After having written a rather long rant about todo apps I wrote over two years ago, I have switched away from Things about two weeks ago.

The one or the other might be wondering why I did that, and it is mainly for two reasons:

1. Platform support
2. Karma
3. Progress

Platform support?

Well, I recently had to switch to an android due to hardware failure twice and both time I had to painfully realize that Things does not support anything that has no apple on the back, which was rather annoying because I did not want to afford an intermediary apple device when mine was only waiting for it’s repair. Thus I had to look for alternatives, at least until I could go back to Things.

I tried Wunderlist (again) which works well but just does not offer me the kind of power user options that I want to have, so noes. Then I tried Todoist, which I had looked at a while ago already, but which was not really ready then. But it turns out by now the apps are pretty alright.

Neither of them (iPhone, Android, Mac or Web) are nearly as good as the Things app was, but I know that I will be able to still use it in case I switch away from Apple one day.

Karma

But that was only the necessary condition to use an app, it was not really sufficient. But throughout using Todoist I realized that the app offered me a feature called Karma. So what is Karma about? Essentially it is kind of a gamification thing. You get points for using the app, completing tasks and achieving your daily tasks. And then there are certain levels for a certain amount of points.

A screenshot of my Todoist Karma

This had me hooked pretty fast. Before Todoist I was simply trying to get my todo list to zero, which involved a lot of moving todos around instead of actually doing that. Now I actually try to complete my todos, because I will only reach my goals and complete my todos, when I complete them, not when I have an empty todo list.

Furthermore with Todoist - for the first time - I have the feeling that I actually know what I got done. While all the other apps I tried tried to hide from me what I had done, Todoist gives me an overview of my work over the last few days and last few weeks, which gives me the feeling that things I did do not just disappear but actually make me happy.

Progress

And that was it. Now I have my iPhone back but I am still using the inferior Todoist app, because I don’t want to live without karma anymore. And well, from what I can see, the timeline I predicted for Things 3 was wrong: it was promised for iOS 8, I predicted it for iOS 9, but it looks like it is gonna be iOS 11 until they finally release anything, while the Todoist apps seem to be under heavy development all the time, which means Todoist gets better all the time.

And I did not even speak about the fact, that Todoist supports collaborating with other users on todos and project, which Things doesnt. This will definitely come in handy at some point.