I’m terrible when it comes to organizing my time. When I don’t have anything to rush me and literally kick me in the butt with “You have to do it!” I prefer spending my time slacking around, playing games and doing absolutely nothing. Yes, I was born lazy and the only thing that keeps me organized are the to-do lists.
I’ve used quite a few desktop and web-based applications so far and the only one that stood out for me was Todoist, where I even have bought Premium membership. It’s not expensive and makes lots of things easier. Since I switched to Mac I started using Things, but I was not quite amazed with it – it was simple to the bone, too simple for me, there were a lot of things in Things that pissed me off, so I moved back to Todoist.
In search of The Holy Grail of Desktop To-Do Applications I found this news about The Hit List on TUAW. I read all about it and decided to ask Potion Factory for the private beta access. It didn’t take long when I got an e-mail with a response that I’ve been granted beta access and they want my feedback when I get the application. Here are some quick thoughts that I got after migrating my Things to The Hit List.
What I love about Hit List
First thing that I absolutely love about THL is the looks. It looks great, like an old paper index card that I used to write my todos on. Ok, I can’t handwrite in Helvetica, but besides that, it’s almost the same.
Second thing I love is tree-like structure of tasks. You have projects, subprojects, lists, tasks and sub-tasks. I found sub-tasks very handy on Todoist and I’m happy to have them in my desktop application.
Third thing I love in THL over Things is totally customizable tabbed interface, where I can put my lists, projects and everything my crazy mind forces me to. I miss drag-and-drop functionality a bit (I mean I pick up the project and just wham it into the tabbed interface to make it a tab), but hey, it’s a beta after all.
And the last thing I absolutely love after my first contact with The Hit List is prioritizing tasks. I don’t think Things got this feature, but I loved it in Todoist and I love and will love it in THL. I am a very specific person and I like to order my tasks not only by due date but also by priority. This makes me skip “could have” tasks and focus on “must have” and “should have”. Sometimes I skip overdue low priority tasks just to focus on high priority that has a longer due date. That’s the way I work. Period.
What I’d like to see in Hit List
Of course it’s not all candy in the beta and there are few things that I’d like to see and few things that struck me after coming from Todoist.
What I didn’t find when I ran Hit List for the first time is dock icon updating with number of tasks that I have due and overdue. That’s a very useful feature to be able see how much you have to do without opening the actual application and I think it’s not hard to implement for the developers. Definately a must-have thing.
What I’d like to see (not as a priority though) is some kind of automatic import from other applications, both web and desktop based. Application seems to have similar feel to some other applications I’ve seen before (including my favorite Todoist again), the lists mechanisms seems quite complex and I’d like to see some automagical two-way sync features with applications that have an open API. I think it wouldn’t be a big problem to import simple lists like Remember The Milk or Things and I hope developers are smart enough to handle more complex to-do applications aswell. Anyway, that’s a song of the future, but definitely a should-have.
Another future feature request from me would be making the task notes easier. I don’t want to change my view from task list to one task just to take some notes on it – I just want to double-click or unfold it in the list to update the notes. Things does it very nice and I think it’s the way it should be done. This extra view with one task + notes is great, but not very practical, to be honest.
One thing that struck me is not propagating the task due date upwards. I mean, let’s say I have a task “Do housework” and subtasks “Do laundry” with 31/12 due date and “Do some cleaning” with 06/01 due date. What I’d like to see is due date 31/12 of “Do housework” task updating with 06/01 after I do my laundry and whole task automatically closing when I complete all the subtasks. That’s what Todoist has and what I love about it the most. I love making my tasks a tree, makes me feel more comfortable (maybe because I’m not overwhelmed with the list of things when I start the application)
Overally…
To sum up, I’m quite happy that I found The Hit List and the guys allowed me to use the beta. I’m very happy with what I can do with The Hit List now and I hope that few of my thoughts will make it into the final version. If yes, I think I’ll be very eager to drop all the applications I used before to switch to THL. It’s great.
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