Comment by jasode
1 day ago
I've had a plain TODO.txt file for over 20 years so I agree with all the benefits the author mentioned. However, I don't like it because without an app, there's no runtime loop to notify and alert me of what's coming up.
This means I don't have "ambient awareness" of what's going on unless... I open the TODO.txt file ... manually scan it... then rescan it again and again multiple times per day. It's really tedious and inefficient to manually re-read the same items again. Offloading repetition like that is what computers are good for. I just don't have a good app at the moment to turn my TODO.txt into something I don't have to manually eyeball all the time.
So even though I have a tasks in my TODO.txt, a lot of things still falls through the cracks because I forget I need to do them.
If you have the type of brain that has a built-in "6th sense" of tasks that need to get done, a lightweight-no-runtime TODO.TXT will work fine for you. But it's definitely inadequate for me and I need to fix that.
EDIT replies to "use calendar for reminders" : Yes, that's a workaround but I've resisted doing that because I wanted the utopia of my TODO.TXT file being the Single-Source-Of-Truth instead of manually copying items to Google Calendar. (Yes, I know that "perfection is the enemy of the good" and all that.) The way other people do it is they make Google Calendar itself the SSOT. But that defeats the purpose of the freeform flexibility of the TODO.TXT that has all the notes, etc in addition to tasks.
I want my TODO.TXT to be a unified view of everything I want to do in life and splitting some items off into Google Calendar is just more digital housekeeping I wanted to avoid.
The way I'd prefer to use Google Calendar is via the developer API to programmatically add entries that's based off of my TODO.TXT. E.g. : (https://developers.google.com/workspace/calendar/api/guides/...)
... but that requires an active runtime loop ... like a Python script constantly scanning my TODO.TXT and then automatically populating the Google Calendar. I just haven't gotten around to coding that yet. Yes, the irony is that meta-task to enhance my TODO.txt is already in my TODO.txt.
I want to address the underlying philosophy behind your edit (and also your original comment). "Perfect is the enemy of good" is not just "all that." It is the thing, the critical design constraint. Computers are a hundred years old. If you believe all repetition should be offloaded to computers -- it sounds like that isn't working for you? I'm in the same boat, and I reacted by.. reducing my standards. I have a tool. It isn't perfect and there are no signs it's going to get perfect in my lifetime. So I don't wait for perfection. I get on with my life. Even if computers will be suitable for all repetitive tasks in another hundred years.
I do have a single source of truth, and it's my todo list. However, I manualate to keep it thus. When I add something to the calendar, I copy it over to my todo list as well.
I don't do this for everything, only stuff that improves my decision making. So an appointment with a barber can just be on my calendar. Long todo lists intimidate me anyway, so it would do more harm than good cluttering up my view of critical decisions I need to make. Stuff like, "what should I make next," or "how should this thing be designed?"
So if manualating seems like too much work, I'd suggest that maybe you're taking on too much in the critical decision category, in which case you might make better decisions by focusing on fewer things. But yeah, YMMV. This is how I think about it and it works well for me.
What do you mean by coming up? Like a deadline?
For event-based things I tend to have a reminder on my calendar. If things are relatively important, you'd assign them some kind of priority; in a simple .txt file, I'd expect them to be at the top for instance.
If the file has too many important tasks (such that I lose track of them), it means that at least some of them are not actually important and they should be revisited. IIRC that's the point of the weekly review mentioned in the GTD book: don't assume your workflow keeps working as you use it, there is some regular maintenance involving taking a step back and revisitings tasks, prioritizations etc.
Another way to solve this is to use Fossil. Fossil has a built-in wiki. You can launch Fossil UI and use the built-in wiki with Markdown. Have legacy txt files? Just open a new fossil project and add them to it. And if you set up the admin and user correctly, you can mirror your notes to GitHub. So, it's not that text files are not a good option. There are vastly superior options with almost no effort.
Fwiw, this is pretty much a slam dunk usecase for current LLMs.
Vibe code a script that parses your existing text file and creates events in your chosen calendar app. Then run this script on a schedule
Explicitly tell it to add a tag or anything else identifiable so it can Auto remove/update the events on changes etc.
You'll have a PoC in minutes and will likely be happy with the result within an hour, if you're using Claude Code
I've been running a text based todo/status doc for about that long and my hack for that particular problem is to occasionally do a scan and copy anything 'active' to the top (or bottom if you append to the end :) of the file. Yeah, there's a bit of duplication there (I usually just copy a short description and a pointer back to the date of the original so not so bad..), but it works for me.
Surely this would be easy to fix with a simple script that runs on a VPS to alert you on a platform of your choice, maybe using something like Apprise (https://github.com/caronc/apprise). Get the notification as an email, on Discord, Signal, etc.
This does complicate the system a bit, but still low overhead in my opinion.
Congratulations you invented a calendar with notifications. Which already exists on every digital device, it existed on Nokia phones 30 years ago :)
I use the Unix way and multiple tools.
If something has a date attached, put it on the calendar.
If something is time sensitive add alarms as needed (calendar notifications have not been doing it for me in the last 5+ years)
20 years ago it was text file + Unix calendar + crontab + something custom.
These days it's text file + calendar + clock app + something custom.
I use a very basic system similar to this idea of running TODO.txt, but they are notecards i write every day. I sit them Infront of me and any timed tasks go onto the calendar. Outlook Calendar has notifications so those are my prompts for time based activities.
i realized either it's pen & or paper or .txt this was a 10+ year experiement and i wasted alot of time finding and building workflows and none of them sticks more than .txt file (i also had a more automated version of it in macos using .txt file and macros that time blocked my calendar but it was too restrict)
nothing falls my mind i can just add #note #<project> #idea or whatever consistent tagging or subnotes i can do the todo.txt and it'd be easier to even feed it to chatgpt/or what everllm to even remind of my most important ones in the future and send me notification in telegram or something.
It's a big upfront investment but it's one of the things that Org mode with its built in agenda view is fantastic for. I've really never needed anything else for note taking and scheduling.
All you need is cron.
<to the tune of "all you need is love">