still searching for the perfect to-do interface

A friend introduced me to Bullet Journaling, which I looked at with shining admiring eyes and said “Yes, but digital,” and then I went to look for something that I could do that with digitally.

I found Workflowy, which is a 100% ideal work-based Thinks To Do format for me. I’m going to use it for work stuff, because it’s cross-platform, it collapses the to-do lists which is awesome for ease of navigating, you can bullet-point your way in for increasingly minute aspects of the job to your heart’s content, it’s drag and drop so I can move completed projects to the bottom of the list easily, it uses tags in a comprehensible way, it lets you add notes and thoughts to any given bullet point without cluttering up the main view of it, it’s simple, basically it’s absolutely perfect for work stuff.

Sadly for my daily life to-do lists I want something more…agile.

This is what my phone homepage currently looks like. Observe the event, “June Bank Holiday”, which is demarcated by a little *, as opposed to the ✓ of the next item, which is a Thing To Do but comes up on this functional but unattractive calendar widget associated with Any.Do. I can switch to Google’s more attractive calendar widget, but then I lose the To Do list, which is about 90% of the whole goddamn point.

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Any.do is exceptionally good for its rolling Daily Things To Do aspect, but I don’t find it particularly easy to add tasks, especially because I’m using their “Cal” calendar interface because their actual Any.do widget interface gives you a “today tomorrow upcoming” but doesn’t add calendar events in, whereas the Cal widget will show not only the to-do tasks but also the calendar events, and the point of this long sentence is that because it’s the Calendar widget, clicking the + in the top corner brings you to ADD EVENTS, not ADD TASKS, which is really frustrating when I just want one. goddamn. app. to do all the things, and 90% of what I add are things to do, not events.

Google Calendar doesn’t add *tasks* easily enough, and has no rolling daily things to do list aspect that I can locate, and that’s 90% of what I use a to-do list for, so that renders it pretty fecking useless to me.

What I want right now, clearly, is the following:

– Workflowy style easy-to-use heirarchical outline-style to-do task list (AnyDo’s interface, even the web one, just isn’t as slick to use for nested lists)
– with AnyDo style rolling today/tomorrow/upcoming/someday appearance task list (Workflowy’s tags could easily be used for this)
– and an easy-to-add appointments/events function that
– automatically integrates with (in my android-using case) Google calendar so if I’m doing a month-at-a-glance thing I see the appointments and so if I buy plane tickets & Google adds them to the calendar they appear as appointments/events on the app
– all with an attractive widget interface

I passionately want this. Not passionately enough to learn to code it all, though, god damn it. And honestly, I don’t know if my desires here are just REALLY DIFFICULT to code and that’s why it sees like nobody’s done what I’m looking for, or if I’m just the only person on earth who wants this.

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