Comment by eisleggje

I have been a long-term user of a todo tool called taskwarrior: https://github.com/GothenburgBitFactory/taskwarrior

One of the most interesting aspects of this software for me is that it autocalculates an urgency score based on various information about the task which is broadly similar to the Eisenhower matrix: whether a task is a dependent or blocking another task, due date, its priority, etc. You can set it to have urgency inheritance, meaning chains of tasks will inherit the urgency score of tasks they block. I use a personal script inspired by a script someone wrote to bump the urgency of tasks if they are due at a time when a lot of other tasks are due. The original one is here, but my own is a bit more involved: https://github.com/00sapo/TWDensity

I find this approach very helpful as someone with diagnosed ADHD. However, it's not a silver bullet. With my habit of putting a lot of things into the list, the urgency scores can sometimes become a bit of a black box, where some stuff that maybe isn't that urgent gets bumped because it blocks something that is. This is of course it working as intended, but it means you can spend more time fiddling with dependencies and modifying the task list than you do... doing things.

It has some rough edges, and lacks a lot of flexibility. For example, how recurrence currently works (though there are some ongoing PRs to address this). Or that your tasks are kind of isolated and hard to link up to notes, files, etc. The list based view in general is not ideal for many kinds of project.

I've tried many other todo tools from kanban boards to things like amazing marvin, and this is really the only one that stuck. Sometimes I neglect interacting with it for a long time and use paper instead.