I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file

Summary

I’ve tried them all. Notion, Todoist, Things 3, OmniFocus, Asana, Trello, Any.do, TickTick. I even built my own todo app once (spoiler: I never finished it). After years of productivity app hopping, I’m back to where I started: a plain text file called todo.txt. I’m not alone in this. Jeff Huang wrote about his “never-ending .txt file” that he’s used for over 14 years. Reading his post validated everything I’d discovered on my own. The Endless Search My productivity journey started like everyone else’s. I’d devour blog posts about getting things done or spot a cool app and think “this is it, this will finally organize me.” I’d burn hours building the perfect system, creating categories, tags, projects, labels. Setting it up felt like work. Then reality hits. The app wants $9.99/month. The sync breaks. The company sells out and dies. Or worse - I waste more time managing the system than working. What Actually Happened With Each App Notion: Built an entire life operating system. Spent three weeks perfecting it. Used it for two days. Now it’s a graveyard of abandoned databases. Todoist: Great until I realized I was gaming the points system instead of doing actual work. Turns out completing “drink water” 8 times a day doesn’t make you productive. Things 3: Beautiful. Expensive. Tricked me into thinking I had my life together. But I kept forgetting to check it. Trello: Turned my todo list into a board with columns. Realized I’m not a startup. I’m just one person trying to remember to buy milk. OmniFocus: So powerful I needed a manual to use it. Spent more time learning OmniFocus than finishing my actual projects. The Breaking Point One day my phone died and I couldn’t check my tasks. I grabbed a sticky note and scribbled: - finish report - call mom - gym - buy groceries And you know what? I crushed all four things. No tags, no priorities, no due dates. Just four things written down. My Current System: One Text File Now I run everything through a single text file. That’s ...