At first, I was very excited. I don't use Todoist, but I do use Evernote, and since the latter doesn't provide sufficient task management functionality, I'd be fine with moving to Todoist if it did the job.
The problem is, currently I use Toodledo. And try as they might, no other personal task manager can come close to Toodledo's combination of function and usability. It isn't especially pretty, but so what? Aesthetics doesn't matter one whit if it doesn't work.
I'd looked at Todoist before, but it just didn't do enough for me. With the Evernote integration, I thought maybe it might surpass Toodledo.
Unfortunately, it didn't take long to figure out that, in my eyes at least, Todoist still doesn't cut it.
First, there's the mapping between Todoist and Evernote. Since the two systems are designed from entirely different points of view, it's not surprising that the fit isn't necessarily perfect. Todoist takes a very conventional approach to interpreting Evernote's structure: an Evernote maps to a single Todoist task, and an Evernote notebook maps to a Todoist project.
Unfortunately, Evernote has been around long enough that conventional approaches aren't that common. And I'm one of those Evernote users who chose a different path. For me, a checkbox represents a task, and a note can have lots of checkboxes in it. So Todoist's approach just ain't gonna cut it for me. I currently have over 400 Evernotes, but at least 2,000 checkboxes. To convert to the one-task-per-note style would be an absolute nightmare. Not that I'd be against it, but there had better be a good likelihood of significant benefit in the long run if I were to do it.
And that's the other stumbling block for me: that Todoist still has shortcomings that seem like showstoppers for me. Namely:
No start dates. Start dates for tasks are awesome, because you can create a task and set the start date to some point in the future. This will keep the task hidden till then. In Toodledo, you can even set the start date without setting a due date. This is great for tasks that either don't have a due date, or you don't know what it is yet, but still want to defer thinking about the task. I have a fair number of tasks like that, so start dates are essential for my workflow. There are various workarounds in Todoist, but they all seem kludgey to me, and involve bending other rules that I just don't want to bend.
No "importance" measure. Toodledo has this fabulous thing called Importance, a calculated combination of due date, priority, and whether a task is starred. Sorting by Importance gives one surprisingly fine grained control over the sorting order of tasks that automatically updates as due dates approach, and as you tweak a task’s priority or whether it has a star.
No Hotlist. Toodledo lets you configure a special list of only the most important tasks. This opens the possibility of using Toodledo to gather tasks, and then organize them, and have the key ones appear automatically in the hotlist. The hotlist is where I do almost all my work, but Todoist has nothing like that.
No saved searches. In Toodledo, one can construct a very complex search for tasks, and then save it as a kind of shortcut just a click away. This is ridiculously useful to embed usage patterns. For instance, I have many tasks without due dates. They need to be done, but cannot be done all in one sitting, and I’m in no particular rush to complete them. So I work on them a bit, today, and then want to move on to other tasks. In such cases, I’ll also use the task note field to remind myself how far I’ve gotten on that task. But those tasks I’ve worked on a bit today remain visible, even though I don’t want to work on them again till at least tomorrow. This clogs my hotlist. So I created a duplicate of the hotlist functionality as a saved search, then tweaked the search so that tasks that I modify are hidden till tomorrow (unless they’re actually due today). This keeps my hotlist hot in that every task there requires some kind of attention today.
So, yeah; nice try Todoist, but you still can’t keep up with Toodledo. Sorry.
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