I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file (al3rez.com)

I am not a fan of Emacs whatsoever (I find it a buggy mess where everything works only 80%), but org mode is absolutely fantastic for this.

I use Microsoft TODO as a reminder and to not lose thoughts, but I primarly use text files to organise work backlog.

Spreadsheet programs such as LibreOffice are the next level. These are the most advanced and easily customized text files yet. Think of these as multidimensional text files that are all connected in an endless grid. Text files may seem ok, but managing tens of thousands of pages across sheets and books seems more straightforward with the spreadsheet format. But Vim is a great fallback when sheets are overkill.

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tl;dr

Ready to ditch the productivity app hamster wheel? Do this:

    Create a file called todo.txt
    Write down what you need to do tomorrow
    Do those things
    Add notes as you work
    Start a new date section when needed

I've used a TODO.md for years. I prefer it to a .txt as I can get some syntax highlighting in Vim.

About a year ago I merged my TODO with my work journal. So now, instead of two files I just have LOG.md with the TODO stuff at the top, a horizonal line and the journal of what I've been doing each day below.

I also copy the file (e.g. LOG-2024.md) each year and clear out the journal to keep the number of lines down.

For short-term (next few days), TODO.txt on my desktop is superior to every fancy solution I've tried.

For longer term stuff/backburner items, I use Google tasks.

I made my own. I needed to have a calendar that showed every todo item per day, and a text editor to edit the tasks just like in a todo.txt. Used it all day every day for over 15 years. I still have it installed on nearly all my Win systems, just because it opens instantly, has priority and colors. I also used it to produce reports for work, so I eventually added export options for HTML to paste directly into an email.

https://github.com/DexterLagan/todo-master

I just use Google Keep Note as my todo app. You don't need anything complex than that. I call my notes as DeathNotes where tasks go to die i.e. finish.

I've always liked https://www.taskpaper.com/

It's one step up from a single txt file. You only need to use one text file with it. It's like a nice UI for a single todo text file.

I use Todoist in a very light weight fashion. I add tasks and they sit on my screen until they're done, basically identical to a text file. I've never used the points, projects, labels, etc.

It does one thing a text file struggles at: scheduling recurring tasks and adding notes to a recurring task. I have annual reminders for infrequent, but important stuff. For example, I have a recurring annual task to review my insurance. Each year, I add context and details that are easily forgotten. Then, when the reminder comes up next year, I can refresh my memory and complete the task quickly.

I use a TODO.md within Obsidian, synced across devices with SyncThing. That's the sweet spot

I have a "never-ending .txt file" too. About 4100 pages' worth, at the moment, across 25 volumes and counting, over the span of now nearly eight years.

I don't intend particularly to advocate the format here, but I will say that of all my many bookshelves, in a certain way there's none I find more satisfying than the one I work to fill myself. Is that worth more than being able to use grep(1) on their contents? Or are those contents worth more to me because I can't? Who could say, but it's fun to think about, at least. (And for those young enough to be easily swayed by vanity, if you think performative reading is in fashion right now...)

I built a simple app a while ago to learn programming and it works for me

https://Simpletaskmanager.vercel.app

All the info is locally hosted.

Amazing. It doesn't surprise me that the most simple workflows are the ones that work best. Probably because there is not a lot of resistance (keyboard shortcut instead of searching through a list of apps / no tutorial on how to use it; it's just a text file / it's easily readable and you get to choose the formatting and structure of your text).

As a developer, however, I have to scratch the itch of always having "wrangleable" data, and yet again text files are the best at it. I am already thinking of doing this and just follow a set of writing "guidelines" so I can parse the txt if I wanted to do some visualization stuff.

Use a single .txt file for a todo list and set up a cron job to do a git commit on it every 5 min. This way you have some history if needed.

Org-mode is life changing, check it out.

I went through something similar. I do use Logseq now, but for many, many years I found a notes.txt or todo.txt file in my home directory to be an excellent solution. I typically just write the date at the top of the file and put the notes underneath. A huge benefit is that I can trivially keep these under git. I keep them in my dotfiles repo so they can be easily synchronized to all my devices. A couple of shortcuts makes it quite fluid:

A bash alias so I can run `todo` and have the file open:

    alias todo='nvim "$HOME/.todo.txt"'

Some vim config so I can run `\date` (from either insert mode or normal mode) and it will print a date line for me:

    inoremap <Leader>date <C-r>=trim(system('date "+%a %B %e, %Y %H:%M:%S %p"'))<CR>                                                                                                                                                              
    nnoremap <Leader>date :put=trim(system('date \"+%a %B %e, %Y %H:%M:%S %p\"'))<CR><ESC>

things 3 is fantastic and access to it is an actual factor in what devices i buy

MS Onenote? I have a page called "todo" but it never really took off. I suppose if the lesson here is "extreme simplification", then MS Onenote--> todo.txt represents an improvement.

I've had a plain TODO.txt file for over 20 years so I agree with all the benefits the author mentioned. However, I don't like it because without an app, there's no runtime loop to notify and alert me of what's coming up.

This means I don't have "ambient awareness" of what's going on unless... I open the TODO.txt file ... manually scan it... then rescan it again and again multiple times per day. It's really tedious and inefficient to manually re-read the same items again. Offloading repetition like that is what computers are good for. I just don't have a good app at the moment to turn my TODO.txt into something I don't have to manually eyeball all the time.

So even though I have a tasks in my TODO.txt, a lot of things still falls through the cracks because I forget I need to do them.

If you have the type of brain that has a built-in "6th sense" of tasks that need to get done, a lightweight-no-runtime TODO.TXT will work fine for you. But it's definitely inadequate for me and I need to fix that.

EDIT replies to "use calendar for reminders" : Yes, that's a workaround but I've resisted doing that because I wanted the utopia of my TODO.TXT file being the Single-Source-Of-Truth instead of manually copying items to Google Calendar. (Yes, I know that "perfection is the enemy of the good" and all that.) The way other people do it is they make Google Calendar itself the SSOT. But that defeats the purpose of the freeform flexibility of the TODO.TXT that has all the notes, etc in addition to tasks.

I want my TODO.TXT to be a unified view of everything I want to do in life and splitting some items off into Google Calendar is just more digital housekeeping I wanted to avoid.

The way I'd prefer to use Google Calendar is via the developer API to programmatically add entries that's based off of my TODO.TXT. E.g. : (https://developers.google.com/workspace/calendar/api/guides/...)

... but that requires an active runtime loop ... like a Python script constantly scanning my TODO.TXT and then automatically populating the Google Calendar. I just haven't gotten around to coding that yet. Yes, the irony is that meta-task to enhance my TODO.txt is already in my TODO.txt.

Zim is actually exactly what you need. Txt files created with a really simple possibility of mark down like style added.

I’ve never found a productivity tool/to-do list app I use more than just sending myself a barely comprehensible email.

This flies a bit in the face of the author's "The sync breaks. The company sells out and dies" point and the simple beauty of a text file. I find that Obsidian.md is just one step above a text file.

Simple daily notes, which are automatically organized into year and month folders. (Tip: Set the date format to YYYY/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD)

The Sync feature works great, but no reason you couldn't do this with just git on your own.

Plenty of built-in features (Plugins, ToDos, etc...)

Cross platform apps.

Markdown

Free. The sync feature is $4/month. Worth it for me.

They also have a one-time $25 payment to get early access to beta versions and a VIP discord channel.