Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes:
- having your computer alert you to things that come up
- being able to tag notes
- being able to add events to a calendar
- being able to set priority of tasks
- expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda
- being able to add recurring tasks
- full-text search (grepping)
- formatting features (markdown)
Some of the laborious (or, in my opinion, plain unholy) solutions include:
- feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter for the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications
- hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list
- running a script on a VPS to sync notifications
- set up cron job with git commit
- writing post-it notes by hand
I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings (though provisions exist for vim users), but _every_ item on the list above is handled out of the box, or is offered through a free and maintained plugin.
The author of the OP claims to have tried _every_ todo app, and has afterwards moved (regressed?) to writing notes in a plain text file, but there is a path extending from this point that the author has not walked yet. I strongly suggest that, especially for people with a computing or technical background, it is an undisputed upgrade. https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html being the bible, of course.
What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them.
I think reading docs, understanding a new system which someone else has designed, and fitting one's brain into _their_ organisational structure is the hard part. Harder than designing one's own system. It's the reason many don't stick with an off-the-shelf app. Including Org mode.
> What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them
I think this is a vocal minority. Outside of internet comment sections, most everyone I know doesn’t care that much about their todo list software.
The most productive people I ever worked with all had really minimal productivity software. For one person it was a Google doc with nested lists. I know several people who preferred physical sticky notes or 3x5 note cards.
A lot of the people I’ve worked with who built elaborate productivity systems and custom software weren’t all that productive. They seemingly spent as much time doing productivity rituals and rearranging their productivity software stack as they did doing actual work. I count the really heavy Notion users in this category because I’ve recently been pulling my hair out dealing with a couple PMs who think “reorganizing Notion” and adding more rules for Notion is a good use of their time each week.
The most extreme example I remember was the eccentric coworker who was building an AI-powered productivity tool that was supposed to optimize his todo lists and schedule them according to his daily rhythms. He spent so much time working on it that our manager had to remind him daily to stay on track with his real work. He was obsessed with “productivity tooling” but the productivity was secondary.
I think it's actually a selection bias. Who is more likely to spend a lot of time on productivity systems -- a person who is on top of their obligations or a person who is drowning in them. A naturally organized person can do with simple txt, they are already doing okay. A chaotic person can build whatever complex process they wish, they will still fail.
That’s been my personal experience. Spend plenty of time looking at all kind of options to optimize my ir my teams workflow. Then just fallback on pen and paper or some very simple excel spreadsheet. Something thinking about being more productive makes you feel productive.
Sounds similar to playing video games: the rules are simple, so once you understand them, you can feel mighty and powerful simply by accomplishing banal tasks. Makes for a great dopamine rush.
I've got to tell you that I don't think people like gwern.net and andymatuschak.org are procrastinating. A lot of these people are very productive in public. Walking through their zettel-sites is like walking through their minds. The best thing zettel-people have done has been to assume that everything that you're writing that was clearly inspired by something else should reference and direct link that thing. I really think we should caching and redistributing our references too, but the law...
The stuff they, and many smart people like them, are putting in their public notes are sometimes becoming the authoritative bibliographies of little specialized subjects. Their notes get referenced in journal articles.
edit: also, as far as I know, the goal of having a Zettel system is to be as lazy as possible. To have all your notes extremely networked so you can find them pretty quick, you can get surprised about what's in them because old stuff gets surfaced, and you can always find a place to add the thought you're having or the notes you're taking. You save all of that time digging though stuff and filing stuff and losing stuff, which you can use to take a walk in the park or something. To accidentally write a few books just because you had all your notes about some goofy subject you're obsessed with in one place and one day you're like "that must be about a quarter million words."
edit2: also, also, this conversation is very quaint. 10-20 years from now we will all have zettelkasten and we will never look at them at all because we will use AI to interface with them. I'm sure thousands are already in that world, I'm certainly working on getting there.
I spent several years trying to make a custom todo system and ended up back where I started using CalDAV and a basic todo app and calendar. Turns out I was always procrastinating because I didn't want to force myself to adapt to something simple.
I used to use caldav but then stopped because there was once a bug on the server side where I couldn't delete events. The main thing I also don't like is there's no encryption or privacy really from the provider unless you go with a more a less proprietary solution like from an encrypted email provider. The closest I saw was EteSync but it requires special apps, and can include special bugs :)
I also don't need my immediate todo list on a calendar. I organize my to-do list simply as "Immediate", "Future", "Distant future", and then put things under heading. Sometimes I add a due date if there is one.
I just had a few markdown documents in a "todo" folder, eg <work>.md <project1>.md etc. Recently I changed it to org-mode because that's a syntax designed for the purpose. https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/ works excellently.
Never been an emacs user in my life. I spent about 5 minutes perusing https://orgmode.org/org.html and was able to do the same.
Most of my daily agenda is also stored in my employer's Google Workspace. CalDAV is the common protocol for exchanging and storing events. Most of my task entries don't have a due date, I just sort them by priority.
I understand the privacy concerns, I can host a nextcloud in a secure location if I need it.
> Same. I dabbled in the second brain fad for a while, until I realized I already have a first brain.
The way you chose to describe keeping engineering notes as "second brain fad" is telling. It says you mindlessly tried to follow an organization scheme even though you felt no need to adopt an organization scheme.
In other words, you somehow hopped onto a solution searching for a problem you didn't had.
That's perfectly fine. Fads are defined by those who, like you, onboard onto something for all the wrong reasons and without spending any time thinking about what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Of course, those who end up searching for problems that fit a specific solution end up not finding it. That's the fad part.
In the meantime, engineering logs are indeed time tested and a tried-and-true technique. Those who use it to solve problems they have will naturally see their problems solved by them. That's why you see blog posts like this, and people commenting on how they scratched their itch.
Eh, I don't know. I wouldn't paint with such a broad brush here.
Regarding productivity/to-do systems: on one hand I agree -- I know a few people for whom it's clearly a form of procrastination and really just need to get on with it. On the other hand, I myself was one of those people, but in hindsight I just hadn't found the right system yet and had real, legitimate issues with the systems I had been trying. Turns out, YouTrack is damn-near perfect for me. I use it both for work and for my personal life and I really, really love it, even for basic to-do lists. The things I was missing from standard to-do lists was the concept of relationships ("depends on," "blocked by," etc) and the ability to schedule multiple projects together on a Gantt Chart. Put those two features together and what needs to be done when and in what order is pretty much inarguable, which is precisely what helps me stay productive, as looking at a huge list and feeling overwhelmed about what to do next -- especially if I'm trying to be efficient or strategic -- freezes me in my tracks.
Regarding second brains: I completely disagree that they're not useful. My Obsidian vault is genuinely one of the single most useful things I have ever done for myself. There's nothing fancy about it, I don't use most of the features, but having a massive vault full of notes is truly indispensable in knowledge work.
There’s a now quite dated comment from Merlin Mann: "Joining a Facebook group about productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”
It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.
On managers side the equivalent is making fancy JIRA workflows with all the fancy fields so that everyone is informed. Makes people annoyed with extra work and that time could be spent just talking to people to understand what's actually happening.
Exactly. It takes enormous effort to get product and engineering teams to agree on how to use JIRA properly, because everyone has their own ideas around how and what to organize. It's exhausting.
OR to put is differently - everyone has their own needs they are trying to get done. Each one need individually is simple so it is easy to demand that need is added too. Until the whole system for each different need becomes so complex it collapses under its own weight and you move to a new tool. This cycle seems to repeat every 10-15 years at all companies. JIRA is the tool everyone talking about today, but there were many others in the past, and there will be a different one in a few years.
Generally the tool isn't the problem: NEVER put ticket numbers into long term storage as in a few years you won't be able to reference them. That is version control, design documents, and anything else that isn't the ticket system itself. You can talk about who is working on ticket 12345 and the problems they face, but if anything is going to be written down you need to summarize the ticket without a number.
The real takeaway from your story is that it's easy to stay on task when you're interested in the task. Your coworker just didn't care about his work. But if his work was creating a productivity tool then he'd probably love his work and be productive.
So much of it is empty productivity, all prepping for the work but never actually doing it.
Like the old joke about the programmers spouse who died a virgin because every night all the programmer did was sit at the edge of the bed talking about how awesome it was going to be when they finally did it.
I’m very guilty of trying all sorts of productivity software as a form of procrastination. The best one did, in fact, turn out to be index cards and a pencil.
The phhsical copy served an important purpose: it forces you to admit you will never do something and so give up on is. until I die it is safe to assume I will eat 3 meals per day. (It won't be 100% because of sickness but close enough) thus if I'm out of some food I will need a todo list to replace it. However if I never finish the ukuele I've started it won't matter and it is reasonable for me to give up on it.
The term that comes to mind, and one of my favorite concepts, is "progressive disclosure", which is a concept we really ought to be more mindful of.
One of the perks of just-a-text-file-with-a-bunch-of-addons is that it enables progressive disclosure - it takes no learning curve to just get in and use the tool on a basic level, but additional complexity (and power) can be introduced over time.
The problem with a purpose-built app is that there's a minimum level of new concepts to learn before the tool is even minimally useful, and that's a barrier to adoption.
A good example of this in action is something like Markdown. It's just text and will show up fine without you learning anything, but as you pick up more syntax it builds on top - and if you learn some markup syntax but not others, it doesn't prevent you from using the subset you know. There is a clear path to adding new knowledge and ability.
Right, instead of fomo over not using the extra features of utilizing the right flow - people tend to experience the want/need to incrementally increase complexity when using roll-your-own software
What I gather is people really like the blank whiteboard. There’s something about Notepad and Excel, the freedom, the linitlessness, of having a blank canvas and being able to do anything.
Todo software is too opinionated. It’s not flexible enough to allow you to break rules. You can’t move things around in a way that allows you to control visual white space between entries. Everything “is something” (a task, an event) vs just being (text.)
The whole point of org-mode is that it's so malleable, that you can extend it to be whatever you want it to be, much easier than writing your own, ad-hoc, bug-ridden reimplementation of org-mode.
This makes it so infuriating that the top comment on Todo systems is almost invariably "just org-mode lol". Same as remote editing "just TRAMP lol".
I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.
On-topic: TickTick or Todoist with a slimmed-down "Getting Things Done" system works really well. Almost no learning curve, and you get to free up so much mental bandwidth vis a vis remembering things and prioritizing things. And you don't have to do hamfisted tricks to make a 'simple' .txt system work. Bliss.
> I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.
Change your editor and rebuild two decades of optimisation in order to use Emacs, two Emacs tools, and also every other Emacs tool out there. Org Mode, TRAMP, Magit, gptel, eglot, flycheck, elfeed, ERC, Emms, EWW … there are a ton of reasons to use Emacs.
Or you can keep using less-capable systems and being annoyed when folks recommend that you upgrade.
Your argument highlights its own flaw; changing your editor opens up a world of tooling that's certainly adequate for most use cases you can throw at it, but it also requires either discarding or (worse) un-learning all of the tooling that you've learned for your current editor.
For example, I'm perfectly content to use nvim as my primary editor, and this was born out of having to develop for and administer literally tens of thousands of linux servers professionally. I have all the plug-ins and configuration necessary for productivity on my development machines, and when I'm on a remote system ad hoc editing a configuration it already has a built-in lightweight version of the editor I'm already used to.
If I switched to Emacs locally, I'd still have to maintain a working knowledge of vi and context switch when in a remote shell. Changing to Emacs would require more cognitive bandwidth when the whole purpose of "switching for org mode" is to reduce mental load.
> If I switched to Emacs locally, I'd still have to maintain a working knowledge of vi and context switch when in a remote shell.
Even ignoring the possibility of installing Emacs on remote systems, there are still alternatives:
1. You can run remote shells within Emacs, and edit files remotely using TRAMP. When you are editing a remote file, shell commands run from Emacs run on the remote system.
2. You could use Evil, the Emacs implementation of vim. Then you would use the same bindings everywhere.
3. I have been running Emacs locally for literal decades now, but I still remember and use vi frequently, both locally and remotely. It’s really not a problem.
I feel like there must be an editor version of the Blub Paradox.
Agreed on TRAMP. It's great and all, but not worth abandoning your toolong.
org-mode though... It's called Emacs' killer app for a reason. Even if I only used Emacs for org-mode it'd be worth it. And I don't even use the productivity features.
Note taking and task management are two things which everyone has a slightly different style and need. There is no one size fits all and in a group someone will always find some aspect lacking.
If the tool brings you (you, as in: the one building it) joy and gives you a chance to let your mind float, then yes, it is useful. Just not for others. And that's fine.
Exactly. Most people wish they could customize their Todo app or system to their specific preference or need, but have no way of making it happen. Devs can, so they do.
What's interesting is AI is going to change this. Entering a prompt for an app that has all the features you want is already pretty trivial, and will only get better.
Which is why everyone likes spreadsheets. You learn a few formula and styling rules, and you’ve got a hammer for every nail that’s been bothering you (if it was actually a screw…shrugs).
I think in part because larger systems aren't typically custom made to the user's exact workflow (especially because users don't typically have one single workflow anyway!). So not only do I have to get into someone else's mind, but it feels ill-fitted to my own mind. Thus, it's also more inefficient.
Yep, at the risk of repeating what you said: I think this is why so many project management / todo apps exist with their own flavor of the very basics. It's a reflection of those wishes that feel natural to us individually, and it just so happens many of these apps mesh well with our model of thinking and organizing.
This is also why it's so difficult to get teams on the same page about project management in their respective workplaces.
> - having your computer alert you to things that come up
If my own experience is a valid example, alerts are overrated. They don't work for long. I hate getting interrupted by something that actually does not need my attention at that precise moment. I would disable those alerts in no time.
I prefer leaving physical cues in the real world. I think screens are bad UI unless you already spend way too much time in front of them.
The god old in- and out- baskets are great, for example. Or notes on a physical board.
Sometimes when I think of something I want to do in the morning, I just leave an object that does not belong in a place I will definitely have to use in the morning. Seeing that object will remind me of that thought I had just before going to bed. I don't even need to write down what it was.
Physical cues are wonderful! And THAT is what I would want from Augmented Reality (in addition to it no longer requiring cumbersome hardware to wear). A flexible recreation of former physical work places, but using the new flexibility of computer augmentation of what I see. To be able to place digital notes in the real world. To view and touch documents not fixed in a single place in front of me, but anywhere! I put some documents on the left, some on the right, some on the wall, and I move my body around to view and use them.
A purely screen-based app, when I already hate having to stare straight ahead for hours every day just doesn't cut it for me. I want my digital world to be in the real world, and use my entire body, not just very limited arm and hand movements while barely moving the head because the viewport is just one small two-dimensional rectangle in my large reality.
Okay, that went slightly OT, but I made that point because it is relevant for TODOs and most interactions with computers. I think they are much better when tied to our real world, not inside a tiny screen where a lot of stuff is already squeezed in and waiting for our attention, and everything can only be used like a surgeon doing keyhole surgery - indirectly through a tiny port and tools, instead of ones hands. Place TODO hints in the real world on or near appropriate places.
"Little Signals considers new patterns for technology in our daily lives. The six objects in the series keep us in the loop, but softly, moving from the background to foreground as needed.
Each object has its own communication method, like puffs of air or ambient sounds. Additionally, their simple movements and controls bring them to life and respond to changing surroundings and needs."
I've been wanting to build these since the project came out, but never found the time. Has anyone else here built them with success? I'd love to hear your story about how you used them!
I think the key part is to use alerts for stuff you can't ignore. Time to pick up the kids, fifteen minutes to get ready for a meeting, your compile just failed, etc.
Unfortunately every piece of software seems to think its message about some new feature you don't care about and will never use is worth crapping all the main premise of what alerts are for.
I geeked out a bit, after reading another blog post, and used my thermal printer for this. I've been using it for a few weeks now. The little sticky notes it makes are great.
I am starting to collect too many of them though. I kinda like the idea of ops text-file because it is renewed from day to day. I'm still not quite sure how to deal with the items I know I need to get to eventually but that I won't get to today. I'm also not sure how to deal with the pile growing continually.
I have noticed that thermal notes fade relatively quickly. When they do that I have to think about weather I want to reprint them or just throw them out.
The recent HN thread on receipt printers for task tracking had this comment which I wish got some attention and replies:
"The biggest killer for any task tracker I find is an accumulating backlog of items that seem too important to quit but too intractable to make progress on." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270076
(I suspect that’s part of too many browser tabs hanging around, too)
> "The biggest killer for any task tracker I find is an accumulating backlog of items that seem too important to quit but too intractable to make progress on."
I worked in this space for some time. Solving the backlog problem is the holy grail of To-Do systems. I am convinced it is a solvable problem.
The reason there are a bajillion To-Do apps and strategies right now is because a working UX for a digital task-keeping system is still not figured out. To simply put it, no To-Do app 'works' right now. Many of them work well enough for some people to depend on them to some extent.
One of the major reasons for failure is the backlog problem. It's surprisingly difficult, it's at the crossroads of human psychology and the varying real life tasks and responsibilities of real people. Real world is messy.
You'll see To-Do apps "work" out-of-the-box for most people and be hugely beneficial when:
- You see research papers comparing different strategies for To-Do task scheduling, cognitive load of different UI views, etc.
- Popular To-Do apps converge. They'll likely look nothing like the scheduled-checklist style apps of today.
- People start depending on them in managing most areas of their life.
Right now the To-Do app industry is competing on who has the shiniest UI. Very few players are even acknowledging the backlog problem.
Personally, I tried everything under the sun from using a single .txt file to custom-designed software. I have ADHD. Right now the thing that works best is a physical Bullet Journal. It works because of the friction of paper and pen. It mostly solves the accumulating backlog problem.
I should build one that sends me an SMS message instead. So I stumbled on AT+ plus code for programing GSM devices. I have a MTN HUAWEI E303 modem from back in 2016 and I wrote a server using the npm serialport module.
I just need to write a dmenu script that pipes from every 3 git commits.
```txt SMS from :mtn-E303-sms-server
-------------------------
PROJECT: ppc-v.1.0
-------------------------
Commits: 3
New Features Added!
Bugs Squashed
Code Cleaned Up
-------------------------
Total XP: +150
Keep it up!
-------------------------
```
That should keep my monkey brain hooked for a while he he.
I've seen mention of using the dot matrix printers common in restaurant kitchens as an alternative which doesn't fade; they have the added benefit of two-color printing (most do black and red)
Yeah the thermal printer one made the rounds here too, I've been curious to see how it's been going the last couple months for the people that adopted it.
Taks tracking is different from reminders. There’s actually few things that I want to be reminded of, and they either belongs to a calendar (collaborative items) or a reminder app. The separation is blurry and they can all fits within the agenda concept.
As for tasks tracking, it’s all lists. And a daily/weekly/monthly review is enough for me.
And my calender app is used like a list, i can sort it by setting the time for each list item if i really care. I kind of set a reminder for every item i put in, but not everybody wants that for sure.
It really depends on a person. For a neurospicy person like me, pull is stupidly hard but push works better. That's why I'd rather turn my environment and lists into intelligent auto reminders. Otherwise they may as well just not exist.
But if it's AR you can have a cute hamster run up to you and holding an urgent note. Or the hare from Alice in Wonderland. And it can just sit on your desk (virtually) and do cute things while you continue to finish what you were working on. Better than a boring annoying beeping alarm.
We have not even started combining digital an real world, and the last few idea, e.g. from Meta, were devoid of anything useful, showing how little actually useful imagination some super-rich have, putting so many resources into bad or even destructive ideas when sooo much useful stuff needs to happen. We still have this tiny viewport, behind which another world - our digital world - awaits, and people think it's normal that we use this tiny port and awkward indirect devices (mouse) to manipulate things in there. We could do soooo much better soon!
Okay, the access device still is missing. Few people want to wear the current generation of AR devices. But that just shows that neuro-computer interface needs investment on the level of AI, it's not magic (actual neurons are just very complex to work with, never mind finding the right one's to connect to), we could slowly build something there.
Somebody asked what the advantage is of having this computerized instead of actual matter, e.g. physical paper notes. It's all the general computer advantages of course, like sharing stuff. Never mind being able to reorganize everything in an instant.
Imagine having a software project not viewed with one tiny viewport, but like a physical project, even over several rooms. You don't need to click, you go to the place representing some module and physically (virtually physically) take out the code, edit with your fingers. Watch the data flow around you. Have a bunch of flying piranhas show up when something goes wrong. Work with all your body in a real 3D space instead of sitting in a chair all day, all week, all month, all life, watching that vast digital world and/or just your project through that tiny viewport.
Yes, building something new is a lot of effort. And? We have been doing it for a few thousand years, again and again and again. Cities were a lot of work. Irrigation was a lot of work. Farming was a lot of work. Castles were a lot of work. Roads. Aqueducts. International trade. And that was before the even more complex problems of modernity, after the industrial revolution. I don't understand the attitude behind such an argument. I would understand complaints if unwilling people were forced to contribute funds and/or time, but it's not like me or anyone else is forcing you to participate in this idea against your will.
You give a long list of features that I don't want. And then go on to encourage everyone to switch text editors, and adopt a specific plugin that happens to work in the way that you personally like.
As a vim user, this is kind of what I have come to expect from emacs users. Honestly, I'm glad that you've found something that works well for you. But I hope that some day you internalize the fact that other people aren't you, and they shouldn't always be "encouraged" to give up their existing solutions to do things in the way that you've decided is perfect.
Don’t switch text editors, and don’t use a plugin.
For a few years I used Orgmode. I didn’t use Emacs. That is, when I needed to edit text files, I used Vim or macOS TextEdit. I used Orgmode to track my tasks and keep notes. That Emacs was underneath it was purely incidental, and I didn’t use Emacs for anything else. For me, Orgmode was not a plugin. It was the primary software I used, and there was this Emacs thing under it.
Ironically, these days I do actually use Emacs, and I use OmniFocus for tasks, mostly because OmniFocus gets multi-device sync right so it’s worth the price. But don’t hesitate to use Orgmode even if you don’t want Emacs otherwise.
org-mode is basically better Markdown with a bunch of automated things that don't get in your way unless you specifically put them in there.
The only unwanted feature you're likely to encounter is automatic sub/superscript conversion, and that's documented and easy to turn off.
I'm not recommending org-mode. I personally don't care if you use org-mode or not. I never understood that mentality. But the type of software you're describing is crap, and org-mode doesn't fall into that category.
I think the OP is far from saying what you are implying. He is not advocating for changing text editor or installing any plugins. Just recommends trying out org mode. I think is very valid. I’ve known many many people (in the order of hundreds) that use vi for editing in general but emacs for other tasks, e.g. org mode, sbcl repl, etc. I think the suggestion ist just to give org mode a try. No need to feel offended or pushed to leave your favorite editor. At the end, is all about personal preference.
I see this just as someone being genuinely enthusiastic about their own approach, and trying to convince people out of that enthusiasm, to make them experience the same happiness they are getting from it.
I think most of us here are old enough to know not to take recommendations from some dude on the internet as obligations, which, for me, just leaves the enthusiasm between the lines.
I think the reason people use text file + "snowflake software" is that they want just the structure (constraints) they want, and no more. BTW, what people want changes over time and by circumstance.
org mode has a lot of features, including customizability, but imposes some heavy constraints as well. By its nature it's only going to satisfy a sliver of the people who have come around to text file.
It's good you linked that document, though. At a glance it gives a fair idea of what you'd be buying in to.
To add a different perspective, I love Emacs Org-mode for note taking but gave up on it for task management after a couple of years. Not because the tool is inadequate – my attempts at Todoist or Taskwarrior didn’t fare any better – but because the GTD-style workflow just doesn’t fit my personality.
I’ve now happily used a paper-based bullet journal instead, and am about to transition to a Rocketbook for this use.
The problem is that a GTD-style workflow requires a lot of discipline to stick to daily/weekly reviews, where you prune or reschedule tasks, and it requires you to be strict about deleting tasks you’ll never do. If not, you just get an endlessly growing list of stale tasks, and for me personally the list becomes so associated with guilt and stress that I just burn out and get paralyzed unless I regularly throw it all out and start from scratch. (Is "TODO bankruptcy" a thing?)
Surprisingly, this led me to the conclusion that being able to forget tasks is crucial for me to remain focused, productive, and mentally stable. Being able to start each day with a blank page, write or transfer tasks that I can realistically do today, and letting the unimportant ones silently disappear on old pages without having to consciously delete them, somehow works better for me.
For notes however, Org-mode is great. I’ve found great value in rediscovering old ideas and knowledge 5 years later, whereas finding 5 year old undone tasks is rarely something I want.
I found Reminders to be unreliable and foolishly designed. It only works for must-do tasks. It uses repeating-period instead of time-since, so it can't handle repeating tasks that are optional. If you fail to mark off a repeating task, the next instances stack up and crash the notification cycle.
I'm familiar with the pain point you're describing. In general, I would say a recurring calendar event is a better solution for your particular preferences. Personally my mental model is that the act of deciding to not do an optional task constitutes completion of the reminder for that occurrence. And if I forget or deprioritize that decision, the reminder still hangs out in my Today list until I do as a mitigation.
I still use my calendar for routine time-window reminders. But when I tried timeboxing tasks for after work, those don't stick because my daily work hours can shift by as much as 2 hours, depending on how many pre-work-hours meetings I have that day.
I'm a big fan of automation, so half of the fun with that project is setting it all up.
If you work at an office, you can set your reminders to be location-based with daily recurrence so that you get reminded when you leave the office or arrive home. I imagine you can also integrate Reminders with IFTT if you want a "Done with Work" button on your phone if you WFH.
Ironically the Reminders app sucks at reminding. I use the Clock app for my todo list; it makes a pretty loud noise pretty reliably, which makes it pretty good for reminders.
Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app. For a todo there is no now, it is pick the best thing todo next. I need to be interupted for my dentist appointment. However I don't need to be interupted to buy milk, I need a remineer when I'm at the store anyway to also get milk. If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work.
Certain tasks have deadlines - can you really have one of those without some concept of time? Creating a calendar entry for those doesn’t make any sense to me - they are not events happening at a point in time with a given duration, but things that need to be done BEFORE said point in time.
A reminder makes no sense because while there is a deadline there isn't a must do now time. What they need is a regular review so as you go about your day it is still fresh, and maybe in a plan. Often those are things that can be done when you have a free moment as well.
Hence scheduling, which leads to agendas, the midway point between a calendar and Todo list.
I used to use an org agenda view for this, now I just use a caldav calendar and trillium. In the morning, I check my to-do list, which has been being created for this day over the last couple weeks or months, I look at my agenda to see what meetings or appointments I have, and I slot todos in between them. I might even be doing so for the whole week or month, moving tasks around as needed. I take a look at my week and month todos and see that something is due in two days so slot it in for today. Similar to how a project manager might do with sprints and tickets I guess.
I think the critical aspect of any functional Todo system is active review, at least daily if not more so, plus regular weekly and monthly cleanups.
I don't know that app, but I don't want a specific location - milk can be had at hundreds of different stores in my town. While it isn't all the same there are only about 4 different suppliers to all those stores.
> Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app.
Ehh. The thing with a calendar "reminder" is that calendar apps assume that any such reminder is irrelevant once the time you set for the reminder goes by. They exist to remind you that some time-sensitive real-world event is starting, in time to be ready for it; but once that event has ended, you must have either done it or missed it — so either way, the calendar forgets about it.
Whereas a reminder / "todo with a date" object in a reminder/todo app, makes a different assumption: that you still need to do the thing, even if you didn't interact with the reminder when it first popped up. So the reminder is still there, glowing brightly, and often pops back up with further notifications, until you complete it.
Three examples from my own calendar of the type of reminder I'm talking about here, if you can't yet picture what I mean:
• It's time to replace the filter in my cat's water fountain [and take apart and scrub all the parts of the fountain while I'm at it.] (This isn't urgent — there's no particular need to do it exactly when I'm reminded of it — but it grows more urgent the longer it is left undone. The persistence of the reminder helps me to remember to do it, if I was busy when I first saw it.)
• I've gotta either pick the specific meals going into my meal-box subscription service box by midnight Saturday, or skip the week (or the service will pick randomly for me, giving me things I really don't want to eat, and I'll torture myself trying to motivate myself to cook those meals anyway, because I don't want to waste money/food.) I set this one to go off with two explicit "pre-notifications" twice — once at 7PM on Thursday, and again at 9PM on Friday. It then goes off again on its own, a little bit before midnight, and that's the final warning. (And, of course, if I check it off before then, the other notifications associated with that instance of the reminder won't fire.) I also usually just leave the Friday 9PM one unacknowledged + open as a toast on my computer until I've picked it, to ensure I won't get distracted and forget about it.
• Pay my credit card bill. (I have monthly autopay set up, but my understanding is that they still get to charge some minimal amount of interest for any charge that remains posted + not paid down for 21 days. So I set a reminder to pay the card down every 14 days. Again, not urgent per se — the worst that happens is that the 30-day autopay kicks in. But I find it a convenient time to review the last 14 days of charges for any strange activity; and the longer I go without doing that, the more of a schlep that starts to feel like — so biweekly is actually good here.
To be clear, I had all three of these set up as calendar events before — and they didn't work very well that way! Repeating reminders have much better semantics here.
Being pedantic, based on your example, I think the Reminders app does a good job at reminding, but a bad job at alerting. But that’s because a reminder to me is a gentle concept.
I believe the Reminders app, when used alongside Notes and Calendar, is becoming a strong competitor in the productivity space. One feature I'd love to see added is persistent nudging reminders that keep alerting you until you manually dismiss them.
Things 3 is another excellent third-party option in this category. Together, these apps form my essential productivity stack. I honestly can't function without them.
Yeah I think this is a result of the attention economy, there are 75 million notifications per day that someone somewhere wants to push in your face so we've gotten really good at cutting them out. But the counter-swing is also too big and now critical things like calendars and reminders are buried in a list we never look at.
I agree it would be nice to have more alarm-like notification options. Flagging, setting as high priority, and assigning a date/time and getting in the habit of checking the Today category regularly all help mitigate; a bug-me-until-this-is-done feature would be a welcome alternative. (I will note that the GP's emacs stack isn't even close to offering native mobile push notifications, to state the obvious.)
Reminders.app does a great job when I want create lists and inventories! I use it for groceries and webpages too. For example, I've sent many of the Emacs-related links to my Emacs list in Reminders, where I know I'll be able to find them the next time I forget Gall's Law and look for a more-complex system to replace my current one: writing things down; thinking about what I've written; redrafting; and repeating.
Most of this is solved by: todo list in one file. One list. Use markdown. Try Obsidian. Read Randy Pausch last lecture. Look at his todo list. Copy that. Use a calendar if it is time sensitive. Look at your todo list often. Want to be fancy? Have an inbox file that is also a list. Your backlog is stuff that moves down to priorities other than 1. Try the Covey quadrants for your task priorities. Don’t over complicate this.
You can make an art form out of procrastinating on real tasks to create the most perfect todo system ever. We got LLMs now. It can query your text file, categorize, etc.
Too many programmers think they have a unique use case without considering that maybe the existing projects are bloated for a reason. Then they end up just recreating the same bloat.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Gall's Law almost always deserves to be repeated and higher up in HN threads, and this is another instance where I wish I could upvote more than once.
Here, Gall's Law provides an accurate explanation for why so many of us have returned to paper, pencil, and brain cells. It is also apropos of your comment's sibling comment regarding how tech folks frequently and mistakenly believe that they can improve on a solution that has worked well for thousands of years of human civilization (e.g., paper + writing instrument + human thought) in just a few weeks. For all the talk of Emacs's being relatively ancient and mature software, handwriting is orders of magnitude more mature and sanded down.
With software to "solve" the problems of thinking, remembering, linking ideas, or deciding what to do … now you have two problems, as we say.
Do I need to start living in Emacs to get these benefits? Or are you saying I can use Emacs as my todo list app, close it after writing a todo, and have it pop up notifications?
Yes, with a little setup. But never forget that org-mode is the gateway drug of Emacs.
You start using it for the agenda and TODO lists, learn it has spreadsheet functionality that ties in with the arbitrary-precision calculator, start taking notes and exporting them to PDF via LaTeX, writing reports in it with your company letterhead, merging your contacts list, migrating your email into Emacs, and next thing you know you find yourself fifteen pairs of parentheses deep in a custom elisp function that tweaks the date format for that one manager that insists on yy/dd/mm whenever you send your weekly progress report.
> who then build quite a lot of snowflake software
So close! People building snowflake software is a consequence of it not being a generalizable problem, not the cause of it. Everyone organizes their notes/todos differently, and though the variations may seem slight, they are best solved by a blunt and unopinionated tool.
> It takes some time to get used to
Non-starter. A text file is the hammer of the digital world
Todoist does all of that and more, basically any reminders app does most of that.
Just a counterpoint to say, many of us look for a todo app, use one of the many great ones on the market and then don't write blog posts about it. It's worth just trying one of the many existing apps instead of building your own.
I think one thing that is missing from emacs/org-mode is the mobile integration. There are apps that handle some features of org-mode on mobile, but probably missing features of the desktop version. Currently, I manage my notes only on the desktop because I haven't found a good companion on mobile.
If you have Android, emacs is now officially supported on Android (https://f-droid.org/packages/org.gnu.emacs). Along with https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard, it turns out to be a pretty usable (assuming you are the type that is okay working with emacs in general). I am now in search of a simple way to sync notes between my phone and computer (without using Big Tech solutions).
Org mode is nice, but ultimately you are adapting someone else's approach. The best is making your own, for which you know all features and which works exactly as you want it to work.
I use a plain text app on phone for TODOs. I hate notifications, do not use full text search.
I have been using it for 5 years now and I hate the notes apps with their clunky buttons, limiting software, where you cannot write or do what you want to.
I see apps often as regressions toward freedom of note apps.
You do understand that org-mode is plain text, yes?
You are basically losing nothing, if you write an org mode file. You don't even have to use org syntax. The point is you can and you can do things faster, if you do. Like inserting a new heading, or changing the order of text blocks, or inserting a quote or a table.
> I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode.
You can even do that, _and_ do stuff from your unholy list.
I have my org folder synced via syncthing to every device I care about. I used to do automated git commits on that folder, but eventually stopped it years ago as commit messages like "daily automated commit" are not better than regular backups.
But thanks to LLMs I went back to that - now I have a systemd timer which calls a script that calls Emacs (because I have all the LLM bindings set up in there already) with the git diff to generate a commit message. That does a pretty good job at summarising my changes.
I think using org mode is way overkill. If someone wants to do pros tastination dressed up as emacs-gardening, it may be a good option.
The best todo app ideally should be a smartphone app, which you'd have always with you. I think Microsoft Todo is a good choice for Android. It is mostly functional, free of cost and does not have any ads.
Combining the feel of plain text with real structure is also exactly why we're building an "IDE but for tasks/notes" [1].
With structured apps (task managers, outliners) you lose the illusion of editing plain text, but plain text alone lacks things like structure, links, dates, and collaboration. We've spent the last few years building an editor completely from scratch to keep the ease of text editing while adding planning and structure.
There's a few bits of information missing on the website that is critical to some people:
- What platforms are supported?
- What is the business model?
- Does the editor support customizable key bindings? Are there presets for Emacs, vi, or others?
I feel the same way. I landed on Evernote rather than org-mode, but it similarly provides all these features out of the box, while letting me largely customize my setup. (I basically do GTD with a notebook for each priority level.)
Was regretting it a bit in the 2020-2023 range when Evernote was going downhill, but it's improved a fair amount since the acquisition. Almost (but not quite) to the point where I'd recommend it to others again.
What I would recommend is spending the time to learn some system beyond just a text file. I've ultimately found it well worth it, to the extent that I couldn't imagine going back now. It is definitely an investment up front though.
So my current pet project is a to-do system with an app that you can look at, edit, or complete tasks in. But I have both a fully agentic interface and simpler LLM powered inputs.
I'm really enjoying it. I think it is a good example of how to leverage LLMs to reduce drudgery.
Things I can do now:
- take a picture of a notice like a license renewal and a task is created and automatically filled with due dates and information extracted from the image and likely from online searches.
- turn a design document into a reasonable task plan.
- create classified and researched tasks with a sentence.
I'm just getting started on it but it already is kind of feature complete. Programmed with Claude Code, about 20k lines.
The key I think is to have something as easy to input as a text file, because it applies intelligence to remove friction.
I'm in the process of doing most of this via Claude check-ins, using a combination of MCP, Obsidian, and Things. Obsidian is the memory system, context info, and archive, while Things hosts the active lists and desktop widgets. It doesn't work perfectly or even that well, but it's coming along.
I still like to implement my own ideas, especially in fun languages like Erlang and Perl. I'm glad I can program, because personal programming in the small is fertile ground and tremendously useful. For starters, this entire site is generated by 269 lines of commented Perl, including the archives and the atom feed (and those 269 lines also include some HTML templates). Why? Because it was pleasant and easy, and I don't have to fight with the formatting and configuration issues of other software. Writing concise to-the-purpose solutions is a primary reason for programming in the twenty-first century.
Not so fast my dear, just this year I finally adopted the default home-directory structure of my linux distro (Document, Pictures, Music, Video, etc.) in my workflow. I'm not ready for more big obvious changes like this. ;)
Am i the only one to generally find those directories getting in the way ? I have very few videos or music, or even images worth storing as images and not related to other documents. Downloads and documents might be useful but then, documents is almost everything that is not online so why not put it in $HOME. And I don't like capitalized folders but that's me.
I 'hated' this too for a long time, but I finally gave in. It now also matches my backup workflow perfectly. And now I don't have to tweak that much after installing a new distro. Sometimes my tools have to adapt to me, sometimes I adapt a little to my tools.
I have used emacs for more than 30 years, use it as a primary code editor now, and I have never found use of org-mode, despite a few attempts, to become a lasting habit. Of the list of integrations provided here, I only see alert and calendar support being of interest (but because of this, I may give org-mode one more try).
Im perfectly happy with markdown in vscode. Right next to my work and with a search function. I guess I could do txt but the syntax highlighting makes things a bit more readable.
I think it works for me because it's mostly just a working memory. I virtually never visit my notes again. It is not some personal knowledge base nor project tracker.
Same and if I need to share a bit often times I just highlight it and tell an LLM to blast out a markdown table, render preview and screenshot it to someone.
This satisfied me for awhile, eventually though I wanted a more comprehensive solution to record todo notes alongside thoughts and project ideas, so I escaped my IDE and got a simple obsidian setup going. I can definitely recommend
I think a lot of your examples demonstrate the power and low learning curve of a single text file as an organizing tool.
Org mode is one direction you could take your text file in. Feeding your text file into an LLM or committing it to git or formatting with Markdown are others. But starting with a plain text file doesn’t commit you to any of those paths.
As somone who uses text and paper for todos, happily for years now after spending equally much time procrastinating in search of the perfect task management system I will now do a half-ironic take on answering your points:
> having your computer alert you to things that come up
That's what the calendar or the alarm is for
> being able to tag notes
Write #tag and then grep for it. Not that hard
> being able to add events to a calendar
A event isn't a todo, you add it to the calendar instead
> being able to set priority of tasks
Cut it and paste it up to the top or write "IMPORTANT". If you have so many tasks that you need something better, you probably spend too much time organizing your todos and should start working
> expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda
If your todo lists are so long thst you cant read them in 30 seconds they are too long. Split them up and mive them to the relevant project.
> being able to add recurring tasks
Just leave it in the list and add a questionmark at the end. If it is time critical add it to the calendar
> full-text search (grepping)
Yeah, good observation you can grep text pretty fine. If you're annoyed by having to type the filename that is a shell oneliner
- formatting features (markdown)
You can use markdown in text, it is just more or less useless wothout rendering. But I don't see how formatting leads to more productivity
> feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter out the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications
Yeah ok, that one is bad.
> hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list
Get a decent texteditor where you can press modifiers + arrow keys to move lines. Works pretty well. In fact better/faster than dragging with your mouse.
> running a script on a VPS to sync notifications
No need to do that, you have a calendar
> set up cron job with git commit
If you need your todos in a git you either work at a nuclear facility, a space station or you take yourself too seriously
> writing post-it notes by hand
What else would you use, a typewriter? Just kidding. Paper has undeniable strengths for the todo space. It is there and you don't have to remember to open it. Rewriting your todos is doubling as both checking their state, refreshing your memory and cleaning them up. Paper can be read without electricity and by other people without any form of setup. People know how to use it without onboarding. Hackers cannot use a flaw in the the paper has been made to gwin remote code execution (they can however potentially use photographs of paper to do so).
I am not kidding, one of the best work-handoffs I ever had was entirely organized via emails and post its. It worked flawlessly.
And I say that as someone who has spent days on todo systems, task warrior and the likes. Everybody has their own needs, but very often boring and pragmatic wins.
Very well said. People here are interested in poking holes in things, instead of actually being productive. Again, we should just look at what actually productive people tend to do, which in my experience is generally to just use whatever works and not spend too much time thinking about optimising todo systems.
How about having a synced and editable version of your to-do list on all your devices, including mobile? I've found that to be the main filter for note taking setups. You seem to suggest that there's an emacs plug-in that can handle that?
There are apps for iOS that will read .org files and allow you to edit them and include the ability to sync with iCloud. beorg is one of them. I'm not sure about Android, but I have to imagine they exist there as well.
I truly just use a plain .txt file. Every "add-on" and layer beyond the .txt happens to run on a complex wetware device that came built-in with my body.
>Every "add-on" and layer beyond the .txt happens to run on a complex wetware device that came built-in with my body.
He was addressing the comments such as mine that determined a txt file without any runtime software layered on was not enough for some people. The built-in wetware was inadequate.
Apparently, you are one of the lucky ones that can just use a txt file. For others, they need a little more support apparatus ("bicycle for the mind") enabled by some type of active app that complements the TODO.txt file.
If people want an excellent todo list system that's essentially infinitely customizable but still approachable for basic productivity, org mode is good.
The mobile experience is somewhat lacking but good enough with Orgzly on Android.
However with org mode I had the same issue I had with all my to-do list systems, wherein I tended to record too many todos. I needed granular prioritization and gtd contexts and scheduled and deadlines and repeaters to keep track of it all. I needed to install org super agenda to get useful views.
I switched to trillium and nuked 90% of my todos in the migration as out of date or just kinda vague things that'd be nice to do and chucked those into a future projects note. Trillium's to-do UX is slightly better than a markdown document because you can click to check the boxes, that's about it. It's high friction. I have to go to today's note, go to the Todo section, and then put my to-do in the list. Or the week Todo section, or month or year.
What I've found is now I actually do all my to-dos because now they're all actually worth doing. I'm not scrabbling down every single thing and cluttering up my list.
It's a portable Lisp environment that just happens to have an editor as its default application. I know it's advertised as an editor, but that's like saying a web browser is a website viewer.
There is photo scanning/camera software out there on phones that detects edges of documents/regions, then crops and deskews the image. My Xiaomi Redmi Turbo 3's camera app has a "document" mode that does that. I also know of other software (for example, Paperless Mobile — though it is not its primary feature) that does that.
I think this would be an improvement to the OP's process: Print a thick black rectangle sized such that the contour's inner edge is slightly larger than the CD. Use the phone to take a picture and deskew it - the scanner should "catch" on the inner contour. Repeat with all other CDs. Finally, load the images onto the computer and run batch processing on them using your raster image editor to trim whitespace. This way, you'd keep manual labour to a minimum.
It’s also stock on iOS, albeit buried in the Files app under More (3 dots in top right)>Scan Documents. It’s especially useful for multi-page documents.
This comment is the only hit in Google and Baidu for fragments of the poems. Z-Library also couldn't match anything to a book via full-text search. Furthermore, the translation has issues. For example:
>化驚腸內舞
>In a flash it’s startled -- inside it dances like starlight.
Where did "flash" (or "in a flash") or "starlight" come from? Neither appear in the line. You could maybe translate the line as 消化，它受惊而在场内飞舞: "digested, it is startled and dances in the intestines (~stomach)". But you generally can't tell with Classical Chinese without contextual research, since characters have multiple meanings.
I'll add the sources to the comments in a future update. I need to come up with a good way to show them in the UI as some quotes can have dozens of sources (maybe some ranking and only showing the top 3).
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