In an effort to stay on top of 2025’s #75Hard: Part 2 (Times Two), I have been on the lookout for the perfect “Get Things Done” app. Something that goes beyond being just a to-do, or just a list app. Something with pizazz! Last year when tackling 75 Hard, I used Microsoft To-Do to keep me on track, but even then, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with it. While other to-do apps are adding useful and thoughtful features every day, Microsoft has left To-Do to die by the wayside. The web version got a few updates to make it a nicer experience, but the actual app itself has not seen a useful update since about 2020.
💡What the heck is Getting Things Done anyways?
Luckily I have the internet, so you don’t need to Google anything. Here’s a quick primer on it:
Getting Things Done, or GTD, as it’s known by the productivity nerds, is a methodology designed to help people get things done. But to give you a quick rundown of the philosophy behind GTD, lets go over the basic workflow behind this method.
- Capture
Collect all your tasks, ideas, and reminders in one place. This can be through notes, emails, or an app like Apple Reminders. - Clarify
Process what each item means and decide what action is required. This involves breaking down tasks into actionable steps. - Organize
Categorize and prioritize tasks. This often involves creating lists or projects and assigning due dates or contexts. - Reflect
Regularly review your lists and projects to ensure they are up-to-date and that you are on track with your goals. - Engage
Take action on the tasks you’ve organized based on your priorities and available time.
Which leads me to my quest – a GTD app to replace Microsoft To-Do. My list of requirements are pretty simple, so it shouldn’t be hard. Right? After all, I am not a List Super User, who needs every feature under the sun. I don’t run a business through a GTD app, I don’t use a GTD app for my job, and I certainly don’t have my life in such order that I need a GTD app to manage every aspect of it.
So what exactly are my requirements?
- Easy to use
This is the big one. I don’t want to spend more time managing my lists, or action points, than I spend doing them. - Quick
When I get inspired, I am adding anywhere from 1 to 100 points to my lists. Thanks to ample time in the gym while doing 75 Hard, my mind wonders a lot. I want a quick way to capture gym-thoughts (like shower-thoughts but better). Widgets play a big part in this as well. I want to hit the plus button and have the app open to adding a new task right away. - Scheduling and repeating tasks
Apart from just adding quick one liners, I sometimes need tasks to be repeated, or scheduled for a time. You have no idea how many “free” GTD apps lock repeating or scheduling tasks behind a paywall. - Basic calendar view
Pretty self explanatory – I’d like to have my tasks show up next to my events for the day. Better yet, if they can show up when scheduled so I can plan certain days around certain tasks. - Notes, subtasks, metadata
Sometimes you’d need a to-do with more context. In this case, being able to add notes to the to-do, or a sub-list or sub-tasks, or even to only pop up at a certain place. Heck, even add in a picture, a web link, or something just to help jog the memory. - Some form of A.I
Look, humans are messy. I don’t want to have to manage my to-do. I want some form of A.I. to help. Microsoft To-Do has a feature called Recommendations where all it does is suggest tasks for My Day that consist of overdue, due and about-to-be-due tasks. It’s not A.I. but I am sure they are about to label it To-Do Co-pilot sometime soon… The GTD app should have slightly more thought-out intelligence behind it than this. - And lastly – look good while doing it
We all like good looking apps. Oh yes we do. When design meets functionality and you’re left wondering how on earth you’ve survived this long without it, then that hits the sweet spot.
I thought I found my answer in Superlist. Superlist does all this really well, but then the company decided to take a big fat dump over all their fans and charge. Not just for team access or business use, oh no! But if you want more than 5 lists, you have to pay up. And there’s no lifetime option either, its all subscription based. So that was quickly kicked to the curb! If you want to find out more, check out my Superlist review where I wrote about how good it almost is.
All of this leads me to this… Sometimes you just have to settle in order to get going, and I have settled with Apple’s Reminders app. Firstly, its on almost everything except my Windows machines. Fine, I can live with that. After all I can just “Hey Siri” to add a task. Convenient right? But being honest, if Apple Reminders ticked all my boxes (ha, get it!), then this would have been a tweet.
So in all my searching, all my trying every to-do, list, and GTD app I could get my hands on, let’s see
How Apple Reminders Compares?
In one word – poorly.
Now don’t get me wrong, this is a very suitable To-Do app with some extra frills, but it’s nothing more than what its name suggests – Reminders. It’s here to remind you. Plain and simple. The frills it offers are things like reminding you when you talk or message someone, arrive or leave a place, at a certain time or date.
So, what’s so poor about this app? Oh, let me count the ways. Using the handy dandy list of requirements I have already laid out.
Ease of use, quick & metadata
Apple Reminders is very easy to use. Its a basic to-do app after all. You open the app, press the plus and start filling in the details. However, when you try add any supplemental data, that’s when things get tricky.
The steps to actually creating a Reminder that’s useful are
- Press the plus
- Type the item
- Press the little ℹ️ next to the task name, which you can only do when editing the name so the on-screen keyboard is still up, blocking half the screen
- Fill in the rest of the details, pecking and tapping exactly what you need. And on the iPad, it doesn’t even fill the screen, and you end up having to scroll to get to the rest of the options…
So easy to use until you want to do more than just create a simple one liner reminder. Then you have all these options that aren’t following any sort of pattern. Like why do I have Tags, Location and When Messaging on the first page when Flag, Priority, Subtasks and adding an image are hidden behind the scroll? I’d like to add a task, add the subtasks, add notes, flag it or prioritise it all before I’d like to add tags to it!
Adding tasks – easy, quick.
Managing the tasks – not so quick and easy.
And the metadata – barely there…
Scheduling & Repeating Tasks
This is great. In a world where just about every list app wants you to pay for the privilege of repeating tasks, this is a welcome change. As you can see, its on the first page when you dig into the task metadata. Great place for it!
So what’s so bad about this then? You see, if you schedule a task to kick off at 12PM everyday, then every day at 9AM, Apple Reminders sends you a notification to remind you that, not only do you have a task at 12 PM, but that you have multiple tasks on your list for today. Oh my word, Reminders, I know I have these tasks – I scheduled them – and I don’t need to be reminded that I have a task coming up if its going to remind me later. This sort of behaviour gets notifications turned off!
Basic calendar view
And boy is it basic. Your tasks without due times all sit at the top of the view, while tasks that have due times slot nicely into the calendar. There not much to say about this apart from its a good start, and I hope Apple take a good hard look at this in iOS19.
Here is how the calendar integration looks on iPhone and iPad.
Subtasks
This one really gets my goat. Like this one section alone is what inspired this entire blog post. And when you hear it, you’ll find yourself facepalming as hard as I did when I realised this. Are you ready? I am not overhyping how bad this is, in fact I may be underselling it. So here it is
When you add subtasks to a repeating task, those subtasks stay completed when the task repeats.
Let me explain. You have a task that has certain steps. Let’s say, water the plants. Easy right. The main list item is water the plants. The subtasks are collect the watering can, fill it up, use to water the plants. This task is set to repeat every week. Simple concept. When it repeats, I need to do all these subtasks in order again, for each time the task repeats.
Not according to Apple Reminders! You see, last week you got the watering can, filled it up and used it to water the plants. You never need to do those tasks ever again! They’re marked as completed, see. You did them. Good on you!
It’s such a simple fix that even Microsoft in all their dysfunctionality are able to understand this and make it work. This renders any subtask to any repeated task absolutely useless. You may as well split out each task into its own task, there by creating more tasks to manage and wasting even more time manging your to-do, rather than Getting Things Done. This really annoys the living daylights out of me!
A.I. or Apple Intelligence
Siri shines here. She can answer how many tasks you have on a list, find all the ones that have a certain word in them, mark them as completed, add new things to your lists, and the shopping list even auto-sorts into categories automagically.
What Siri, or Apple Intelligence doesn’t do, is organise your tasks to the degree that some other apps are able to do. You aren’t able to have a list autogenerated, the A.I. doesn’t detect duplicate tasks in different lists. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, and I really hope Apple uses this as a showcase for their next big A.I. sizzle reel.
And lastly, looks
Look, we’re told to not judge a book by its cover, but we all know that when it comes to apps, we totally do. I mean, we live in a world with Moleskine’s Actions and TimePage, Superlist, Structured and many, many more that all look and feel incredible to use. So why on earth does Apple – the company that staked their entire image on design – get a pass with this app. It looks like a student came up with the simplest app he could, using every free asset he could find on Google and called it a day.
I am not saying it needs to be complicated to achieve this either, but come on Apple. You have the pencil shadow in the notes app on iPads for crying out loud. How did the Reminders app get no love for so long! It doesn’t even give you a nice sound when ticking things off the list.
Just have a look at the Today widgets between Apple Reminders, Superlist and Microsoft To-Do. Which one looks like it’s easy to quickly add items to and quickly to mark things as done?
Wrap Up
For now, I am using Apple Reminders because it’s there and because I have already setup my task list for 75 Hard in it. So I will continue to use for now, until something better comes along, or until Superlist comes to their senses and drops the stupid subscription for more than 5 lists.
And yes I heard you already saying “why not just use Superlist for this one particular list?”. Well, dear reader, I want to keep all my stuff together. I want to have a GTD app that contains my second brain. And I may even have found one. You see, I used Notion to write this blog post, and so far, I like what I see.
There’s tons of to-do templates I can download and use. Add to the fact that Notion is everywhere I am. In fact, the only thing Notion doesn’t support right now is the Apple Pencil… Will that be the dealbreaker for me? Who knows. I have a lot more playing around to do, but yet again, I find myself bumping up against the free tier’s limitations.
For now, I am on Apple Reminders, and dealing with all its quirks and caveats. And after all this, maybe I am more of a superuser than I previously thought…
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