778: Exploring the Task Management Environment
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Hello and welcome to MacPowerUsers. My name is Stephen Hackett and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, Stephen. Happy New Year, buddy. Happy New Year. It's always fun starting off a new year together. Do you get that feeling in the new year like, hey, I want to do some stuff better? I think it's almost an irresistible force, right? I think it is a pretty irresistible force. Yeah.

But I don't know. I don't think anything major is going to change in 2025. I'm pretty happy with where things ended up at the end of last year, but you never know. Yeah. My big one this year is I don't really want to reduce the amount of stuff I'm doing, but I don't want to increase it either. And I want to spend more time doing stuff for me, like health stuff, wood shop stuff. Sabbatical. Yeah. We'll see. You know,

I'm going to do something this year. I don't know if I want to use the word sabbatical, though, because that's so loaded, right? I mean, for people in academics and stuff. But I definitely want to take a little time off for myself. I don't know when. Yeah, you should. Anyway, that's why we're here. It's the first show of the year. We've been talking, you and me, for about six months now about task managers offline. We've both been just kind of...

Feeling our way through the environment right now. And I thought we had enough to do a pretty good show on it. Because task managers have definitely evolved over the last few years. And I think it's time to check in.

Yeah, it's a good beginning of the year topic as well. So well-timed. Yeah, there we go. There we go. I want to talk about, before we get into apps, though, I want to just talk about task management and task managers in general. Okay. I think one of the big observations you can make now that you couldn't have made 10 years ago is that there are a lot of good ones. It used to be most of them were pretty bad except a couple.

So when people ask you, it was very easy to give advice, you know, this one or that one kind of, you know, OmniFocus or things that was it for so long. Right. But that's not the case anymore. You and I have talked about how reminders has upped its game, but there's also a lot of third party developers coming in. I think this is kind of the, the fruits of Apple's API labor. When you think about it, like just think back, um,

10 years ago, how hard it was to sync data, right? Google could do it. Apple could kind of do it. But, you know, if you were like somebody developing an app out of a bedroom, sync was not an option for you.

And now it's just an API. You push a couple buttons and it generally works. And there's a lot of pieces of technology like that that have been democratized over the last 10 years. So people with good ideas can make apps with the appropriate infrastructure to be actually pretty good task managers. And as a result, we have a lot of them now.

And that's good and bad, right? Because picking one can become daunting because you have a lot of good options, but it's good because you have a lot of good options. So I think one of the things to think about when you're picking a task manager, and I do think it's important to have one. We can talk in a minute about ways to use them, but I think when you're picking one, I like to think of kind of like the, what are you solving for?

Sure. Like, you know, when you look at the iPad, Apple is solving for an all day battery. That's what they solve for. You know, it's always got about 12 hours of battery life, never more, never less. What is, what is the feature that you're solving for when you pick a task manager? Like if you're somebody who's on the road and you work primarily from your phone, I think the mobile experience is what you're solving for. And there are certain apps that are better than others at that. Right? Yeah, it is. Uh,

It's interesting. I feel like in addition to there being a lot of good ones, there are a lot of task managers now that are like really built around different priorities that people have. And I think that's good. I think it's good that we have options, but I agree it's important to have one. I really can't imagine my life without an application, not telling me what to do every day, but a place to put things so they don't get lost. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I can tell you on this journey, I've heard from some people and listeners that do all this with paper and pen. Although I just don't feel like that's something achievable for me. I think if you had a simple, pretty simple setup, you could, you could pull that off now, but the apps are really good. And like,

So I think it makes sense. And I want to get into that later, but that's kind of teasing. But the other solve for variables that occur to me, mobile is one. Like, do you want something that's good on mobile? Automation is another one. A lot of people like automation attached to their task managers. Depending on how you use a task manager, automation can make a huge difference. So you want one that supports it.

Another one, something that's important for me, is linking. I want my task manager to be accessible everywhere. And it gets back to this idea of contextual computing. A good task manager should be able to jump to a list from anywhere on your Mac. And linking is a feature that's important to me. And then there's what I just call advanced features. There's a lot of interesting kind of on-the-fringe features that various developers have come up with.

And then the other one that kind of stands out to me that's an option now that I think a lot of people will solve for is what I call system integration. And that's where you don't want your task manager to be just your task manager, but

You also want it to be your notes app and your calendar. And you want an integrated system where everything is all in one place, which wasn't really possible five years ago. But now with things like NotePlan, Obsidian, Notion, there's a lot of ways to get a system integrated task manager. And I don't think any of these variables are wrong, but you should be clear in your mind what you're looking for.

Yeah, I think that's right. Another one that I know we hear from listeners about sometimes is web access or

What is the cross-platform story? Like, hey, I've got an iPhone and a Mac at home, but I use a PC at work. What do I do? And that does complicate some of these. Some of these apps are basically everywhere. Some of them have web access. Some of them just don't. Some of these that maybe just rely on iCloud for syncing.

It's Apple ecosystem or bust. And so that is another one I think people really sort of contend with, you know, in the, if you can and want an application to maybe have work and personal stuff, you know, I think that's even another factor here. Like, is this something for my entire life? Is this something just for my work day? Is this something for the rest of my life? And those different things really can impact what you end up choosing. Yeah.

Yeah, another one is collaboration. A lot of people choose one around collaboration because they've got people they work with and those lists need to be integrated with collaborative work. And all of these are things you should have clear in your mind before you go shopping for a task manager. Because once you know what the important solve for variables are, then the choices become a lot clearer to you.

So that's kind of an overview of that element of it. Another thing I wanted to talk about in general was evolving task strategies. For me, they have evolved. And I'm very curious. I haven't really solved, answered my own question here yet. But over the years, my approach to task managers has altered. At one point, it was what I would call a daily driver. It's the thing I'd wake up at and look at would give me the list for the day and I'd start marching.

And that can make a lot of sense when you're a trial lawyer. I'm not sure how many people it makes sense for though, because it's very complicated to set up a daily driver. It takes a lot of, you know, automation and it requires a lot of power in your task manager to,

And I've come to realize I don't really need that as much anymore. In fact, for me, I've realized that the most important element of productivity is my, my time blocks. You know, the, the fact that I spend enough time prepping this show or, you know, something I'm going to make for the max Sparky labs. It's like those content time blocks are what matter. If I don't do those, then things break, but the actual list isn't as important. Yeah.

So my task manager has evolved into what I call now a list of lists more than anything else, right? It's not a daily driver. It doesn't tell me what to do every day. But when I'm in a time block for, you know, Mac power users, um,

I have a list for Mac power users and I will go in there and check. Like a lot of times there's little admin things we need to do as well. And other things like, you know, confirming with a guest or whatever. And so, so long as I have the right time blocks and I consult the lists, I'm good. The advantage of that is that I don't feel like I'm beholding to the list so much as now it's just a tool that I go and refer to. And that is very much less stressful. Yeah.

But there are people listening to this show that need a daily driver. I would argue that it is not as many that think they then I don't think as many people need it as people think that they need it. You know what I mean? And one of the things I would like you to consider if you're thinking about task management is what is the role of this thing for you? Is it your boss or is it an assistant that gives you a list of things to do when you say, now I'm working on X task?

Keep a list of everything I need to do when I work on X so I can see that now. And I wish I was still practicing law for the purpose of an experiment of could I do a list of lists as a lawyer? I don't know. I think I probably could, honestly, if I set the blocks right. But I do find that the new way I deal with tasks has evolved over the last two or three years to be more soft. It's not as taxing on me, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I think something you said really kind of caught my ear of the relationship between your tasks and your calendar. You know, you do time blocking, but I think that's always a point of friction for people. I mean, even for someone like me, and I also use my task manager as sort of a list of lists, right?

Sometimes it's like, well, this is fuzzy between a task and an event or a task and a note. And that's where some of these applications like, say, Apple's Reminders work.

you know, in Sequoia and iOS 18, you can have your tasks show up on your calendar at the time that they're due. And for some people that may really sort of solve that, that friction point. A lot of other apps will bring in your calendar and show it to you, like in the today view in your, in your tasks. So you can see your tasks, but up at the top or the bottom, you also have your events, you know, maybe they're read only, but you can kind of see where things are. And I think,

people's needs around these things can change over time like yours have. Yeah. But it is worth some consideration of like what and what I'm doing, what makes sense as a task and what makes sense as a block of time. And your example is the same as mine of like show preparation or content preparation and

That gets blocked down the schedule because I know like I'm going to spend an hour and a half doing connected or MPU prep. Right. I'm going to spend an hour writing this column, whatever it may be. And if it's just a task for me, sometimes that doesn't give me the full picture of like what my day may be, because if it's just a single line in my schedule.

you know, list for the day. It was like, well, gosh, that's a, that's a big chunk of time. How does it interact with everything else? And these are all things that need to be taken into account. Yeah. I mean, and I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole here, but it does change the way you work with a task manager. Like for me,

At the beginning of the week, I set blocks for the week, which to me are key, right? I need to do those. But then when I go through the lists in my task manager, I don't say, oh gosh, this had 20 items on it. I only did 10 today. I don't care. I just did as much as that block afforded me.

And if I notice that like that part of my life isn't getting enough things done, then maybe I'll make bigger blocks for it. But I don't end the day saying, you know, I had X number of tasks and I only did Y, you know, it just, it's more fluid than that. And that's why I kind of consider it a list of lists, but this is something you should all be thinking about as you're picking tools again, because the daily driver there, that's a very demanding task manager.

That you need something that has good automation and notifications and a lot of different things. Whereas the list of lists gives you a lot more options. I mean, technically, really, a list of lists you could get by with a yellow pad and a pen if you wanted. So think about all those things as you go into it.

But like another one is collaboration. We've already mentioned it, but maybe your task management strategy is, no, I work with a team. My whole point of my task manager is for me to see what everybody else is doing. Well, that's going to send you down a different rabbit hole as well. Yeah. So my advice is think about your solve for variables, think about kind of your philosophy about it, and then start looking at your options. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Squarespace.

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And I took on this testing with an eye to moving. I've been using OmniFocus for 15 years. I've been using the same app for 15 years. I got thinking, well, all of these have changed. My philosophy towards task management has changed.

And I really do feel that almost every option we discuss here is a viable option. Yeah. Maybe it's time for me to switch things up a bit. And so about July, I started playing with a lot. It started with me with the betas and I spent a bunch of time in Apple reminders and

And man, there's a lot to like about Apple reminders. I feel like, and we've talked about this a few times on the show, but Apple has improved the game. I feel like they're gobbling up all the oxygen for the mid-tier task managers in terms of native apps. Because it's just, it does a lot of stuff good and it does some stuff better than other applications. Yeah.

Yeah, Apple has really continued to focus on reminders. And I mean, it wasn't that long ago where it had that goofy like index card sort of UI and wasn't all that powerful. But it has really turned into something, I think, I think really special. And it is a really good example, I think, just like Apple Notes of like, yeah, there are more high end professional tools out there that give you more options or have a different focus.

But Reminders is aiming for like the middle part of the market, right? The sort of average iPhone and Mac user. And I think they've done a really good job with that. And I think in particular...

this year wasn't the biggest year for reminders, but just like Apple Notes, it has big years and it has years which is kind of like refinements. And I think that they've continued to push the ball forward really at a pretty good pace. And there are still some things, I in particular am going to talk about reminders a bit later on in the show, but there are some things I'd like to see them improve. But I think the pluses, the benefits of it really are

really are strong. Yeah. And I'll tell you, so what I did with is I wrote an Apple script to just export all of my tasks out of OmniFocus and put them into reminders lists. So I recreated a list of lists. The things that stood out to me was simple sharing, like

I I've always shared some reminders with my wife and some of my family members and a couple other lists that are shared. So it has always served that role for me, but it just reminded me, wouldn't it be nice if all my lists were this shareable where I could just like, what if I just had a Mac power users list and just shared it with Steven and we just both had it, you know? And that is something I guess we should probably discuss at some point offline, but, but that was really impressive to me. And I think,

Their Kanban view is really impressive that they included that where you can set columns and within a task list set up basically Kanban lists where you've got columns of statuses or whatever index you want to use and you can visually move them around. If anything had kept me in reminders, it would have been that Kanban view because I

It still calls to me like a siren. Yeah. I mean, it just, it looks good on your screen. You know, it's great. We're going to talk about more about reminders because you're more involved with it than I am at this point. But the, but the other thing that stood out with me was Siri capture. I mean, it's just so good to get it to a specific list with just your voice.

Capture other ways is not as simple as some other apps, but Capture with your voice, I don't think anything can hold a candle to it at this point. Yeah, I don't either. And while Reminders is obviously an Apple product, it doesn't have a Windows application, you can have web access at iCloud.com. So if you are on a PC and you need to get to your list, it does offer that, which is a real bonus for some people.

I also spent some time in Things, and Things, I think, remains the Goldilocks of task apps. It really looks great. I mean, you always have to say that when you talk about Things. It is still, I think, slightly better than Reminders, but Reminders is creeping up on it.

And it still is not as powerful as OmniFocus, but it looks prettier. And if you can work within kind of the things system, I think it's an excellent solution. People always think I don't like things. I think it's great. It's just...

Um, for me, the, you know, the variables I'm solving for, it doesn't really fit, but it's, it's great app. And my big question was, does reminders overrun it at this point? And it doesn't because like the way they use that today list. And I mean, there, there's some definite development on things that reminders has not caught up with. And I'm not sure ever will. Mm-hmm.

And their mobile app is Aces. I mean, it's a great looking mobile app. It's really good. They've got a Vision Pro version, if that's your jam too. Yeah. One, I think, knock against things is that it's just their business model. Each app is separate. They don't have universal purchases. So if you need the Mac, iPad, and iPhone version, you're in for like 80 bucks. So just like, you know, there's a trial on the Mac, but it is a bit pricey.

But it is really beautiful. And I think the Thing system, while it doesn't work for me for some very specific reasons, it is really good for a lot of people. They have this whole sort of idea around like your day and your evening, which I find really compelling, especially if you're using one app for, you know, work and home things. Yeah.

Not many other apps that I have tried sort of have that idea of like, this is due today, but not until the evening, right? Not until I'm home. And I think that's really compelling. They also have the kind of two categories of tasks, anytime and someday, which you can do in some other applications, but I think Things does it best. These are tasks that

I just, you know, I want to get out of my brain and I will deal with them at some point in the future. And if I've got some free time, I could go into my anytime list. I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, I can I can do this at any point or someday is sort of for longer view things like, you know, a task or a project that I want to get to, but maybe isn't important and doesn't have a time frame.

It lets you sort of categorize those in different ways than your day-to-day tasks. And I think that's useful. Like going through my lists, very often I will have tasks sort of at the bottom that are undated, that are useful,

sort of someday tasks like yes it would be good to do this at some point but because they're at the bottom of the list and they don't have a date associated with them it's easy to get lost and with things you can have a place for those and review them easily and and make sure that they're not being forgotten i really like that honestly

Yeah. One risk with digital task managers is that it becomes a, it becomes like that room at the end of Indiana Jones for your tasks, right? It's just a bunch of crates.

As far as the eye can see, you don't know what's important to you. And any app that can help you surface those things and keep aware of them and look through the crates once in a while is a good thing. But also, I think that's a mistake to have that room. You know, a task manager, just because it can hold a million things doesn't mean you should put a million things in it. Sure.

And that's important no matter which tool you pick. The next category of my tour was this integrated systems. We did that show on NotePlan several months ago with Dave. And I am super tempted. I love so much about NotePlan. I like the way the model works. I like the way every month the developer releases a new feature.

Like he spends every month just making a new feature and then it comes out and it works and there's no problems. I like so much about no plan. And I know a bunch of listeners switched over to it afterwards because I hear about it. Same thing in the Mac Sparky labs. We did a meetup and I had two no plan users in there that were,

So happy with it. Like they put it in and because it is, it is again to use the term Goldilocks, it's right there. It's, it's a native Mac app with powers similar to, but not as powerful as obsidian. And you can have your notes, you can have your calendar, you can have your tasks all in one integrated system. You don't have to jump around apps. Just there's so much about that that appeals to me.

And so I spent a lot of December. I moved a bunch of data in there and I really thought about just moving everything into note plan and just making that my thing, but it didn't quite make the cut for me for a couple of reasons. The, um,

And for me, a lot of the reason is because of my collaboration in notion, you know, so I'm working, I have someone that works with me and everything I produce goes through a notion database that is very collaborative and,

That's the reason people use Notion. The idea of duplicating stuff in NotePlan and Notion to me seems fraught with peril. Because the active notes on projects I ship are in Notion, so duplicating it in NotePlan just seemed to me like I would have inconsistent data. And it's good at that, although it's good with all that integration stuff,

It's not as good of a task manager as the task manager I picked. It's not really quite as good of a note app, although I would, maybe you could argue that it is as good as the notes apps I'm using. It's just a little bit less of everything, but you get a huge boon from having it all in one place. And, you know, I haven't given up on this app. I I'm still keeping a data set in there and playing with it. And like every month as they add new features, I'm keeping up with it. So yeah,

I'm not saying I'll never switch to note plan, but at this point, at least I will not switch to note plan, but it, it was tempting. I know there was a thread on this in the forum. So people were asking if I had picked one. Yeah. I, I just, you know, I, I don't think it's the, the end all be all for me yet.

And that's just kind of where it is at this point in time. Obsidian is a more powerful one. I made a field guide on it. The Obsidian task plugin has got even better. Now there's two people working on it. They don't have a monetization plan. It's just kind of...

They want you to just give them money. But honestly, it rivals OmniFocus in terms of power. It is really impressive. But again, the thing with these integrated systems is because I already have another integrated system that JF works in, having two of them I've found through experience is just going to make me crazy. Sure. Like if I was just working alone, there's a very good chance now I would be at 100% in Obsidian or Node plan.

and not using the other stuff. But because I work with other people, that kind of pushed me out. Yeah. Yeah, man. And it's a little frustrating to me that collaboration and task managers, like Things, for instance, no collaboration. Reminders is pretty good. But for some of these apps that are task-focused, collaboration is a secondary feature, if a feature at all. Yeah.

And so you may not want the complexity or sort of the all-in-one aspects of something like Notion or Obsidian, but you may be driven there because of collaboration. And that's something that I would like to see all of these apps take more seriously. Like, I'm a list of lists apps, but having real, like...

polished, well-working collaboration where I don't have to turn to a more complex app is I think, I think there's room for that in the market still. Yeah. Agreed. And, but speaking of the market, there's a whole new category of these apps that I'm just gonna call them web-based task calendar integrators because there there's like, I was going to make a list for the show, but there's so many of them and they're all really expensive and

And I really can't recommend any of them. When I was talking earlier about how my task management really starts with the blocks of time, which drives into the task manager for the list.

A lot of people are doing this now. It's a really great way to run this. So they're making web services that do this for you. And it's a calendar with your tasks built right in. And often like the quote unquote killer features, ability to drag items off your list onto your calendar is

But I've been able to do that forever with OmniFocus. You just drag a task onto the calendar and it creates an event. I think Reminders does it too. I know Reminders does it into Fantastical. I haven't checked in the native calendar app, but it probably does. They just added a feature that if you have a reminder with a time on it, it automatically shows up in the calendar. So these are features that have kind of been floating around for native apps for a long time now.

And I just found the testing I did in those was that they are very tedious to capture things in. Metadata management is too many clicks. It's kind of a new frontier of apps, and I don't feel like any of them are refined enough to justify my use. And they are, like I said, all kind of expensive for what they do.

And I think a lot of them to sort of stray into project management territory. It's like they have a lot of, a lot of features for teams or for collaboration, like beyond what most of us need. If we're just working with a couple of other people, I think there's a whole, a whole category of those as well. And yeah,

I think it's interesting to have this sort of web-based, web-first approach. And it certainly works for some people. But I think those of us who are really in tune with the Apple ecosystem, like we want our native apps, right? We want an app that sits in the dock or works really well on the iPad or has a watchOS version. And a lot of web tools just aren't there. And I

I think that I think a lot of people like us kind of write off that whole category because, oh, it's just like a tab in Safari. Like, that's not that's not enough. That's not what I want to interact with every day. Well, I actually went at it enthusiastically because, you know, I get the connection between the calendar and the task list. That is, to me, magical if you do it right.

So I understood what they were aiming for. And like I said, it was this whole new kind of like category of apps. So being a nerd, I was like, oh, I bet these guys are thinking out of the box and they've probably come up with some ideas I've never seen before, but they really haven't, at least in my experience. And the one feature a lot of them brag about is AI. I want to just talk about that real quick.

AI and task management to me don't combine. I mean, as much as I am a fan of these large language models and looking for ways to use them, I mean, if you're in the labs, you know I'm doing like at least a video a month on AI in one direction or another lately because I think it's so interesting and developing. But what I don't need AI to do is tell me what tasks to do today or how to spend my time. Like that's exclusively in the domain of my brain.

And I don't know that I will ever be okay with, you know, my robot overlord telling me what I work on today. But that's a big feature that's showing up in all these web-based systems. You know, it's like, give me all your tasks, give me all your calendar events, and I will tell you how you should run your day. I'll plan it for you. That is, while that sounds easy, I don't think it's right. And I don't think you're going to get the most out of your day if you do that.

Yeah, I don't want AI telling me what to do either. Like, I have all the context for my day and I get it wrong sometimes. Like, I don't need a system that does not have that context to manage things for me. One other option I looked at, and this was started out just because of Apple Reminders and their Kanban features. I started looking at Kanban tools again in general and saying, could I run my whole system on a Kanban, like a series of Kanban boards? And that actually...

was one of the more successful experiments for me right so you just set up a kanban for every area of your life and then you set up kanban cards for every existing project and with um with the categories like waiting on hold active whatever your categories are and you just move the cards around so then when you go into an area of your life you look at the kanban for that area and

And you just have a visual list of cards that you can move around. And of all of them in this recent round of testing, that was the one that nearly got me to bite. I mean, it was so different.

than what I've done with lists in the past, that that's very kind of sexy. And I didn't know if that hadn't needed time to wear off and I would get bored with it, but it also wasn't so good for the administrative stuff. And I have a lot of administrative stuff in my life. And the other thing, you know, we're talking about solve for variables, uh, automation and, and, uh, cap quick capture are two very important variables to me.

And I didn't find any Kanban software that had good automation or good quick capture. So it felt real tedious to set things up in it. Yeah. So that was kind of the Achilles heel for me. But that's another place I could see myself going in the future, like a really well-built Kanban board. I mean, so much so that I'm bugging some of my favorite developers that make task managers now. Hey, man. Yeah.

Yeah, I think Trello is like the example for most people. Yeah. And I use Trello for a couple of specific things. We have some for Relay, just kind of like...

keeping up with goals over the year and that sort of thing. And I've used them in the past with Mary for a couple of like just family projects. She really likes them. So our trip to London, we had a Trello board of like things we want to do, things we've booked. And then eventually we had columns for each day that we were there. It's like, okay, like today we're going to go to this museum and go see this and we're going to eat at this place. And it was kind of a way to manage that. And I think it works really well for,

for those sorts of things for me. But anytime I've tried to like move task management into a board like this, it is the administrative stuff. It's the repeating stuff that these systems just don't seem tuned for.

But I think there are types of projects or organizational things that they really excel at for me. And so I kind of view these as not task managers, but maybe project managers or ways to organize things kind of visually. And they can kind of live alongside my tasks, kind of where they've landed, where I've landed over the years with it. Yeah. I mean, but if you look at Trello, because I re-upped my account just because of this experiment and I,

They are creeping toward task manager friendly systems. At the same time, the Apple reminders is creeping towards Trello with its own comm bonds. Yeah. I mean, there is, there is movement here.

Where I think in the future, if we do the show five years from now, I think most tools will probably have some sort of Kanban option to them, which to me, really, I'm a visual thinker. I've said this before. I love seeing it visually presented to me. It makes it really easy for me to make decisions and move things around. And I think this is something that we're going to see more of.

Okay. But I'm not the only one that's been on a journey. You have not. What about you? Yeah. So every fall, I take my task out of Todoist, which is what I've used for years and years, and put them in reminders. Because I want to give it a fair shake every year. And again, like we said earlier, basically every year it gets something in terms of features. And I will say...

I never make it to the end of the year, still being in reminders, but I am, I'm still in it. I'm still using it. And it is not perfect.

But it is something that I have landed on. I'll talk a bit more about my pros and cons in a minute. But Todoist is where I've been for a long time. It's a list of lists. It has really nice natural language processing, which is very high on my list of priorities. Like I want to be able to enter things quickly, make sure they're filed away the right way. I don't want to do a lot of manual clicking and dragging. And Todoist is great for that sort of fast input.

Another one that I have tried on and off, and I spent some time with it this year as well, is TickTick, T-I-C-K, T-I-C-K. And it is kind of like Todoist in terms of like it can be a simple list of lists, but you can also use TickTick to pull in and manage your calendar. And you can kind of set tasks on your calendar like Apple can do now natively.

And it's pretty good. I've got some complaints about the Mac app. The Mac app is clearly not the most important version of it to them. But like Todoist, it is cross-platform. So you get it on iOS and you get it on Android and get it on Windows. And so if you need something that's everywhere, TickTick is one of the few that can do that. And like I said, it's pretty good. I think it could easily be my daily task manager if it needed to be.

It also does some fun stuff with theming, which some of these apps do. Some of them do none of. But if that's important to you, like I want my task manager to be this way or set these colors, you can do that. And it has really nice collaboration. So you can assign tasks, share a list. It's pretty great. Their collaboration stuff is really good.

I had an account with Tiktaker for two months, and my takeaway was that it largely got gobbled up by Reminders improvements. I think it did, yeah. However, if you like the Reminders feature set, but for whatever reason the Reminders app rubs you wrong, this is a great option to that. It's not as expensive as some of these other apps we've been talking about, so you can get into it.

you know, relatively cheap. I forget it was like $5 a month or something for the subscription. And I guess that adds up when you think about it, but, but yeah, it feels to me like apps like this are going to really struggle as reminders get stronger because it's like, why are you going to pay for it? Yeah. Yeah. I think the front of the line for that sort of complexity in the, in their future business model may be good tasks. Good task,

is built on top of the Apple Reminders and Calendars databases. So GoodTask is not a separate sync system like TickTick or Todoist or OmniFocus. It is your Reminders database. Yeah. And basically, it's sort of like Reminders for power users. Lots of customization features.

lots of different ways you can view your data. Again, you can combine calendars and tasks really easily. But I think the most clever thing in GoodTask is the quick actions. And so these are automations you build in the app and you can trigger at any point. And so...

Some of them may be around due dates. Like I have a task that's due today, but I need to move it two days down the road. You can set up a quick action plan

and just tap a button and it do that automatically. You can change what list it's in automatically. The quick actions is really, really cool. And I think it's a very approachable way to do automation in an app like this. It's basically just drag and drop. And, you know, you have some menus you can choose things from and you can organize them the way you want. And they sync across all your platforms, which is also nice. But I think as reminders gets more powerful, like,

the ground is kind of slowly shrinking under good tasks feet. And I have had some pretty rough like sink issues with good task. And maybe it's because I've used it, you know, on and off over the years, but like I'll set everything up and it'll sink in the order of my list will be different. It's like, what are we doing? Like this should be a soft problem. And so it's not perfect, but if you,

If you really want something that uses reminders, so like you can talk to Siri and do all the reminders things, those get, those changes get reflected in good task, but you want a more powerful view into it. It's a good option. And I know a lot of people really love good task. It just hasn't been a huge hit for me. And I do wonder again, kind of long-term where they can go, but it's a really good alternative to Apple reminders, kind of a super set on top of it.

Yeah, I mean, this is like a category of apps that add on to the built-in apps, and this is one of the better ones. Yeah. Anything else in your tour of task managers? There's a relative newcomer to this. It's just called Tasks, which makes it basically impossible to find in the App Store.

But it uses iCloud to sync. It's available across all the Apple platforms. And it's not perfect. In fact, it does a lot of things that I really just kind of find a little bit confusing. And I think the Mac app, again, is sort of the weakest of the clients. But its general idea is that a task can have multiple...

I guess it can be, it's not binary. So it's not to do or done. It has this whole middle part of the flow where this is a task that is being worked on right now, but it's not finished. And that doesn't really work with the way that I work. Like, but if it does, if you do want that sort of intermediate step, kind of like some Kanban stuff where it's like, I can move things between columns and,

Uh, TAS has a lot of that built in, uh, again, built on iCloud syncing. I believe it has sign in with Apple. So it's like, you can have like a private account. Um, and it is a relative newcomer. Um, uh, but it is, um, it's pretty interesting. Some of the ideas in this app. You also in the notes, Stephen have talked about an analog tool.

Yeah, this is something that I've been sort of experimenting with a little bit over the last year is to take and look at my task list for the day and just kind of actually handwrite at the top of the page of my field notes for the day, like the top three. And that may be like, you know, a big thing like prep for MPU, like, you know, read the ads, do the CMS stuff, whatever it may be. But I found it to be a way to just like kind of

highlight like at the end of the day these you know two or three things they've got to get done they're the most they're the high level bit for the day it has not been as impactful as I kind of thought it may be but at the same time it is kind of nice to have it written out and like it feels nice to like draw a line through it at the end of the day like okay I got these

these big things done. It is in no way replacing my digital task management. Like my task management is fully in the digital realm. I'm going to keep it that way. That works really well for me. But sort of extracting the most important things and writing them down can be really useful, especially on a hectic day.

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Okay, David, so you've talked a little bit about what you're using, but what does your system look like these days? Okay, so after all of this fretting and touring, I'm still using OmniFocus, which I think to a lot of listeners is no surprise. But to me, it is. Honestly, I had started this journey thinking I'm going to find something new and it's going to be awesome.

note plan and con bonds very nearly hooked me, but the friction points in it was my, some of my sulfur variables. Like one of the things I try to do is keep email under control, but I get a lot of it. And like when somebody sends me a customer service request for me to capture that into OmniFocus is one key press, just one key. You know what I mean? It's just so easy to,

to capture it. And, and OmniFocus has just nailed capture so hard. And so whether I'm capturing a link for something I want to write about or an email or whatever, it just does such a good job at that. I also, I was just shocked and amazed that still some of the really powerful OmniFocus features, like the ability to review projects and have deferred dates on tasks don't show up in these other apps. Um,

It's just, you know, I mean, this is not a secret, guys. How come nobody's copied that? So there was just, you know, power there. Now, I pay $100 a year to the Omni group for my subscription to this app, which is not chicken feed, but...

Since I'm paying it, you know, might as well use it. And honestly, I think it's worth the money to me because it takes all the friction out of my day. And granted, I'm a power user of this app. I've made field guides on it. I've been using it since before it was an app. So I know it very well. But honestly, I felt like I confidently mastered the other apps too pretty quickly. It's not that hard. But just given kind of my overall situation, it still makes the most sense to

Some other things that stand out for OmniFocus for me, in addition to Capture and Automation, is the Active Development feature.

The Omni group seems to have really, really put the pedal down. You know, with the total conversion to Swift UI means it was like one of the very first task managers that showed up on Vision Pro. I mean, Reminder still hasn't, go figure. And they're doing just this regular cadence of updates. The other thing is, you know, bringing Sal Segoian onto the team who was at Apple, and now he's doing all the automation for the Omni group.

I mean, it just means that the automation story is really good. There's just a bunch of stuff going on. And I think another big factor in me deciding to stay with it was the other tool sets that I'm using.

particularly Notion. I made reference to it earlier, but projects for me live in Notion. They used to live in Obsidian. So when I say, you know, we just started a book club in the Max Barkey Labs, right? So I've got a project to run a webinar on this book once everybody reads it.

So that is a record in our shared Notion database. JF knows what his job is. I know what my job is. The Zoom links are there. All the stuff we need to do it. In the old days when I was just running everything out of Obsidian, I could see myself just putting the tasks in that same note with all that information.

But that's not what I'm doing now because I've got another person who needs to see all this stuff and Obsidian doesn't collaborate. So another option is I could have moved all the task management into the Obsidian, I'm sorry, the Notion project here. But there's not that much to that. And I will add some project specific notes and tasks in Notion, but I really don't do much of that.

But it's just not that good. I tried at one point, I guess I should have mentioned, I also put all my tasks into Notion. And it's just not, you know, I know a lot of people build their whole life system in Notion.

And it's just kind of, I just didn't find it at all appealing. Like capture is difficult. All the variables I'm solving for, it's bad at. You can't link an email in Notion. There's just a bunch of hard stops for me where that doesn't work. But you know what OmniFocus has? It has linking. So I can embed OmniFocus links in anything, including Notion documents, anywhere.

And that allows it to be just kind of my go-to task manager, no matter where I'm in, I can get to it. It's a native app. It has easy capture. It's got great support from the developer and all of that kind of combined to me making the decision to stay with OmniFocus. And so my main system is OmniFocus. I've got some stuff over in Notion, but most of that is just linking back to OmniFocus and,

And then there's an analog component to as well. But let me just kind of answer any questions you have on the digital side first. Yeah, I guess my biggest question between OmniFocus and Notion, right? I would imagine there are tasks that kind of fall in between OmniFocus.

Like it's collaborative, but it's solely on you. Like how do you know, quote unquote, I'm doing air quotes. How do you know what system something should go in? Well, for me, it generally goes in. If it's a task type item, it goes into OmniFocus. Now, because I work on blocks, like I'll have a block dedicated to making a video for the labs.

Now, I have a Notion record for that. There is no task in OmniFocus for it at all. But every Tuesday from 12 to like 4, I make two videos for the labs for the next week. And all of that is run out of a shared Notion document, and I do what needs to get done on that. Now, maybe I'll get to the end of it and say, I need JF to research one thing about this and add this to the description. I will put that in Notion with a flag to him.

but I won't track it. You know, I trust the guy. He just does what I ask him to do. You know, we have a great relationship, so it doesn't need to be that fancy. Make sense? Yeah, I think it does. This is something that I have kind of over the years, like, you know, I work with a lot of people, both on podcasts and running Relay and now Underscore. A lot of my work is collaborative, but I have never been in a...

other than my wife and a couple of lists, I've never had a collaborative task place. And a lot of that seems that from the early days of Relay, neither Mike nor I wanted that. Like we can talk, but it's up to us to kind of keep up with our tasks the way we want to and manage them. And over time that's worked well, but you've got to, we got to have the communication, right? The collaboration is not happening in the,

task app level it's happening in Slack or email or something. And then we kind of manage it ourselves. And so I've basically inherited that across my podcasts and my work with David Smith. Like we're gonna talk about what we need to do, but it's kind of up to each of us to manage that. And that's how I prefer to do things. Like I don't want a shared task list with anybody else really other than my spouse, but

But a lot of people do. And I think Notion and Obsidian to a lesser degree are really interesting examples of it because they do so many other things. You know, you can have tasks sort of like scattered across a bunch of different places in a bunch of different ways. And I think that's really interesting if you are moving a lot of stuff into those tools to have your tasks alongside make a lot of sense.

Yeah, and I really haven't found all that necessary. Like, to use the earlier example, if I'm going to make a labs video about AI, like, I've already done the research. My notes are in the note. I create an outline in the note. I record it. I do the rough edit. And then I send it off to JF, and I change the status in Notion. And I never think about it again, because his job is to finish the edit,

Add the heads and the tails, export it, put it on the website and do all that stuff. So there's just not much of a need for it. And I like that, honestly, like you. Another thing we do, which is somewhat task related, is we have a weekly meeting, like a phone meeting.

And we have started recently where we have a database in Notion for every week we have a record. And as you're thinking, as I go through the week, if I think of something I want to talk to him about, I put it on the list. So we can both look kind of at the list of things to be discussed before we get on the call.

And so that, that works for us. I know there are people listening out here that collaborate to a much higher level and they need something much more integrated and much more that carries more kind of accountability. But, but it is the lack of formality in the notion stuff that allows me to keep OmniFocus. JF also uses OmniFocus. I've never seen his list. He's never seen mine. Yeah. We do it independently. That,

OmniFocus was such a Swiss army knife in terms of linkability, automation, and all that stuff that if I'm going to use a free agent style task manager as opposed to an integrated system, I still feel it's the best one.

And while reminders could have worked and a lot of the, basically everything I talked about earlier in the show, I could have made work if OmniFocus disappeared from the earth. But OmniFocus to me hits my variable list better than any of them do. So use that, you know. Yeah. Are you primarily using these tools at the Mac? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Most of my work gets done with the Mac. Yeah. Same. I do occasionally work out of notion in the phone. Interestingly, because of the holidays and whatnot, I wrote most of the outline for the show on my phone. I'd never done that for a podcast before, but I did the, but there's also an analog component to it. I've mentioned before analog, Ugmonk makes these great cards. They weekly cards and daily cards and,

For several years, I've been using the daily cards and the weekly cards. However, this past year, I fell in love with Plotter Stationery, which is a ring notebook system. It really solved a journaling problem for me, the analog piece of it. I always wanted to analog journal, but I hated these books where everything's glued together. I want to move the pages around.

And with this, you can do it. And I like the paper and it's finicky, you know, over designed and overpriced Japanese stationary, which is exactly the kind of thing that, that gets me going. Right. So of course I bought it. But what I've done is for the last three months since October is rather than use the, the Ugamonk daily cards, I just been at the beginning of the week creating a single page for each day.

And I've got my plotter binder on my desk. So if I want to put down something I want to do on a certain day, I'll just go to that day and write it at the top.

And I have a little system where I can designate time commitments, block commitments, or task commitments. But I don't need to get into all the details now. But yeah, I have a little bit of a system. So how does this work with a digital system? To me, the analog is the last mile. That's the thing that I actually pay attention to as I work through the day. OmniFocus is the master database of things I could do, the master list of lists that

But when I'm planning the day out, I will go and find things in OmniFocus and I'll check them off and write them down on the page. And over the course of the day, I'll get them done. And if I don't get them done, then I've got to put them back in OmniFocus or move them to another day.

And this is the piece of this I do that the least number of people are interested in. Like when I talk about this in the labs, almost nobody does that. They all just work out of whatever their task manager is. But yeah, I find it only takes a couple minutes, you know, to your point earlier with your experiment, it just really takes minutes to it. But for me in my head, at least when I take it out of the digital realm of ones and zeros and I put it in pencil lead on my page, I,

it becomes real, if that makes sense. It more kind of manifests as something I'm actually going to do. I mean, one of the problems I was noticing a couple of years ago is there was so much stuff in OmniFocus that it was just, it became almost like

inconceivable to me that any of it mattered. Right. It was just so much stuff, right. You know, whereas now it's like, no, I've got great, you know, perspectives that surface stuff. That's important. I've got this new block system I use and then, but I always take a few things out of it and I write them down for the day. And that also forces me to be realistic about the time I spend. How much time do I have? How many of these things can I actually write down? It just takes a few minutes. I usually do it the night before and,

And that is an essential part of my task system because ultimately I'm looking at the top of the page as I go through the day. I'm not looking at an OmniFocus list. I have been, uh, also experimenting with some analog stuff. Um, but I got to tell you, every time you talk about the plotter system, um, and I have, uh, a pen addict review of the whole thing, uh,

in the show notes as well. So if you're not familiar with this, like scroll through this pen addict post. But every time I see this, I'm like, oh, this is so awesome. Like the idea that I could like completely customize a notebook with the pages and even the cover, like in the size,

All really interesting and tempting to me. The movable pages are what really... I mean, of course, that was what I needed. Because I'll write down thoughts about something I read in a book, and then I'll have my plan for the day...

And then I'll, you know, I use it. I use the analog side to kind of give my brain another playground. That makes sense because I do so much stuff in digital. I do find that analog sometimes brings out ideas and thoughts that I wouldn't have otherwise.

But when I was using a notebook where the pages were glued together, it would make me nuts because trying to find stuff was really hard. And with this, you just open the binder and you put another page in. It's very easy. Yeah. And it's a well-done system. To make you even further tempted, I've now expanded my plotter collection. I bought the, it's called the A5 Mini. It's the wallet size. Yeah.

So I've got, rather than your field notes, I've got a little five-ring binder in my pocket with really tiny pieces of paper. But we've been spending a lot of time with doctors lately. It's complicated. But I've got a bunch of notes in here I've been taking in doctors' offices and things. And it has a wallet insert, so all my cards and stuff are in there too. It's just, it's my new wallet. I love it. So...

Steven, maybe before the year's over, we'll get you converted. So it sounds like overall, you're pretty happy with where things are? Yeah, I am. There's a part of me, like I said, that really likes the integrated system approach where you look at a tool like Obsidian or Noteplan. To me, Notion is not an option for integration because it's not native enough of a Mac app to make it worth it.

But OmniFocus is kind of the lingua franca. It jumps across any app I want with its very powerful linking. And will I still be using OmniFocus in 15 years? I don't know. Who knows, right? But for now, it seems like the right call for me. But I do miss the Kanban boards. I'm looking at ways to integrate that in my life. Yeah. Yeah.

It would be cool. And it does kind of seem up OmniFocus's alley, like to give you more views into your data, right? That's what perspectives are about. I love the today view in OmniFocus. Honestly, I wish more task managers would adopt that sort of thing. I think that's always been, when I was in OmniFocus for years, that's how I interacted with it most of the time was the today view.

And it's like, it's just right there. It's like, I really hope that they do that. And it sounds like if they do, you'll be very excited. Yeah. And I just, in general, I'm very happy with their switch to Swift UI because it tells me that I've got future. It's kind of future proof in that sense. Like they're one of the leaders down what Apple says is the future. So whatever Apple does, OmniFocus will be there for them.

One thing I'm thinking about doing as an experiment is I've got a big glass board in the studio, and I think I'm going to get some sticky pads and make an analog Kanban over there. There you go. Where I can just put a sticky for each project.

But my first test at it failed because the stickies wouldn't stay stuck. I guess you've got to get, I got some very pretty ones that were nice colors, but maybe I just have to get the ugly yellow ones with better glue. I don't know. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like I'm still kind of reaching a bit to get kind of this set up just the way I want it. But I'm, but the question of, am I, am I satisfied? Yes, I am. I mean, I, I feel like I've looked at everything and,

And I'm not with OmniFocus because of momentum. I'm there because of choice. That's great. That's really good. How about you? So I am in Reminders. Like I said, it has stuck for me since the OS releases this fall. And I'm not 100% sold on it. There are still some things that I wish Reminders was better at.

But I feel like reminder strengths really go a long way. A lot of these we mentioned earlier, great support with Siri. If you've used Todoist, you will know that to talk to Siri to get it to put something in Todoist is very difficult because the word Todoist is hard for Siri and the company and some of its users disagree on how to pronounce the name of the product. So that can be really frustrating. But another great thing about

is it's shortcut support. And this has been a bit of a friction point for Todoist. They had some shortcut support and they've scaled, they've actually scaled it back. Uh, they had some, some things that they've pulled out of shortcuts and I'm not quite sure what the future of that is. I hope they fully embrace automation through shortcuts, uh, again, but that's, uh, that's been a challenge for some users. And, uh, uh,

Apple's not always the best at supporting their own apps and shortcuts. Like Apple,

There's some things that like Safari, for instance, right? Safari has some like really interesting shortcuts support, but then some other like basic stuff just isn't there. Like what are you doing? But the reminders team has done a good job with that. And, and that's great. Another great part of it is that collaboration. So when I was using Todoist, my wife was also using Todoist and we, for years have had two shared lists. We have one called Hackett's, which is just like stuff that,

either around the house or in the family that either of us can do, but we need to be aware of, right? So sign the kids, you know, permission slip for the field trip or, you know, just today it was like drop off a package at the UPS store, a return. Either one of us can do it. We're both aware of it. And being on a shared list means if one of us does it, the other one is aware, right? So

But the second one has always been a grocery list, shopping list. And my word, reminders, auto sorting of grocery store items is so good. I'm actually going to have a link to a support article about it because if you have not played with this, it is really, really great. So you put in your...

or the item that you need from the grocery store. So milk, eggs, tomatoes, whatever it may be. And it auto categorizes it. So dairy, produce, bakery, whatever it may be. I'm not even sure how many categories there are, but the idea is that it is grouped by kind of the way things are grouped in a grocery store. So if you're in the produce section, you can see all your produce. Before this, when we were using Todoist,

And I do a lot of our grocery shopping. My wife works for myself from home. My schedule is a lot more flexible than hers. I do a lot of grocery shopping. And inevitably, I would be in the produce section, get everything I thought we needed, and be on the other side of the store and realize I hadn't gotten bananas, right? Because the list was sorted alphabetically or some other way, and I didn't see it. And it's really great to have all your items grouped by product.

The type of item there are, but what's even better is if it miscategorizes something or you just don't want it in that category for some reason and you move it. So say that I put muffins in there and it keeps putting it in bakery, but I want it somewhere else. Next time I enter muffins on the list, it will put it where I told it to be.

So smart. So good. The groceries list support is really is fantastic. And even if you don't use reminders, but you share a grocery list with a roommate or a spouse or something, it's,

Like I would say, put your grocery list in reminders. It is, it is that good. And because it's reminders, it also works really well with Siri. And this auto categorization works with items entered via Siri. So if I'm in my car and I hit the button for Siri and car play, and I say, add milk to my grocery list, it will add it to the grocery list and it will sort it for me. Just amazing.

It is a great feature. I know there are some dedicated grocery list apps out there that do this and more, but to have it in the stock, like from Apple task manager is really, really good. I love this feature. Yeah. I mean, that's why I feel like they're just gobbling up a lot of the space here. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, can you imagine if they come out with deferred dates? I mean, Oh, I know it's going to kill a whole nother, a whole nother group of, uh,

Group of apps. The other thing, though, the reason why I didn't stick with Reminders, because that Kanban view was very tempting, is I just felt like Capture was always kind of a little bit harder than I was used to. Yeah. And I thought I would get used to it, and I never did. Yeah. I think for me, the biggest con of Reminders is entry and sort of the overall...

fiddliness of the user interface, especially on the Mac. And I have pleaded with Apple for years and I have a pretty good track record of asking for things and reminders and getting them like the badge matching what's in the to-do list. Like that was me. Like I wrote a blog post about it. I filed a radar. It got added. You're welcome. But the,

The inspector for a task or the entry is just, it's a little, it's a little bit fiddly, especially coming from something like Todoist or TickTick that has a lot of natural language processing. And it's not perfectly consistent between the platform. So another thing that I'll take credit for is

the task inspector on the iPhone and iPad, you could move a task between lists. You could not do that on the Mac. You had to drag and drop the, the task from one list to another. It wasn't in the inspector. Uh, and thankfully they added that this time around, but it's a lot of small buttons to click. It's a lot of sort of dropdowns and things where if it understood better what I was typing, uh, it would be, it would be nice. Um,

In there, I will say that reminders really seems geared more towards tags than lists. And so you can, with natural language, add a tag. And from the little quick add bar on iOS and iPadOS, you can add a tag. But lists are sort of secondary. And for me, I use this as a list of lists. Like, I'm not using tags in reminders. I really don't use tags anywhere. It's just not the way that I work.

And that's a little bit frustrating. I wish that they would make lists sort of on even footing with tags, but...

What's great about it is that there are some workarounds for some of this entry and sort of fiddliness, both on the Mac and on iOS. And so there are, there are two apps on the Mac that I really like. One is called reminders menu bar. And it is, uh, as it says, it's a menu bar app for reminders. Um,

Something that Apple could add and, you know, then would would blow this app out of the water. But you get you can have a list. So you click on the reminders icon in the menu bar. You can get a list. I have mine also showing me my number of things due today. But at the top of it is a text box and I can type a reminder and it does some more natural language stuff than Apple. And it files it away for me, which is really great.

And it's the one that I use. I like having my tasks in my menu bar, especially when I'm just on my laptop and may not have reminders visible all the time. The second one is InstaRemind. And if you have used OmniFocus or Todoist and many other apps that have like a quick add feature from anywhere in the system, so they have a hotkey anywhere in the system, I can hit the hotkey and I get a little reminder.

a text window and I can type in my task and it goes in. It basically adds that feature to reminders and it has a bunch of natural language processing so you can add a list, add a tag, add a due date and time. And it's really great. InstaRemind is fantastic. I will say, if you just look through the website, it feels like maybe it doesn't get a ton of

a ton of updates a ton of active development but honestly it doesn't need it like it it does everything i would want it to do and uh and does a good job at it and it's in the app store but again the last update was two years ago for mac os monterey i don't know if it's i don't think it's abandoned like i think the developer is still around but i'm keeping my eye on that i would say

Yeah. I, I created a shortcut as well. Yes. You can, you can do this with a shortcut pretty easily. That's how I do it on the phone is my action button is tied to a shortcut that is just a text field and it gets saved to the inbox and reminders. Yeah. Reminders is really good. It is. But if you do want something that is a bit more detailed than the shortcut, you

especially on iOS is remind me faster, a very simple app. You get a text field and you can set the date and time and task list for an item and then save it into reminders. It's on the iPhone and iPad. It's been well reviewed. I really like it. And they have a control center action. So I actually have remind me faster in control center on my phone so I can swipe down and hit it.

type in something and they get saved and filed away. So there are third party apps that have gotten around some of the, I don't want to say limitations, but some of the friction points and reminders. But yeah, I've been pretty happy with it. And another con is that like my wife likes it. You know, I want to have those shared lists. And she, in the past when I've tried this has been reluctant and hasn't liked reminders, but something in it has clicked for her.

uh this year so uh we'll see where i end up at the end of the year but for now even though it's a little more friction than i want in a few places uh reminders is getting the job done

Yeah. I look, you know, it was tempting for me. Like I said, the combine boards is pretty, it's an Apple app, but, but you know, all those features, the variables I was aiming for OmniFocus lined up better. That's kind of the bottom line. And I think that's the point for everybody listening is spend some time on those issues. We talked to about the beginning of the show. Think about what is it that you're solving for?

How is it that you want to manage tasks? And there is a good task manager. Every single one of the apps we talked about in the show, I think could be a, a perfect solution for the right people, right? Just see how you fit on it. And let us know what you think. We've got the forums. You can go and let us know what your favorite task manager is. Why, what are the features that it does? What are the itches that's scratching for you? Go over to talk.macpowerusers.com and let us know.

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Have a great week, everyone, and we'll see you next time in the Mac Power Users.