Product review: todoist

I’ve been using Todoist for a few months. It’s not bad!

What I like

  1. Since there’s a mobile app and a web interface, it is really likely I’ll get stuff stored in there.
  2. Nearly no extra data is required to store a task. I just can just put “bananas” in a new task’s title and hit save. Again, this increases the likelihood I’m actually going to use the product. If a bunch of fields were required and didn’t have defaults, I might put off using the app.
  3. The alexa interface is fun. I can say “alexa add to my todo list …” and then add a line. I can also have alexa read back my to-do list.
  4. I like how projects and tasks can both be nested. I like how a task only belongs to one project, but can have many labels on it. And I like the priority feature.

What isn’t perfect

  1. There’s no obvious way to track the estimated size / difficulty / required work for a task. In other words, I can’t mark a task as “easy” or “really tricky” and then rank by that.
  2. Linking to tasks isn’t fun or easy. Links look like this:
    https://todoist.com/showTask?id=2179109422

    I found that link buried behind two mouse clicks. Meanwhile, github issues start at #1 in each project and increment up from there. That is so much nicer! I can easily tell somebody “hey look up task XYZ-432” but I can’t remember ten digits!

  3. A task has a title, but I want another field where I can add more description of the task. For example, some times, I want to add add links to screenshots, or blog posts with discussions, etc.
  4. Tasks need more statuses, like “in progress” and “will not do this”. Right now, as far as I can tell, a task is either not finished or finished or deleted. I need more statuses!
  5. There’s not an easy way to put tasks in order relative to each other. It is possible to set priority levels on tasks, but if three tasks are all at the same priority level, it isn’t easy to put them in a particular order.
  6. This is kind of complex, and expects a lot from a single application, but there a lot of times that I want to store stuff related to a project that aren’t to-do entries. For example, say I have a conversation with a client. We probably talked about a bunch of things:
    • near-term to-do items
    • stuff that would be nice, but not immediately planned
    • background information about the project

    The last point doesn’t fit that well into the todoist model!

  7. You can’t (as far as I can tell) upload attachments to tasks. Update! You can, but you have to add them as comments!
  8. There’s a developer API, but not an official CLI program. Instead, there’s a bunch of half-finished CLI programs on github.