I received a life time subscription offer for Toodledo, which is rather tempting. However, the iOS app is 2 years old and their blog has not been updated since May and there’s a lot of chatter that Toodledo is dead in the water.

Anyone using toodledo who can shed some light?

Simon wrote:

I received a life time subscription offer for Toodledo, which is rather
tempting. However, the iOS app is 2 years old and their blog has not
been updated since May and there’s a lot of chatter that Toodledo
is dead in the water.

Anyone using toodledo who can shed some light?

I have not used my account in years, but I have received a number of emails from them over the past few months. I believe they have a new CEO and are trying to revive/refresh the product. In this day and age, it will take a lot of effort to succeed IMHO as there are so many other products in the same space.

--Ken

Depends on the price. If the tier they're offering is at an especially good price and you like the workflow, then go for it. They've been around, and limping along, for 15 years, so I doubt they're about to close down. But the app/service design needs a serious refresh.

I remember that in 2017 WeDo offered a lifetime Pro subscription through StackSocial for $20, at a time when the yearly subscription was more than that. (Yearly is now $40.) I'd assumed they were making some sort of last-ditch effort for funding and worried that they'd soon disappear, but although no one talks about them much anywhere it's still an ongoing service.

So I don't think that ToodleDo is necessarily going anywhere, but they may not currently have the funding to make anything but slower, incremental advances right now.

It's a tough market, with lots of free options, and lots of much bigger competitors with Pro plans that cost in the same ballpark. Again, ultimately it depends on whether you like using the app and would be happy if nothing major improved.

Thanks guys. It’s a similar stacksocial deal. I’m not going for it as it runs out tomorrow.

I’m moving most of my computing to non-subscription software and this came along and gave me pause for thought.

It seems the toodledo forums have been removed.

Wondering if this is the end of toodledo?

I just sent Toodledo a support ticket asking about the continued development and future of the app. We'll see if I even get a response.

Toodledo was one of the first, if not the first to have a suite of tools. The problem is they never integrated them. If they had and done a good job with it, I think they would really have built a winning app.

Steve

Discussion, and grousing, on the Toodledo subreddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/toodledo/comments/m9a7i8/looks_like_toodledo_forum_is_gone/ ( or https://bit.ly/3lRfeqE )

I can't say that my post from two years ago has changed much. I get weeks late notices of old tasks that I left in my account when they come due, but they seem to have been passed by over the years.

--Ken

Thanks guys. It’s a similar stacksocial deal. I’m not going for it as it runs out tomorrow.

Note that StackSocial will no longer give your email to the vendor 'because privacy'. That makes it quite difficult for the vendor to support you, e.g. if you lose your license key.

If Stacksocial used to give devs email info but now don't, I'd believe them that there were privacy issues they were addressing.

In years past I've bought from software deal sites like MacZot (now defunct) and saw that the unique emails I'd created for purchase and app registration had obviously been resold, resulting in spam. So I appreciate having my identity be protected from this type of annoyance. Also, Apple's app stores have never given user info to any developers or media publishers in its 14-year existence. Seems to work okay for users the vast majority of the time.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Toodledo was one of the first, if not the first to have a suite of
tools. The problem is they never integrated them. If they had and done a
good job with it, I think they would really have built a winning app.

Steve

I used Toodledo for years, then moved to ToDoist after Toodledo changed hands. After playing with Toodledo today, I remembered how much I liked it and at the same time, how much I disliked the dated interface & the outliner. And, yes, the lack of integration was a little frustrating.

ToDoist seems to have finally fixed their historical problem of throwing tasks and subtasks into one shapeless list (or maybe that was an iOS problem?).

It's so slick though, it makes me a little nervous. Maybe it's the widget staring me in the face every day, or that I get so hung up on the colors & am constantly re-doing my setup, completely defeating the purpose. But the same projects, tasks, filters & tags don't give me that panicky feeling in Toodledo, so I may go back to it.

Sarah wrote:

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

>Toodledo was one of the first, if not the first to have a suite of
>tools. The problem is they never integrated them. If they had and done
a
>good job with it, I think they would really have built a winning app.
>
>Steve

I used Toodledo for years, then moved to ToDoist after Toodledo changed
hands. After playing with Toodledo today, I remembered how much I liked
it and at the same time, how much I disliked the dated interface & the
outliner. And, yes, the lack of integration was a little frustrating.

ToDoist seems to have finally fixed their historical problem of throwing
tasks and subtasks into one shapeless list (or maybe that was an iOS
problem?).

It's so slick though, it makes me a little nervous. Maybe it's the
widget staring me in the face every day, or that I get so hung up on the
colors & am constantly re-doing my setup, completely defeating the
purpose. But the same projects, tasks, filters & tags don't give me that
panicky feeling in Toodledo, so I may go back to it.

I also eventually went from Toodledo to Todoist, with a few stops in between, but am mostly using Clickup these days. It is not perfect, but I do like it a lot. Something to consider if you are interested. As far at Toodledo goes, I cannot see going back. The UI was a challenge when I used it, and it still has not changed.

--Ken

I moved from Toodledo to Amazing Marvin, and the difference was night and day. AM has a modern, clean look, a responsive keyboard-friendly interface, a flexible design, and not a grid in sight. In terms of task management, AM has many tools to help you limit overwhelm, whereas Toodledo always made me feel I was losing the forest in the trees.

Cyganet wrote:

I moved from Toodledo to Amazing Marvin, and the difference was night
and day. AM has a modern, clean look, a responsive keyboard-friendly
interface, a flexible design, and not a grid in sight. In terms of task
management, AM has many tools to help you limit overwhelm, whereas
Toodledo always made me feel I was losing the forest in the trees.

It looks quite interesting, but the price is above what I would consider within the mid-range for comparable products.

--Ken

Yes indeed, it is expensive. So it depends on the user if it's worth it for them. I find it a worthwhile investment to manage my working life.

Cyganet wrote:

Yes indeed, it is expensive. So it depends on the user if it's worth it
for them. I find it a worthwhile investment to manage my working life.

I understand. If a product is that important and helpful, I can see spending a premium on it. But right now, most of the task programs that I use do not meet that threshold. The free version of Clickup has been serving me well, but I cannot say that it is indispensable.

--Ken

What threshold would a task manager have to meet for you? Asking out of interest, because I tried many that I found to be overly complex list-makers that didn't add value.

Cyganet wrote:

What threshold would a task manager have to meet for you? Asking out of
interest, because I tried many that I found to be overly complex
list-makers that didn't add value.

That is a great question, albeit a bit of a loaded question on this forum. ;)
But I'll try to be brief in my answer.

I have need of a program at work and at home. At work, I manage a number of projects that run for months to years, and work can ebb and flow. I also administer some programs and that has its own set of responsibilities. So, I need a task manager that can keep track of many tasks and related information. And, I want to be able to prioritize tasks and/or subtasks so I can view everything by project, program or priority. I'll skip the many programs that have tried and used after having to give up ECCO Pro a number of years ago, but of late the programs that have come closest to what I want are My Life Organized and Clickup, the latter of which I am currently using. Clickup is quite powerful and I have not finished setting optimizing its setup, but it does contain a lot of detailed information. As a temporary aid, and an electronic version of a scratch[ad, I also use Kanbanflow. I can quickly add items to it, and can set my priorities. Yes, it duplicates a bit with Clickup, but until I finish getting it tweaked, the pair serve me quite well. I am sure you could substitute another kanban board for Kanbanflow, but it is dead simple to use and I like that it is fast, has colors and you can quickly delete items.

I was trying to use Kanbanflow for home use, but have actually got Clickup set up quite nicely. It took a bit of time to set it up the way I wanted, but the more I have worked with it, the more impressed I am, especially with its flexibility. I used to use a variety of programs here as well, like Todoist and Trello, but Clickup is now set up in a way that is encouraging me to use it, and that is a good sign.

I am sure there are other programs out there that I might find functional, useful or fun to use, but for now, things seem to be working, and I am able to use free versions of both programs. I would be fine with paying a nominal yearly fee or flat rate for either, but when things start getting up there, I need to be able to justify the expense. I paid for the full version of Todoist, but I will probably cancel it as I am no longer using it. My needs may change when I am no longer working at home after COVID-19 is under control, but for now, I am happy.

And, I forgot to mention that paper and pen is also in the mix as needed.

Hope this helps.

--Ken

Hi Ken, thanks for sharing the details! I understand where you're coming from - your need is for a project management solution, not a simple task list. If I break it down into requirements there's:
1. manage programs, projects, tasks, subtasks
2. separate home and work
3. store information related to tasks (i.e. metadata)
4. prioritise tasks and subtasks
5. view by project/program/priority
6. Kanban board
7. quickly add items and set priorities

Not to persuade you to change what you're using, but here's how some of the programs that I use stack up:

If I look at Amazing Marvin, it has categories, projects, tasks and subtasks (#1,2), but subtasks are not separate from tasks (#4). It doesn't have a Kanban board (#6), and metadata is limited to fixed fields or user-defined tags(#3), so it's not extensive enough for your needs. You can create custom views via smart lists (#5) and data entry with priority goes via super-speedy text processing of the input field (#7)

Another program that I use for simple project management is Quire. Its main benefit for me is collaboration - I use it to share home maintenance planning with my partner. Its benefit over AM is separate subtasks (#4) and Kanban (#6) but metadata is limited to user-defined tags (#3). You can separate projects, but then you cannot view data across projects in one go (#5).

A third program that I use is InfoQube. Its strength is creating unlimited fields of metadata and attaching more information (#3), and creating user-defined views of all tasks provided they are in the same database (#5). It has a built-in Gantt chart, but no Kanban, although Kanban can be simulated.

Putting these here in case anyone is interested in the comparison.

Regards,

Cyganet

Like Ken, I have been using ClickUp for specific work projects. It is almost Notion-like in its flexibility, but if Notion were equipped with ready made templates. ClickUp has so many assets that that is sometimes a deficit. That is, I can get lost in the weeds of features, which is why it isn't my everyday task manager. I've been using Dynalist for that purpose, but I'm giving Amazing Marvin a try (thanks for the recommendation, Cyganet).

But back to ClickUp. You can use it for everything from a simple todo list, to a KanBan board and timelines, now. A feature they don't seem to talk about much is that you can associate Notion-like documents to projects. Notion-like because you can put almost any information into them. So, for instance, I am managing our exhibit at a virtual conference and I've got the instructional PDFs in one of the documents for this project, along with clipped email information. You build these documents very similarly to Notion pages by selecting elements to add to the document with the slash key.

Each task you create in ClickUp can be loaded with information, including fully formatted notes, attachments, sub-tasks, all kinds of meta data, commentary (because ClickUp is first and foremost built for collaboration -- which I don't need).

ClickUp also has a ton of video tutorials to help you figure out how to use it. It is impressive.

Steve

Talking about todo managers, here are three more recommendations.

*MyLifeOrganized* (MLO) is a very flexible and powerful application that is essentially based on an outline (arbitrarily deep tree) of tasks. Tasks can be marked as pure containers (folders) or projects. User-definable filtering views allow to create flat lists from this outline. It has as a desktop app for Windows, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. MLO has many interesting and advanced features, like time- and location-based contexts, start and end date, reminder date, and review date (all separate from each other), and can be used to implement different task management methodologies.

*ToDoList* from AbstractSpoon Software is a bit similar, but completely free and open source. Like MLO, it has a desktop app for Windows. Both can also be used on Linux with Wine. I'm particularly mentioning these two, since on this forum there are often only recommendations for MacOs users, and MacOs seems to generally have more and nicer productivity apps. But there are also some options for Windows users.

I've also become fond of *Everdo* which is a very clean implementation of the "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology. Everdo provides a platform independent (Electron) desktop app and mobile apps. I know some don't like Electron, but it works very well for me. If you're into GTD, you will surely like Everdo (note that despite of the name, it has nothing to do with Evernote). In terms of outlining, it is not as powerful as the first two apps, since it can only nest three levels: projects, actual tasks, and inline tasks in the task comment. So, it is not really an outliner as the first two mentioned apps. However, I noticed that forcing me to keep things simple (instead of creating deeply nested trees) can also be helpful. Also, Everdo has a clever tag system that can compensate for the missing task outline. All tasks can be tagged, you can filter for tags, and the type of tags (work area, context, contact) can be freely changed.

I've tried many todo apps over the years, and I ended up having the same problem with all of them, namely, that after a while it was hard to see the forest for the trees.

But even that metaphor breaks down here, as I could see the forest of todos, so that wasn't the problem.

Maybe the problem was that it was getting increasingly harder to see which ones were the important trees, as they were getting lost in the ever-expanding forest, and far too much time was spent on forest management to find the important trees.

Then I came across a study somewhere which said that the busiest and most productive managers (CEOs and presidents etc.) only use a calendar to manage their todos because only what can get done at a specific point in time is worth focusing on (i.e. is important enough).

So the essential skill here is not task management (and forest management), but task selection, i.e. prioritisation, and choosing tasks and scheduling them in a calendar and getting them done is what matters.

Now it's possible that this is only valid for those in senior management, and if one is an underling, then we are tasked to manage the forest, so that we can suggest important trees to senior management.

But I feel there is a learning point there that the higher level skill is to learn how to select (prioritise) important and urgent tasks and then focusing on getting them done (by scheduling them in a calendar), and forest management leads to stagnation or at least it's a lower level skill, almost an admin skills vs. the management or leadership skills of prioritisation.

For the last several years I was using a combination of WorkFlowy (for capturing tasks, managing the forest) and Google Calendar to manage my affairs. But my WorkFlowy has grown into a giant forest of captured tasks most of which are ultimately probably pointless and useless as they never got scheduled because they turned out not to be important or urgent.

Enter RoamResearch, which has emerged as the magic solution to the forest management problem, and for me therefore is the absolute best todo management software I have ever used.

The key feature is the automatically appearing daily page, which forces you to review the previous day's undone tasks, to evaluate whether they should be transferred over; so it's a forced moment of reflection, evaluation, and prioritisation every day. (I imagine this is very similar to the bullet journal method.)

Although I still end up with some tasks that I've been rolling over for weeks or months, it also forces me to recognise that some of these are no longer important or will never be done and can be forgotten about.

But it also helps me never miss anything important, because it forces me to encounter again tasks that I scheduled for the future, when the given daily note appears on its assigned date. I still use Google Cal to schedule tasks in a calendar format, which just adds another moment of reflection and prioritisation, when tasks get mapped against the available time on a given day or week.

So when it comes to a todo system or software, the key features to evaluate would be how it deals with the growing forest problem, how it helps prioritisation, how it helps scheduling, getting things done, and reminding of future tasks.

Creating an audit trail is also important (and for this Roam is also excellent, as there is a record of each day that's passed, and the internal linking can ensure the monitoring of connections between past, present, and future tasks and events).

Dr Andus's comments have me thinking that perhaps Roam's biggest impact on the apps we love isn't bi-directional linking, but daily notes. NotePlan was doing that before Roam, but in a different way. Since Roam, daily notes has become almost a requirement and is a feature in the following apps:

- Amplenote
- Hypernotes
- Obsidian
- Organizedly
- Logseq
- Remnote

And probably others. I agree with Dr Andus that this is an extremely handy feature.

Steve

Cyganet wrote:

Hi Ken, thanks for sharing the details! I understand where you're
coming from - your need is for a project management solution, not a
simple task list.

You are welcome. The discussion that we have around product use and selection are one of the things that make this forum so helpful. While I would say that I am doing project management work, my software needs are for both project management AND task management. My head is holding on to too many pieces of information, so offloading a lot of that is the primary purpose for me. Sometimes it is information and sometimes it is specific tasks. I have looked at Quire, but cannot remember why I did not give it a full spin.

And I really want to dive into InfoQube, but I just have not had the capacity to lean the ins and outs of a new program right now. Clickup was more than I wanted, and I am still in the middle of learning how to use it best, but it has been paying off for me at the moment in my personal life so we are getting along well enough for the moment.

--Ken

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Like Ken, I have been using ClickUp for specific work projects. It is
almost Notion-like in its flexibility, but if Notion were equipped with
ready made templates. ClickUp has so many assets that that is sometimes
a deficit. That is, I can get lost in the weeds of features, which is
why it isn't my everyday task manager. I've been using Dynalist for that
purpose, but I'm giving Amazing Marvin a try (thanks for the
recommendation, Cyganet).

But back to ClickUp. You can use it for everything from a simple todo
list, to a KanBan board and timelines, now. A feature they don't seem to
talk about much is that you can associate Notion-like documents to
projects. Notion-like because you can put almost any information into
them. So, for instance, I am managing our exhibit at a virtual
conference and I've got the instructional PDFs in one of the documents
for this project, along with clipped email information. You build these
documents very similarly to Notion pages by selecting elements to add to
the document with the slash key.

Each task you create in ClickUp can be loaded with information,
including fully formatted notes, attachments, sub-tasks, all kinds of
meta data, commentary (because ClickUp is first and foremost built for
collaboration -- which I don't need).

ClickUp also has a ton of video tutorials to help you figure out how to
use it. It is impressive.

Steve

Agreed. Thankfully the logic of the advanced features was easier for me to understand the MLO, which I liked but always felt that it was beyond me to make any tweaks after having things initially set up. For tutorials, there is a woman who has a YT channel that I find very helpful - Layla at ProcessDriven. She has a good grasp of the program and can explain things quite well. My only suggestion is to turn the video speed down to about 85-90% as she is a bit of a fast talker.

--Ken