Todoist Boards

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Posted by Luhmann
Aug 20, 2020 at 12:52 AM

Todoist added kanban boards today, via the beta channel on all platforms.

Personally, I feel this feature is not very usefully implemented. They use “sections” to structure boards, which is how one’s lists are already organized. Boards would be more useful for me if they showed me something different. For instance, if organized around tags I could use a board to see the status of different tasks, even if they are organized in sections according to something other than status. Instead, this implementation requires me to stop using tags and use sections to display that information.

In generally this highlights many of my frustrations with Todoist, which seems to be designed by people who don’t particularly understand their own product. Despite this, however, I have not found anything better for collaborating with other people, especially since the free tier is so generous the people I’m collaborating with don’t need to pay to use the same app I’m using. (Unlike many other products which require all users to have paid accounts.)

Posted by satis
Aug 27, 2020 at 03:44 PM

I think the Todoist people have run into massive coding cruft and have spent most of the last year revamping the app to continue to resemble what devoted fans are used to (while unfortunately removing some functionality), while trying to implement promised functionality that’s been more difficult than expected.

The CEO originally promised Boards for Todoist in a tweet in 2018, promising it for 2019’s ‘Foundation’ revamp. But that came 10 months ago, with no Boards to be seen and no promised launch date, or launch window.

I signed up for Todoist just before they raised their yearly price from $29 to $36/year, and I can say it’s been worth it. But I can’t use it for general lists and outline notes with subtasks because it’s just too clunky in implementation, so I end up resorting to other apps for lists that I’d otherwise want to toss into a task manager.

The only thing keeping me with it is the fast 2-way calendar sync with Google Calendar, which is extremely useful and something I wouldn’t want to give up, considering how much I depend on my calendar for scheduling my day, and life. Almost every other task manager I like has one-way event publishing to a calendar, but being able to change events from within my calendar is just so useful, and most apps don’t offer it. (TickTick offers 2-way-sync with Google Calendar but it’s not instantaneous, and can take up to 15 minutes to effect a change.)

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