August 11, 2025
I’ve tried them all. Notion, Todoist, Things 3, OmniFocus, Asana, Trello, Any.do, TickTick. I even built my own todo app once (spoiler: I never finished it). After years of productivity app hopping, I’m back to where I started: a plain text file called todo.txt .
I’m not alone in this. Jeff Huang wrote about his “never-ending .txt file” that he’s used for over 14 years. Reading his post validated everything I’d discovered on my own.
The Endless Search
My productivity journey started like everyone else’s. I’d devour blog posts about getting things done or spot a cool app and think “this is it, this will finally organize me.” I’d burn hours building the perfect system, creating categories, tags, projects, labels. Setting it up felt like work.
Then reality hits. The app wants $9.99/month. The sync breaks. The company sells out and dies. Or worse - I waste more time managing the system than working.
What Actually Happened With Each App
Notion: Built an entire life operating system. Spent three weeks perfecting it. Used it for two days. Now it’s a graveyard of abandoned databases.
Todoist: Great until I realized I was gaming the points system instead of doing actual work. Turns out completing “drink water” 8 times a day doesn’t make you productive.
Things 3: Beautiful. Expensive. Tricked me into thinking I had my life together. But I kept forgetting to check it.
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