Specific things I'm looking for in a Todo manager:

1. iPhone <=> Mac apps and syncing

2. Hotkeys + Speed

3. Shared lists (you don't even mention this until I get into Guides, but I love it)

4. Smart lists

5. Nesting

6. Pasting images

7. Projects + subtasks

8. An inbox

9. Snoozing to the future

10. Focus mode (gets rid of everything else EXCEPT for the current task... really nice as a reminder when I start a task, hop into a meeting, and flip back to the todo list to see what I'm meant to be working on and it's staring me in the face vs. seeing a long list of items). Don't think you support this - first saw it in Amazing Marvin.

Concerns:

1. How painful will it be to import from Things?

2. What if the app goes away? I don't want to lose my stuff or switch again, it's a pain. How big is your company? Are you a going concern with real customers or is this a side project that will fall by the wayside?

3. I do love not paying a subscription for Things. I like the $150 one-off fee for 18m. Would consider that.

Regardless, going to play with it today. Seems very promising!

Shame that it only nets you 18 months, and seemingly no support guarantee. I'm also curious how limitless bug fixes for older versions is going to work out. "Godspeed will never stop working" feels like a bold claim to make given enough time in "never." I've been using Things for 6 years now.

Godspeed looks interesting enough vs Things to kick the tires b/c:

1. Speed of date picking and moving todos (choosing dates in Things is a mouse operation and I do it multiple times a day. It's 2024 guys, we don't need calendar pickers when we have command palettes)

2. Image support (super annoying I can't include files in Things. Again... 2024, come on)

3. Sharing lists (can't do in Things which doesn't respect that todos are often collaborative / shared)

> choosing dates in Things is a mouse operation

Not so! Cmd-Shift-D: https://imgur.com/a/kfa6KZj

> 10. Focus mode

You're right, this is the one we don't support. But we've gotten requests for it, including from my cofounder, so its coming!

> 1. How painful will it be to import from Things?

I'm not sure if Things lets you export tasks, but if they do I'm more than happy to run a one-time custom import for you (or any other Things user). There's also the simpler way, which is copying a bunch of tasks to your clipboard and hitting ⌘+Shift+V in Godspeed to paste tasks from clipboard. It'll respect indentation and bullet characters.

> 2. What if the app goes away? I don't want to lose my stuff or switch again, it's a pain. How big is your company? Are you a going concern with real customers or is this a side project that will fall by the wayside?

Important question, thank you for asking it. First, if the app goes away, you're able to export your data from Godspeed. Currently it exports as JSON, but we're going to add other export formats in the future (as well as attachment exporting, which we don't currently support - though all your attachments are stored in a particular folder in ~/Library).

We're small right now, just a few people. But this app is pretty cheap to run and we use it every day (I don't want to brag, but I'm currently at the top of the charts for # of todos with 22,000 :p). So for what its worth, we intend to be around for a long time.

Thanks so much for the feedback and for checking it out! Happy to answer more questions, either here or [email protected]

The local Things database is just a sqlite database. https://culturedcode.com/things/support/articles/2803570/

It is extremely minimal and elegant, does everything that you're looking for (on first glance), and is completely free. Not to be hyperbolic but the interface is ingenious in it's power and simplicity. Give it a shot.

[0]: https://workflowy.com/basics/

It's not completely free. [0] A set of features are available free. The complete set of features runs > $4/month, depending on whether you pay monthly or yearly.

[0] https://workflowy.com/pricing/

I use the app for work and personal note taking, todo lists, etc. and have not run into any limitations of the free plan in the last five years of daily usage.

It's an online service, isn't it? Not a local application.

https://workflowy.com/download/

Now I use vanilla Obsidian with checkboxes - super simple, and I own the file.

There's no snoozing though - you have to cut-paste a task into a different todo list if you want to move it.

I'm sure there's also a plugin that would make it more org-mode-ish.

I wrote a template for my Daily Note which includes a Tasks section. Underneath the list of tasks for the day, I use a Dataview to create a collapsable "Backlog" section, which selects all uncompleted tasks from my Daily Notes folder with a created time before the current file. It ends up looking something like:

  ### Tasks
  - [ ] Task 1
  - [ ] Task 2
  
  >[!todo]- Backlog
  > #### 2024-03-18 (1)
  > - [ ] Uncompleted task from 2024-03-18 Daily Note
  >
  > #### 2024-03-17 (2)
  > - [ ] First uncompleted task from 2024-03-17 Daily Note
  > - [ ] Second uncompleted task from 2024-03-17 Daily Note

Here's the Dataview query I'm using:

  >[!todo]- Backlog
  > ```dataview
  > TASK WHERE startswith(file.folder, "Daily Notes/") AND !completed AND file.ctime < this.file.ctime AND file.link != this.file.link GROUP BY file.link
  > ```

Also Concern #3, is there a subscription for things? o.O

The easier I make it on myself the better.

At work, after trying seemingly everything, I think I hit my stride with Obsidian. I have a plugin to show a calendar that works with the daily notes. I setup a template for that with a todo heading and a notes heading. I treat that kind of like a bullet journal. Each day I move over the stuff that wasn’t finished from the last day. The notes section is to give me a scratch pad for stuff that I only need that day. Other notes go to their own page to easily find later (with none of that zettlekasten nonsense). If I have a lot in my mind at the end of the day, especially on a Friday or before vacation, I’ll fill out the daily note for the day I plan to be back in the office, so I can remember where I left off. I can also open up a future daily note to add an item if I need to follow up on something on a certain day. For normal meetings I use Outlook, because I have to.

At home, the above system doesn’t work so well, because I have a lot less going on. I don’t need something that requires daily interaction like that. I have been writing up some ideas for an app I plan to write that will hopefully solve this problem for me. Time will tell how that plays out. In the meantime I’m using Apple Reminders and Calendar in a pretty basic form.

I write a list of todos, check them off as I go, then rewrite that list once the page is full or after a few days - leaving off those that are done. I've found it works better than any app (and I have tried many).

[1]: https://todoist.com/ [2]: https://todoist.com/features [3]: https://todoist.com/help/articles/use-keyboard-shortcuts-in-...

I tested Godspeed for 10-15 minutes, and I'm very impressed by what they built. There's a massive difference in how it feels to me.

Beyond that, I can't tell yet. Todoist certainly has an advantage in depth of the product, but for the keyboard-driven approach only, Godspeed is top notch.

We do, however, store the data locally in a sqlite database (~/Library/Godspeed/godspeed-db.sqlite). You shouldn't directly edit it or things won't sync properly, but you can use it to easily read your tasks if you'd like!

Thanks for pointing this out to me, I got this wrong in a couple other places here too!

For (PKM) notes it’s a whole different story.

- I do a lot of my tasks away from my desk, so when I have my phone with me but not my laptop - A todo item without a reminder/due date is “dead” to me, it’s the reminder to actually do the thing that adds the value

The stock Reminders app is the only app on iOS I know of that can keep persistent notifications on the Lock Screen, even after locking and then unlocking the phone. A reminder will stay on the Lock Screen as notification until marked as complete.

Any other todo app can give me a one time notification. But if I don’t act on it, the notification is gone (or hidden below the fold at best) and unless I open the app, the todo item is again “dead” to me.

This is definitely Apple allowing its own apps access to features closed off for others, but this unique capability is what will keep me on the stock Reminders app forever.

Agreed, this is Apple taking advantage of private APIs in much the same way that got Microsoft in so much hot water in the late 90s/early 00s.

> Couldn't reminder apps implement "nagging" such that dismissed notifications are re-notified until some action is taken?

Setapp is a subscription service for Mac and iOS apps. For $9.99/mo, use Due plus more than 240 other apps. No extra fees, no ads.

HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39764919

- if the app is running on your MacBook the reminder is added as a task to your vault as soon as iCloud syncs it to your Mac calendar

- if the app is not running, next time it runs the Task will be added to your vault

How do I script it? OF's automation is a must-have, as that's how I integrate it with my other apps. Extensive Shortcuts support (ala Things) is a minimum. AppleScript or JavaScript is better.

I won't use a to-do app without a start date. Don't remind me to renew my driver's license 3 years in advance. I don't even want to see that. Everything that's due far in the future that I couldn't be working on today even if I wanted to is just a distraction.

I can't deep link directly to an item. That means I can't use it with things like Hookmark, or have a note in another app that links back to its related project.

I can't legally use it without end-to-end encryption. That's a deal breaker for anyone in a regulated industry, and I don't want to have one to-do app for work and another for personal stuff.

This looks really cool! Each one of the above items would keep it out of the running for me, though.

We don't have a story for this yet, but we will. And I strongly agree about JavaScript. In fact, an idea I really like is making that API available directly in the developer console, which we have available anyway because we're an Electron app!

> I won't use a to-do app without a start date.

We've gotten this request before and its on our list! I also really liked this feature of OmniFocus.

> I can't deep link directly to an item

This is coming soon too, I find myself wanting it all the time.

> I can't legally use it without end-to-end encryption.

Totally understandable. Once again, this is on our list, and has been hotly requested.

I SUPER appreciate this feedback. Always valuable to hear about the blockers, and you can bet I'll follow up with you when we've addressed them all!

(All of those are for sufficiently small values of "no", perhaps literally not none whatsoever, but guaranteed better than if you're storing readable data.)

What's the usecase for scripting in todo apps? Are you using it like some kind of "cron job"?

Nitpicks, but some of the ways in which it doesn't behave like a mac app I don't like. I don't like the non-native looking font. The sidebar isn't collapsible or resizable like a mac app, but I guess you could add an editor-style shortcut to toggle that. If you have a mouse plugged in you get scroll bars everywhere. It seems to maintain its own undo/redo stack? The shortcuts for undo/redo work but the menu commands for them won't.

Edit: typos

The sidebars can be collapsed with ⌘+; and ⌘+', though we also intend to make them fully resizable soon too!

You're right about the undo/redo stack, we need to improve its integration with the system so those work properly.

Thanks so much for this feedback! Keep it coming!

I'm just saying I think the buy to own price is an order of magnitude too high relative to other significantly more complicated pieces of software.

If the app enables you to do that then $150 to actually keep on top of tasks you need to do is an amazing bargain.

At the same time, there are apps like Mindkit [0], which seem to do similar things as this, but with more features, but which cost 3000 JPY(20 USD) lifetime.

Personally, the only time I can justify 150 USD for a purchase of an app is when it has as many features or is as impactful as Word/Excel/Powerpoint combined.

No disrespect to the people who made it, good luck with the app!

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mindkit-keep-things-organized/...

If it's more than a todo app, OmniFocus sets a price point: https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/

Yep, $150. So not scale or age, cuz it is the granddaddy gold standard.

I guess it’s a non-goal, but do you envision a future where you would integrate with those solutions? Of course any integration would hopefully sync lazily in the background instead of blocking the render…

Every morning I have a routine of selecting my tasks from Jira. During the day, I just try to keep Jira up-to-date. And then at the end of the day, I ensure Jira is up-to-date with my progress.

I've tried multiple times to automate them, but the automation ends up with more costs than benefits.

Integrations: Todoist ClickUp Trello Asana Notion Jira GitHub Gmail Outlook Slack

Also, they say it does timeboxing, but it's not evident they understand the notion of prioritization through pre scheduled and empty timeboxes, that tasks fill by category match, then do not overfill but spill to the next available timebox of that same category, allowing you to meta-manage your prioritization by category of task vs. amount of recurring timeboxes as a proportion of your week, rather than by task.

EDIT/ADD:

Upon review of the user manual, they seem to think "timeboxing" is the alternative to "playlisting", meaning, do you book actual time on your calendar for a task, versus, do you burn through a list of tasks when you are in task mode.

They seem to miss that timeboxing is the opposite of calendaring particular tasks, it's a third way.

If you have calendaring tasks, and playlisting tasks, timeboxing is calendaring big chunky timeboxes (not tasks) for "headspace" around sets of tasks, then playlisting the matching subset of tasks within that timebox.

There seems to be a concept of channels (#hashtags) and an ability to auto-schedule within channels, and an ability to have per channel schedules. Depending how implemented, that combination of features might allow actual timeboxing, which, incidentally, could line up well with the legitimate timeboxing offered by SavvyCal, my favorite "meet with me at a time that works for you (and me)" tool.

You should not, ever, be "dragging a task to the calendar" in timeboxing. The task should be in a class that you have a timebox for (their channels notion) and if you have unclassified tasks, you can playlist them in a "random tasks" designated timebox. To force a task to be in the next available timebox for that class, you prioritize the playlist.

Unfortunately, as someone was curious about, this doesn't support Linear, though perhaps you could do it transitively through, say, GitHub.

This one is a new app, light on features but worse conditions for the same price. Can‘t forbid to get overconfident, I guess?

Look at Sublime Text. Sublime Text 3 was released in 2013, and Sublime Text 4 in 2021. That is approx 8 years of software updates for a big piece of software, top of line. For what was it like 100 USD? If you bought it later in the dev cycle, you'd get a discount on next. And it is cross-platform and native (no Electron). So you really are looking at 1 USD per month. A bargain.

I've been looking at Obsidian and Zettlr (not exactly same) but these too are just Electron apps. Although they seem to be cross-platform, and the document format is just MD. Zettlr is even FOSS.

What Nextcloud doesn't have (for me at least) is that the MD files can be edited and viewed by me and my wife at the same time. So with regards to one use case (grocery store shopping list) that is a minus. On Google Keep it worked, sort of.

Maybe if you have a high income this is peanuts to you, but for me, it just isn't. Especially not right now.

n+60 (is now + 60m)

n-10 (is 10m ago)

t+1 (is today + 1d)

w+2 (is two weeks from now)

m+12 (is 12 months from now)

(I skipped n-10 because it doesn't support picking dates in the past.)

Thanks for sharing, it's interesting to learn about the medical shorthand regardless :)

If the date is invalid, like January 30 m+1 then you fallback to next valid date, February 28/29.

Edit: but perhaps that’s the custom used at many places and I’m just not aware.

For example, "every month on the 15th", "every month on the 1st", etc. It makes it easier to figure out compared to "every 30 days" or "every month on the 30th, unless there are less than 30 days in the month"

I use Obsidian + Rollover Todos[^2] plugin with Cmd+Enter set to cycle through checkbox states for todos.

[^1]: https://obsidian.md/

[^2]: https://github.com/lumoe/obsidian-rollover-daily-todos

I tried hard to make task management in Obsidian a thing, and gave up, it just isn't good at it. Tasks, Checklists, all way too clumsy to rely on every day, at least for me

Agreed! That's a big part of what motivated us to build Godspeed.

> Perhaps some testimonials from organisations/teams that have used it would be a better thing to lead with than a strange technical statement which most users won't understand. I'm a fairly technical sort of guy myself and I don't exactly know off the top of my head what 50ms latency feels like or how it compares to other note taking software.

Appreciate that feedback! Today is our 1.0 launch, we'll definitely add some testimonials in the coming weeks.

For what it's worth, a response time of 100ms is perceived as instantaneous [0].

[0] https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce...

That's not true. From the source you cited:

> Increasing latency above 13 ms has an increasingly negative impact on human performance for a given task. While imperceptible at first, added latency continues to degrade a human’s processing ability until approaching 75 to 100 ms. Here we become very conscious that input has become too slow

The 100ms figure was in regard to conversational interactions with a computer.

Not hosting my own data is a dealbreaker though unfortunately, so I stick with 2Do which I think is massively under-rated and has brilliant sync options. 2Do is a one man band and I'm worried we might not see another version. Making smart lists based on tags, due dates, starred, and then being able to make multiple smartphone widgets for multiple lists is not something I've seen anywhere done anywhere near as good.

Godspeed OP, this looks like a great first release and hope you make it work.

A dropbox folder for each “case”/“project”.

A dropbox folder for each outside compmay

A password manager

Some gaffing with scripting to tie it together

I think pythonista ought to be part of it too

Edit: @DanielDe - apologies for that brain dump.

You built an app and launched it - fantastic. Honestly That’s an achievement most of us on HN cannot even claim. - my honest congratulations

I hope you find a niche and make 10,000 true fans happy.

I would love to hear your views on how to stay organised in life (or rather, how shall I put this, I don’t see organised as a pre-active thing but a post-active thing. It’s like project management - it supposed to remind you of the important things, to follow you around and capture the right information (#) not control or constrain your actions.)

Anyhow - congrats. Break a leg :-)

(#) the most obvious is monitor my communications - like capture my phone calls and keep that alongside the name of the contact in my phone list. But because iOS no-one can do that. I get it but also I don’t.

Anyhow I think I want a unicorn.

Really appreciate the kind words! Indeed, actually launching is hard. Like everyone, I've got a big pile of abandoned side projects sitting in a folder somewhere.

I think we're pretty aligned on staying organized. For me, the most important bit is "capture". I need to be able to get tasks out of my head and into a task tracker from as many places as possible. Then later I can triage them.

Godspeed attempts to help with this by offering a global hotkey for quick entry, and an iOS app with Siri and shortcuts support. We also intend to add "log a task by email" soon.

Shame it appears to be abandoned.

Is this normal for SaaS?

In this case, you'd pay $150 for an 18-month window of updates, or $144 for two years of updates (or, if you like, $72*1.5 for the same 18-month window, assuming you're going to pay another $150 at month 19 for something interesting.)

Contrast that with Agenda, which is $35 to buy with 12 month of updates, or about $100 for a life-time of updates. The tradeoff is more straightforward as you're just deciding whether to bet on more than three years of features.

Or contrast with OmniFocus which is $150 for the major version, which typically is on a 4-5 year cicle, or $5/mo. In that case you're just betting that you'll use the current major version more than 2.5 years.

(I'm ignoring cashflow discount; you get the idea.)

(The app itself is fun and fast to use, and I'm not complaining or demanding special treatment. I'm just interested in how these things are priced.)

The super bubbly chime vibe didn’t match my expectations for your brand based on the copy, value prop, fact that you’re posting on HN, etc. Reminded me a bit of the flat, corporate videos I’ve seen from B2B orgs, like “look, our tool is compliant and exciting, really!” (Just the music, overall it’s fine).

Music also doesn’t match the low, quiet LockpickingLawyer-esque voiceover. Which I thought was fine, seemed sincere, scrappy, matches the brand.

I’d experiment with different royalty-free music options, and maybe lower the level a bit more and/or boost the voiceover to make it easier to understand. Hope this is helpful!

And good to know I sound "sincere". That'd be at the top of my list for how I'd like to come off!

Because task managers are storing a lot of sensitive information over time this is an important topic for a lot of people. The website should cover these questions.

"Pay once $149 keep it forever, ongoing compatibility updates + bug fixes, 18 months of new features"

...this is not old skool pay once payment. It is just one payment for 18 months of subscription to new features which makes it slightly more expensive than monthly subscription. Go figure.

With the subscription, you lose access when you stop paying.

So I think it is pretty comparable to an old school one-time payment, but with bug fixes and compatibility updates added on top.

1. “today’s commit list” which is different from “today’s list” with a one click way to “commit”. If not done that day I have to commit again.

2. Being able to hide task’s that are not currently doable (because of date interval or a dependent task not done).

3. Date interval for when something can be done is different from deadline date.

4. Share and edit one list with family members, unfortunately they use Android.

Overall I think most task managers miss that the managers are there to help against anxiety. Out of sight out of mind. It took me some time to figure that one out because I don’t notice that I am anxious.

An important question: can we sync it with our own method (e.g. Dropbox or SyncThing or whatever) or is there a hardcoded sync to the company's Cloud?

It's a matter of privacy and freedom to move the data as we see fit.

For what its worth, all of your data is stored locally in a sqlite DB. You shouldn't edit this DB or syncing may not work, but you should feel free to read from it if you'd like ~/Library/Godspeed/godspeed-db.sqlite

When you snooze a recurring task in Godspeed you use the same date picker as for setting a date, so you have full power and flexibility to choose whatever date/time you'd like. And it only snoozes _this instance_ of the task, without changing future recurring due dates.

https://workflowy.com/basics/

There are a few reasons we're not using iCloud: 1. We eventually intend to support other platforms, like Windows and the web. 2. Though they're admittedly rare, we've heard some iCloud horror stories. @DanielDe (OP) lost some files using iCloud Drive, so it's hard for us to trust it. 3. We wanted much tighter control over syncing to provide the particular experience we were aiming for. Things like live cursors for shared lists, and the way our offline experience works, are tightly tied into our sync engine.

It is not necessarily a deal breaker, one can always just export/backup regularly.

Two questions: 1. How can I keep offline without uploading data to cloud? My company won't allow me to do so and I want to manage business TODOs safely. 2. While I'm offline, how can I back up my TODOs? So I can restore them after I reinstall Godspeed?

> How can I keep offline without uploading data to cloud?

There's no first-class way to do this right now. Godspeed will work perfectly fine offline, but you can't disable sync. However, if you really wanted to, you could disable network access for the app in the Network inspector of the Electron devtools ([⌘+Option+I] to open dev tools, then click the Network tab).

> While I'm offline, how can I back up my TODOs? So I can restore them after I reinstall Godspeed?

The only way to restore tasks right now is to sync them through the server.

I totally understand if these things are a dealbreaker for you! Hopefully you can check us out again if we support something more amenable to your work requirements.

Most of them provide abstraction layers that handle low-level input events, including keyboard input, with a consistent API across platforms. They also adhere to established standards like ISO/IEC 9995 for keyboard layouts and XKB for X Window Systems.

Additionally, platforms often provide dedicated input method libraries (e.g., IBus on Linux, TSF on Windows) that these frameworks can leverage to handle different keyboard layouts and input methods seamlessly.

Not to mention the focus on localization and internationalization (L10n and I18n) in modern software development practices, which includes support for different locales, character encodings, and input methods out of the box.

While there may be some edge cases or platform-specific quirks to consider, the challenges of handling different keyboard layouts are generally well-understood and addressed by the frameworks and their active communities.

plus you can use the same vim skills and mindspace for lots of other use cases

plus its free, offline friendly, VCS friendly, backup friendly

But I really wanted more native features like shared lists, attachments, and a mobile app, which is why I built Godspeed. But Godspeed is heavily influenced by Emacs in a bunch of ways.

However, there are a couple options you could use: 1. Use nested tasks for this purpose. If task B is nested beneath task A, then B is a dependency of A. Godspeed supports infinite nesting (okay, okay - MAX_INT levels of nesting) 2. You could use labels and smart lists. Give blocked tasks a "Blocked" label and create a smart list that filters out any tasks that are blocked.

I'm currently trying out SilverBullet.md as a markdown note tool and task management. The UX isn't close to rtm, but it's pretty customizable so I'm hoping I can make it close.

Only request: hide/show done tasks (crossed ofc)

Glad you're liking the feel! What we're going for is essentially an app that "feels" great.

If there's a taskpaper or other simple text-based import format, I'd switch in a second.

Edit: looking closer, you're totally going for OF specifically! Same price point, and I think nearly-feature matched. Good job!

I'm also happy to do a custom, one-off import if you can get me any kind of machine readable file.

Congrats

$150 once for an app to organize your work and personal life is a screaming bargain.

Personally I pay less than 1/2 the sub rate they're charging for TickTick Premium, and love it. That's not to say I wouldn't pay double for what it gains me (I definitely would), but given that TickTick is a viable option - I don't need to.

Side note: although TickTick supports notes, I don't use them. I dig UpNote, another not-super-well-known but simple, cross-platform, and inexpensive tool. It's basically the feature-set I wished Evernote stopped at (super subjective, maybe too simple for most here).

With todo apps, I don't really expect the same sort of constant on-slaught of features like I do from other things. I expect it to continue to work and get out of the way. I expect the price to reflect the fact there was a lot of upfront work to get it "done" to a level where I can just use it.

[0] https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/buy/

Even the Sublime users have lots of options already. Sublime is ALSO a very capable text editor and $100.

A CLI app is not something I would want to use for something I touch every 30minutes, every day, from many devices. But I do use vim for text editing.

Emacs users have Org Mode and MobileOrg and can store the sync data somewhere they have full control over.

Pen and paper worked great for me when I did everything at a desk (or carried a notebook with me) and I was always doing deep focus work. I went digital when I started being more mobile in my work and I had a lot of contexts where I needed to jot quick TODOs as I thought of them. Also, it's difficult to collaborate with my wife using paper.

The inbox mechanic for tasks works great, because I don't need to add all my task metadata right away. I can also annotate projects and contexts so I can say "what are my TODOs when I'm at home" or "what are my TODOs related to a person on my team". Now that I'm tracking over 20 things, it's necessary to stay organized

Strongly in the pen and paper camp, myself.

"I found some results on the web. I can show them to you again if you ask from your iPhone."