Android App Review: Todoist

Do you have trouble remembering to do things? No, me neither. But if we did, we’d probably get our phones to remind us, right? That must have been part of the thinking behind the app Todoist.

This is like one of those daily planner books, only it’s digital and makes noises to let you know you need to do things.

You can set either one-off or repeating tasks (daily, weekly, every second Monday of the month, etc) and create either individual tasks or organise them into ‘projects.’ You can even give them different levels of priority, and create sub-tasks within tasks in case you’re trying to do a large thing made up of many small things (like most things in life).

As with so many apps, there’s a basic free version and the more extensive ‘premium’ edition which you can pay for.

The premium version comes with the ability to add notes and labels to your tasks, both features which seem a bit unnecessary if you named your tasks usefully (although I guess some people will need more information on their to-do list than just “write app review”). I’m sure there are other differences between the two versions but they weren’t immediately apparent to me.

At this point you’re probably wondering, much as I was, what it is that Todoist offers which you don’t already have.

The alarm function on my phone is pretty robust, and I can label my alarms so that they tell me what it is I’m supposed to be doing. This makes an app which does basically this very same thing seem a little redundant.

The thing that Todoist has over my phone alarm is that it’s not just limited to my phone. You can synch it up with other devices and computers, so your same list of tasks and projects is there wherever you are.

This is ideal for people who take their work home with them, and want to be able to sit at their office computer and set a reminder to get up at 2 am the next morning for a business Skype with someone overseas. Or people who work on various computers and devices throughout the day – you can log on to Todoist from anywhere, so for temps or freelancers this is probably pretty good.

For the rest of us who, say, work from home, this has limited use. I don’t really need to synch up a to-do list between my phone and computer because by and large when I’m actually doing things off that list, my phone and laptop are sitting next to each other.

Also, if you had one of those little daily planner books you’d take it around with you, right? No need to synch something that’s always on your person anyway.

You might find Todoist useful. I don’t know. It does what it does well enough, but personally I don’t feel like what it does is something that was missing from my life – or from my phone, for that matter.