Why Use a To-Do List App and Not Pen and Paper?
There’s nothing wrong with a paper to-do list, but going digital has many benefits. Paper is fine if you enjoy writing by hand, crossing off tasks in ink or pencil, and drawing arrows all over the place when deadlines and priorities change. A to-do list app lets you do all that much more efficiently, dragging and dropping tasks to reorder them, changing a priority or due date with one click, attaching a note to a task with additional thoughts. In many ways, a good to-do app is the ultimate productivity app.
As many to-do list apps as there are, few stand out as being much better than others. For example, there are dozens of apps that are excellent for Android, but they do you no good when you’re working away on a laptop and need to jot down a task without losing your place. For this list, we looked for apps that you can access on both desktop andmobile devices. We also looked at how these apps help you organize and stay on top of your tasks. We consider collaboration tools, such as those that enable you to share a to-do list with other people, a bonus, but not a requirement. We also looked for apps that fit different user profiles, such as people who follow the Getting Things Done (GTD) method of organization (OmniFocus 3 and Toodledo are good choices), or those who prefer writing down tasks using a stream of consciousness (Workflowy is the app that fits the bill there).
One of the most popular to-do list apps, Wunderlist, was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 and taken out of commission five years later. Microsoft’s stated ambition was to build a replacement app for Wunderlist from the ground up, cloning all its best features in the process. The new app, Microsoft To Do, frankly took too long to come to market and arrived half baked anyway. Although the app has slowly improved since its debut, there are plenty of alternatives to Wunderlist, many of which let you transfer your old to-do lists from Wunderlist into the new app.
What To Look for in a To-Do App
There are a few qualities to look for in a to-do app. The top three are:
First, you have to like an app’s design and interface. Seriously. How are you going to get stuff done if you can’t stand looking at your ugly app? If you enjoy looking at your list, you’re more likely to actually use it. It also helps if navigating the app feels intuitive to you. When a thought pops into your head about something you must do, you want to be able to capture it quickly so that you can forget about it and get back to what you were doing.
Second, every to-do list app comes with tools and features for organizing your tasks and lists. These features need to match up with the way you think. For example, if you are a highly visual person, you might find that color-coding your lists or tasks that are high priority is important. If you are a deadline-oriented person, you might want to make sure that you can sort your tasks by due date or put them into a calendar view. If you are a forgetful person, you might want an app that can send you a lot of reminders on different devices.
Third, it’s always nice to have the option to make lists collaborative. For home use, a collaborative to-do list means you can assign chores to other people or track who has purchased items off a shared grocery shopping list. In business settings, collaborative task-management makes working together easier and more transparent.
The Best Free To-Do App
Several of the best to-do list apps have a robust free tier of service. Of them, our favorites are Asana and Todoist. Asana may be too free-form for some people’s tastes. Todoist has more inherent structure.
Another very good free app is Remember the Milk. It’s a little more old-school in some respects compared to the other apps on this list, but it’s very capable and reliable. It’s also highly intuitive. You can figure out all the ins and outs of this app in minutes.
Many of the other to-do apps on this list are excellent, but their free versions are quite limited compared with the power of their paid versions.
The Best To-Do App For Teams
It should come as no surprise that our top picks for teams are also the Editors’ Choices: Todoist Premium (meaning the paid version) and Asana.
Todoist works best among small groups of people organizing relatively uncomplicated tasks, whereas Asana is better for managing more in-depth teamwork, the kind of work that changes between many hands and passes through a lot of phases before it’s complete.
To-Do Apps vs. Project Management
An ongoing challenge in the world of software is deciding what gets classified as a project management app. We take the view that project management apps fit a traditional mold of being apps that a group of people uses to manage a project. A project is a series of tasks that has a start date, end date, and deliverable. Building a house is a project. Sending a rocketship to the moon is a project. Answering support emails, however, is a series of ongoing tasks and not a project.
Some work-related tasks do fit the definition of a project but are so small they don’t warrant being tracked and logged in a project management app. Work of that nature can be managed in a collaborative to-do list app. Collaborative to-do list apps, as a category, overlaps heavily with so-called work-management apps. Asana is an app that we sometimes call a work-management app or even a workflow management app, but it also classifies as a to-do app. These types of apps are ideal for managing smaller projects or series of tasks that are ongoing work.
Let’s use the example of publishing a news story. Multiple people work on this so-called project, such as a reporter, fact-checker, editor, and production editor. From start to finish, the work isn’t so cumbersome, however, as to require weekly reports or being put into a Gantt chart to keep it on track. To publish a news story, each person involved only needs to know the order in which the tasks should get done and when each person finishes their tasks so that the work can move to the next person in a timely fashion.
So we can see how a project management app and collaborative to-do app serve the same function but at a different scale. They both keep track of what needs to get done, when, and by whom. They help us manage time more efficiently and regulate how many tasks are on our plate at once. To-do apps are simpler and cheaper than project management software. For many types of work, they’re a better fit.
Use Your To-Do List to Get
Organized
Having a great to-do list app can help you get organized and get more done, whether you want to manage personal tasks, or those of a family or small team.
A to-do app is only as useful as the information you put into it, so in addition to picking the right app, you might also want to peruse these tips for creating better to-do lists.
