as “unavailable”
• No review option built-in
• No subprojects; projects are intended to be completable
• No custom perspectives / filters