whats the plot

last year, i signed up for a 1 year subscription to rememberthemilk. now that it has expired, i’ve started wondering whether i should re-subscribe or switch to something else (toodledo appears to be a popular option).

so i made a toodledo free account and imported my tasks from rtm – fairly straight forward and easy (although i had to re-tag and group everything, but no big deal). i tried using both of them for a few days together, and here are my thoughts:

what i like about rtm:
• interface – the ui is really slick
• keyboard shortcuts are like vim’s – familiarity is good!
• the new smart input bar is really nice and allows for fast inputting of tasks

what i like about toodledo:
• more emphasis on goals, tying tasks to goals, etc
• development seems a lot more active – rtm seems dead at times
• team seems to be more friendly
• nice subscription features (statistics, subtasks, auto-scheduler).

i’ve used rtm’s iphone app but haven’t used toodledo’s yet (although i read that it’s also really good) – so i am guessing that on the phone front, they are roughly equivalent. rtm is $25/year and toodledo is either $15 or $30/year, depending on which plan you get.

rtm is pretty functional without a pro subscription, but you can’t use the iphone version. with toodledo, you can use the iphone app (a one time ~$4 charge), but you have other limitations (task history of completed tasks is limited to 2 weeks).

so in summary – it’d be pretty nice to use something like orgmode for emacs (if i can dedicate enough time to learn it) or something like taskwarrior and just use plain text files. the advantages of such approaches are the price tag and portability/accessibility, and ease of use. the downside is that there’s no mobile (or web) interfaces unless i were to serve my todo files on my webserver (or write some code to sync to another service, etc).

another option is to buy things, which is a really well done app – but the problem is that i am then locked in to seeing my tasks on my mac and my phone (but not on the web and therefore, not on my linux box). it’s also $50 for the desktop app plus $10 for the iphone app. other apps have similar issues (omnifocus and the hit list).

decisions, decisions… sometimes, deciding on this sort of thing makes it “how to not to get things done”