WHY NOT TO USE TODOIST

The best task manager is the one you stop managing. Todoist makes you a professional task manager instead of a producer.

I have nothing against Todoist personally. It is well-designed. It works reliably. The natural language input is genuinely clever. All of those things make it more dangerous, not less — because a well-designed distraction is still a distraction.

The Promise vs The Reality

The promise: capture everything, organize everything, never forget anything. Your second brain for tasks.

The reality: you build a task management system so elaborate that maintaining it becomes your primary activity.

The trap is that Todoist is just good enough to justify the time you sink into it. You label. You filter. You set priorities. You create projects and sections and sub-tasks. You use the karma system to gamify your productivity. And somewhere in there, the actual work becomes what happens between task management sessions.

Complexity Overhead

Todoist's overhead is subtle because the interface is clean. The complexity lives in the choices it forces.

→ Every task needs a project. If it doesn't have one, it goes to "Inbox" — which becomes a guilt pile. So you spend time categorizing instead of doing. → Priority levels (p1-p4) create a false precision. Most tasks are actually just "do it" or "don't do it." The 4-level system encourages you to sort and re-sort. → Labels and filters are powerful. They are also a rabbit hole. I've seen users with 30+ labels and 15+ filters. That's not organization — that's taxonomizing your procrastination. → Due dates on every task train you to ignore due dates. When everything is urgent, nothing is.

The result: Todoist users report spending 15-30 minutes per day managing their task list. That's 60-120 hours per year. That is not insignificant. That is a week and a half of focused work every year, consumed by the act of telling yourself what to do next.

Feature Bloat Inventory

Todoist is a todo list. Here is what it has added:

→ Project templates → Section groupings → Sub-tasks (nested) → Priority levels (1-4) → Labels → Filters → Boards (kanban view) → Calendar view → Karma gamification → Team collaboration → Natural language parsing → Integrations with 50+ tools

A todo list application should let you add a task and mark it done. Everything else is negotiation with yourself about what to do instead of doing it. That kind of negotiation is just another form of productivity theater.

Attention Cost

Todoist demands micro-decisions constantly. Write a task — choose a project. Add a task — pick a priority. Need a label? Create one. Or pick from fifty.

Every micro-decision is a tax. The tax is small. The frequency is high. The total is real.

Natural language input reduces the friction — "Buy groceries every Saturday at 10am" — but it doesn't eliminate it because the tool still prompts you to refine, categorize, and assign. The prompt to refine is the product. Todoist wants you inside the input loop because engagement is their metric, not your output.

I've noticed that people who use Todoist for more than a year tend to have elaborate systems with color codes, emoji prefixes, and custom filters. They also tend to tell you about their system before they tell you about their work. That is a tell. Your task list should be the most boring thing you open all day.

Tool Complexity Score: 6/10

| Dimension | Score | Notes | |-----------|-------|-------| | Learning Curve | 4/10 | Easy to use, hard to stop over-engineering | | Daily Friction | 5/10 | Clean UI but constant categorization decisions | | Feature Bloat | 7/10 | Karma, boards, team features in a todo list | | Maintenance Tax | 7/10 | Label drift, filter rot, empty projects | | Notification Noise | 5/10 | Reminders help but create dependency | | Lock-in Risk | 6/10 | Export works but your organizational structure is lost |

The BBM Approved Alternative: Pen + Paper / Obsidian Checklist

The most productive engineers I know use one of two systems:

→ A $3 notebook and a pen. Write tasks in the morning. Cross them off at night. No labels. No filters. No karma. Just work. → An Obsidian checklist in a daily note. One checkbox list per day. Zero configuration. Zero categorization. Done is a - [x] character.

Both systems work because they don't invite optimization. You can't optimize a notebook. You can only use it. And that's the point — a task manager that can be optimized will be optimized, and every optimization is a distraction from the actual work.

Your task manager should be boring

If your todo list is interesting, you are using it wrong. A task manager should be the most boring application you open. Lists of things. Checked off. That's it.

→ You don't need labels. You need fewer tasks. → You don't need filters. You need to stop adding things that don't matter. → You don't need karma. You need to respect your attention enough to stop gamifying it.

Strip the noise. Ship the work.