Todotxt on Android and Ubuntu
- I use Linux (specifically Ubuntu 14.10)
- I don’t use a pointing device. At all. If I can’t use a tool from the keyboard, I can’t use it at all (as a side effect, I use keyboard enablers in my browser so if your website has “helper” keyboard shortcuts, I probably can’t use that either)
- My other devices (phone, tablet, work phone) are all android
Taken together, this makes finding tools a challenge – but I’ve had good experiences with todotxt and the ecosystem around it.
Todotxt is a great choice because it’s a text file – so it’s delightfully cross-platform by design. You can seriously just edit the text file if you want to – this is my kind of tool.
On *nix systems there is a great CLI tool, and I used this for the first 6 months or so exclusively. It gives more features than just editing the textfile and since I spend a lot of time at the commandline, it feels right.
I have also started using QTodoTxt which works a treat on Ubuntu and is a nice way of filtering by tags and having a visible list in a window and counts for each tag. QTodoTxt is thoroughly cross-platform so you can try it whatever you are using.
There’s also an android app that I use on all my android devices, which is pretty simple, but it works. I keep the todotxt file itself in Dropbox so that it automatically syncs between my laptop and my other devices – and of course I can peek at it from anywhere.
I’m a pretty busy person and while I don’t follow the GTD methods very closely, I’m a great believer in capturing things rather than wasting cognitive energy trying to remember them. I do prioritising and labelling as an exercise that is separate from just getting my head down and blitzing as many things off the list as I can! These tools help, so I thought I’d share – but I’m really interested to hear how other people manage their lives, especially when open source tools are involved. If you have any tips to share, leave a comment!