You get what you pay for

I’m an organized, neat-freak, hyper to-do-list user of epic proportions. I highly value the apps that help me stay on top of everything. Fantastical has been worth every penny, for instance.

OK, but a calendar app is only part of the battle. You also need a good GTD (“get things done”) app AKA a “To Do” app. This has been a surprisingly difficult thing for me to find. So, today, please let me complain about it. Yes, yes, #firstworldproblems, I know. But it is annoying, and I am easily annoyed.

When iPhones first started getting GTD apps, I got 2Do. For a while, I loved it. It was attractive, it had lots of features, it helped me stay organized. However, a few things soured the relationship. Chief among them: feature creep. The million (mostly unused) features in the app made it harder to use, and cluttered to boot. Plus, sync was slooooooooooowwwww. I gave it a while to get faster, but nope. Didn’t happen.

Next I tried Orchestra. In many ways, it’s the opposite of 2Do: free (yay!), uncluttered, fast sync. But, again, all was not well: Orchestra doesn’t have an iPad app (grr), orders the tasks upside-down (those due the latest are on top. Why? Who knows. Drove me NUTS) and, worst of all, the app has been abandoned by the developers. To be fair, they abandoned it for Mailbox, another great app I use every day, but still.

After that, I floundered a little. Tried Wunderlist. No go: its date chooser doesn’t have the day of the week for some unknown reason. Looked at a bunch of others, too, but most didn’t have what I wanted: easy add, a good date chooser with day of the week, uncluttered interface, sync with iPad and web/desktop.

And then I discovered Astrid. It wasn’t love at first sight: interface was a little busy for my taste, adding tasks with due date took too many steps, but it had some killer features. First, it was free. SWEET. It also had an iPhone app, iPad app, and web interface. SUPER SWEET. Sync was pretty much instantaneous. SOLD.

But then, yesterday, Astrid was sold to Yahoo!, which means it’s going bye-bye. DAMMIT.

So, back to the drawing board. I think that I have now learned my lesson: free GTD apps are heartbreak waiting to happen. Meanwhile, though, most other GTD apps are ridiculously expensive and have too many bells and whistles for me. I don’t need special commands for emails, location-based stuff, sharing info, etc. I don’t need to be able to take a picture in-app. I don’t need sub-tasks or lists. I use clear for that. (It’s made packing and grocery shopping actually pleasant.)

Anyway, the newest app I’m trying is due. It does cost a little money, so that may be a deal-breaker for some, but after my experiences, I take it as a plus. The snooze function looks neat. I don’t think the interface is gorgeous, but then again it’s simple, so that’s fine. Sync, so far, has been ultra fast. Most of all, it’s super easy to input tasks. Technically, it isn’t really a GTD app but just a quick reminder app. However, it does just about what I want: keep a list, in chronological order, of what I have to do, with reminders.

I’m hoping my search for a GTD app is done for a good long while. Only time will tell. I’ll keep you posted.