The TODO Silo

Yesterday I saw the news that Microsoft will be shutting down Wunderlist in 2020. I’d used Wunderlist for a time before its acquisition, and it was a decent task manager. But I moved away because while it looked beautiful, its way of working didn’t quite gel with me. (That’s also a criticism I have of Trello.)

Microsoft now have their own app, with the unoriginal name of Microsoft To-Do. It’s sorta-kinda the successor to Wunderlist, and the app they’re suggesting that current users migrate to. You can also export your data from Wunderlist as a ZIP file, although I’m not sure how useful that’ll be. From my experience with other services, it’s a nicety that doesn’t help if you want to import that data into another service.

This got me to thinking about the information I put into Todoist. While I get immense value using Todoist to organise my life, its ability to export data is rather limited. For one thing, I’d need to go to the web version of the app to even attempt that. That’s not soley a criticism of Todoist, by the way. Trello has export options too, but none let me import the data into Todoist, so I ended up re-entering some stuff by hand.

So now I ensure that any info that I want to keep for posterity gets copy-pasted to a file somewhere. One I can access from the cloud if need be.

Could it be the folks who do all their organising using plain text files, or even physical bullet journals, are onto something?