Why I finally deleted NotePlan

The feature list looked perfect. The app did not.

On paper, NotePlan inside Setapp can look like a great home for tasks. Daily notes. Calendar integration. Linked references. A whole personal system in one place.

In practice, it never stuck for me. I would install it, poke around, half-commit to moving things in, then slide back to Todoist and other tools.

The problem was not the feature list. It was the feeling of using it.

NotePlan vs Todoist: the difference you actually feel

Todoist has one trick that keeps pulling me back: natural language input that feels like talking to the app instead of configuring it.

Typing something like:

Call Sam tomorrow at 3pm #work p1

and watching it turn into a properly dated, tagged, prioritised task is hard to beat. The interface mostly gets out of the way. You think about the task, not the tool.

NotePlan, by comparison, always felt like work before the work. The interface is visually dense: panes, calendars, notes, metadata. The power sits in front of you instead of behind you. Every time I opened it, I had a small moment of friction: where does this thing go and what is this screen trying to show me?

That friction is subtle. It is not a crash, a bug, or a missing feature. It is a half-second of hesitation every time you capture or review. Multiply that by a few dozen interactions a day and you end up with a tool that looks great in theory and quietly loses in practice.

Visual friction is adoption friction

Visual friction is what happens when the interface makes your brain do admin before it can do the actual task.

With NotePlan, the combination of calendar, notes, and tasks in one view sounds efficient, but it also asks for constant micro-decisions:

• Is this a note, a task, or an event?
• Should it live in a daily note or a project note?
• Am I looking at the right pane for the thing I care about?

Todoist, in contrast, is visually boring in a good way. It is a list with some filters. The natural language input means the main interaction is: type what you mean, hit enter, move on. The visual layer confirms what you did instead of asking more questions.

I wrote about this earlier in Productivity Hacking With AI: How I Let a Model Reorder My To‑Do List.

That difference is one reason a “richer” app like NotePlan can lose to a “simpler” one like Todoist. The richer app has more states to understand. The simpler one lets you stay slightly under-loaded mentally, which is exactly where you want to be when you are trying to actually do things.

The moment I finally deleted NotePlan

There was no dramatic break-up. I was using Todoist every day, and NotePlan had become an ambitious side system that never quite got fully adopted.

At some point you have to admit that if you keep re-opening the same app every few months and it never sticks, the problem is not that you have not found the right configuration. The problem is that the tool does not match how your brain wants to see work.

So I removed NotePlan from the rotation and stopped pretending it was “almost” my all-in-one solution. The result was not a loss of features. It was a gain in clarity.

The 4-app stack that replaced the all-in-one dream

Instead of forcing everything into one environment, I ended up with a small stack where each app has exactly one job. That constraint turned out to be more useful than any integrated feature set.

The current daily drivers look like this:

1. Todoist: tasks only

Todoist is where every actionable item lives. If it has a verb and a clear “done,” it goes here. Nothing else.

No notes, no long-form thinking, no project briefs. Just tasks, with natural language input doing most of the heavy lifting. This keeps the interface clean and the mental model simple: open Todoist when you want to decide what to do next or capture something you must not forget.

2. Calendar: time, not tasks

The calendar is for events and time blocks. That is it.

Meetings, training sessions, and any block of time that is actually reserved goes here. Tasks do not live on the calendar by default. If something from Todoist needs protected time, I block it in the calendar, but the task itself still belongs to Todoist.

More on this in my article My Sunday Planning Ritual: Why I Plan On Paper Instead Of Apps.

This separation avoids the usual mess where tasks and events fight for the same space and you cannot tell what is optional and what is fixed.

3. Notes app: thinking, not tracking

A notes app handles all the text that does not have a clear “do this” attached.

Project outlines, ideas, meeting notes, and reference material live here. Tasks that emerge from notes get promoted into Todoist, but the note itself stays as context, not as a to-do list.

The key is resisting the temptation to turn the notes app into another task manager. That is how you end up with ghost tasks scattered through documents that never get reviewed.

4. Whiteboard or sketch tool: structure, not storage

For planning and untangling bigger pieces of work, a whiteboard or sketch tool fills the gap between messy thinking and structured tasks.

This is where you map flows, group ideas, and see relationships. Once the structure makes sense, the actual actions go into Todoist. The board is allowed to stay messy. It is not a database.

Why “one job each” beats “one app for everything”

Feature lists push you toward consolidation. If an app can technically do tasks, notes, calendar, and planning, it feels rational to put everything there. In reality, this often creates a second problem: you now have to remember how you decided to use that flexibility.

Giving each tool exactly one job does a few useful things:

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• You always know where something belongs.
• You reduce context switching inside each app, because you are not jumping between modes.
• You are free to swap out one tool without rethinking your entire system.

NotePlan tried to be the place for everything. The 4-app stack is a set of single-purpose rooms. That small architectural change removed a lot of silent friction.

Visual appeal and intuition beat feature checklists

None of this shows up in a comparison table. Natural language input vs markdown syntax. Calendar integration vs external calendar. Daily notes vs separate notes app. On a spreadsheet, NotePlan can look like the smarter choice.

The problem is that you do not live in a spreadsheet. You live in the interface.

If an app feels visually heavy, if it asks micro-questions before it lets you act, if you keep bouncing off it even though you like the idea of it, that is data. Ignoring that and chasing features is how you end up maintaining a system instead of doing the work the system was supposed to support.

Deleting NotePlan was basically admitting that intuition and visual comfort matter more than theoretical power. Once the tool stopped fighting my habits, everything else got simpler.