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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Your shamelessness is duly noted. You cannot touch the simplicity of pen and paper. Your app works on a platform plagued by push notifications, which destroys all momentum instantaneously. You describe two points of friction in adding tasks: periods, and priority. I'm sure you have put much thought and care into these features and are justifiably proud of them. Good for you, you did a thing that you cared about.

I need task lists for the things I don't care about, that I'd rather not do. And picking up my phone at any point in that process is completely self-defeating. Having multiple options and do-dads in the task-collecting interface encourages pseudo-productivity in the form of fiddling with the list. In this case, the pen is mightier than the smartphone. If I want priorities, I have multiple colors of pen.

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I'm all for whatever works for you.

Edit: In fact, you can partly use the same system with pen and paper:

https://blog.nestful.app/spontaneous-productivity/

We're all different. Personally I can't do pen and paper.

Writing with a pen makes my hand hurt, and I can't hyperlink to other information that I'll need when addressing a task or easily delegate some task to my partner, especially when travelling.

I prefer tools that get out of my way — and I think Trello is great for this — for me personally, a good electronic TODO list gives me fewer problems than strictly pen and paper would.

If you don't care about it, then pen and paper does seem to be ideal, but smartphones have a major advantage of portability.

For me, every extra object in my life is a source of stress. Something that can be lost, along with all the information, in a list with no cloud sync.

Paper is fine around the house, for non urgent things, that I'll probably remember again next time I actually see the problem I made the list entry about, which is probably a pretty big fraction of the stuff people use lists for. Perhaps I should try a paper list for that one of these days.

But if there's any chance I might want to take something outside.... cloud sync is amazing. It does majorly create a pseudo productivity trap, and a temptation to check a bullshit notification(Made a little more manageable by Keep tiles on a smart watch), and probably is not optimal for getting stuff done.

But it sure is convenient not to have an extra item to carry.

> If you don't care about it, then pen and paper does seem to be ideal, but smartphones have a major advantage of portability.

For me, apps are a non-starter because I don't trust them to not collect and sell/exploit my personal info. Even if they insist there's zero telemetry collected because they don't care what types of tasks their users most often use the app for, a change of owner/management can change that situation without notice. The last place I want something like that is in the cloud.

I just assume they all are collecting data, not much that they can use that for besides ad targeting.

I do use Diary(The one of F-Droid) synced with SyncThing for journalling at the moment, to avoid any subconscious censorship I might give myself with a cloud app, but even then, it's not like I'm doing anything super private very often (Although I recognize that there are legitimate reasons to hide things including just not liking spying)

> I just assume they all are collecting data, not much that they can use that for besides ad targeting.

That's far from the truth. Depending on how detailed your task descriptions are. Your health insurance company could track how often you do or don't check your "go to the gym" tasks and if you miss too many days an algorithm could raise your rates since you're living a unhealthy lifestyle. They won't tell you why it happened. You bill will just go up. Your future employers could buy up that data and use it when making hiring decisions. So could a landlord.

Not only are you documenting for them all the things you struggle to do without reminders, but you also give them a list of all the times you've failed. That data could easily come back to haunt you in a court room. It could be used in a custody battle or divorce to show you are undependable and irresponsible. In auto accident if your records show you repeatedly failed to perform maintenance on your car it could make you more liable.

The problem with all the data being collected about you is that you can never know what it will be used for, but you can absolutely be sure that it won't be limited to ads and it will never go away so it can be used against you for the rest of your life.

You don't have to be doing anything wrong or "secret" for the data companies collect to screw you over. Just ask this guy: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...

You'll never know who has access to your data or what will prejudice someone against you. Best to keep as much data out of the hands of others as you can.

Apps have the advantage of handling lots of tasks and extra stuff. I have my chores in Todoist with various repeating schedules. I think I have almost 100 of them from do every week to once a year. I guess I could make paper lists of the different schedules and then each weekend figure out which ones need to be done, but the app does it for me.

I started carrying my phone with me while doing chores so I could more easily check off tasks. Carrying a piece of paper, or using text document like someone else mentioned, would be less immediate.

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