Moving Away from Todoist - to Taskwarrior, SSH & Dropbox - Part 1
Why Todoist no longer works for me.
In the past year I've been gradually moving away from Todoist.
Mind you, this is no small thing, as I'm not an amateur or hobbyist. For context:
I've been a paying subscriber from 2014 (some 8 years to date).
I use Todoist constantly, both as a temporary cache (for things I have to do, or that I'm reading/watching/thinking) and for long-term project management.
As a court lawyer, Todoist has been somewhat integral to my legal practice. I've thousands of tasks strewn across hundreds of cases/projects over the past decade.
I've used all of Todoist's more advanced features, and have tried many different workflows/methodologies with it. These days I do not dabble or experiment when it comes to task management; I know exactly what I need from a task-management tool.
According to Todoist, I ascended to divinity as of 2 years ago. In its realm I am an 'Enlightened' entity, one of the rare beings of the "exclusive 0.05% of Todoist users":
So it can't be more strongly said how my decision to move away from Todoist has come only after deep reflection and consideration.
I can no longer continue with Todoist, because it has too many changes/flaws I disagree with. I'm not even referring to nice wants (like Kanban view) - I speak of fundamental features, and Todoist's abysmal performance in that regard as a piece of software one relies upon, e.g:
Modal pop-ups for tasks/subtasks can take up to 2 seconds to appear. I engage in context-switching across hundreds of different tasks daily, and the waiting time can really mount up.
The search is phenomenally terrible. As a professional this is unacceptable, given the speeds and accuracy (and fuzzy allowances) of solutions like FTS and ripgrep.
Todoist's key bindings are unresponsive, and not customizable. It constantly subverts expected UI behaviours for its desktop clients (e.g. holding the 'J' key to scroll down continuously will not).
The text field focus behaves unintuitively when adding/escaping, thus forcing me to resort to slower mousework when batch adding/editing tasks.
Drag and drops are buggy; tasks sometimes disappear; templates are unwieldy and slow and difficult to manage.
There are no task dependencies, start dates, durations, and the like. These are necessary for deadline-based workflows, such as for court proceedings.
Sometimes Todoist even ignores the hierarchy/precedence that I set to tasks. (Which is a big no-no for me as a user and legal practitioner, since court procedure demands exact steps of action, which must be able to be traced back on demand, and which if disregarded can have fatal consequences.)
Archived folders cannot be easily retrieved in batch. In fact, completed items are hidden/archived by default. This change came later, and was a decision I found very confusing. Todoist became geared towards one-off tasks, since less importance is placed on historical records of work undertaken.
The desktop client feels different across Mac, Linux and Windows and as against the web version. I need consistency of interface, if I must rely on a tool for many hours in a day.
Todoist's API is slow, even when I'm tapping into it with simple Python and SQLite. (And I'm rather disappointed with its data structure.)
Owing to my teams, I'm still stuck with Todoist in some regard. But I've minimized its use, and have dropped it from most of my personal/professional workflow, and I'm happy to report that I've figured out Part 2 - a simple and elegant way to enable a syncing-like mechanism for task and project management, using just Taskwarrior, Dropbox and SSH+rsync.