Giving Todoist A 6‑Month Trial: Why NotePlan Didn’t Stick For Me

I tried to make NotePlan the center of my life for about a year. Tasks, notes, projects, personal experiments, baseball coaching plans, supplements, everything.

It felt powerful. It also felt like work.

This is the story of why I am giving Todoist a strict 6‑month trial and why NotePlan, for all its cleverness, quietly slid out of my daily workflow.

My baseline: what I actually need a task manager to do

Context first. I am a web experience developer, I coach baseball, and I mess around with biohacking stacks that change every few months. My workdays are a mix of:

• Deep dev work on client projects
• Content and experiments for my own stuff
• Training sessions, travel, logistics for coaching
• Personal protocols: training, sleep, supplements, learning

My task system needs to do three boring but critical things:

• Show me what to do today without debate
• Hold long‑term projects without me re-learning it every Monday
• Stay out of the way when I am actually building something

If the tool asks for mental energy before I even start work, it dies. That is the bar

How I tried to bend NotePlan into being the answer

I wanted NotePlan to be my all-in-one cockpit. Notes, tasks, calendar, journaling, everything in one time-linked system sounded perfect.

So I went all in.

My setup looked roughly like this:

• Daily notes: a page per day with time-blocks and a rough log of what actually happened
• Project notes: one per project, with sections for tasks, decisions, links
• Areas: pages for Coaching, Health, Content, Clients, Admin
• Tasks: markdown checkboxes sprinkled across everything, linked to dates

I wired it to my calendar. I set up templates. I added tags. I connected tasks to specific days and projects, which feels satisfying in the same way a perfect folder structure feels satisfying.

For about three weeks I thought, this is it. I found the system.

Where the friction started

The friction did not arrive as one big problem. It showed up as a slow leak.

First leak: where do I put this?

A new task comes in. "Add pitch design section to the coaching course". That is clearly a task, but also part of a bigger content plan, but also connected to upcoming training sessions, and it should probably be attached to the day I want to work on it.

In NotePlan that simple thing already leads to a branching decision tree:

• Do I put it on the daily note and link it to the project page?
• Do I put it on the project page and assign it to a date?
• Do I also tag it with #coaching or is the project context enough?

Every option technically works. That is the problem.

Second leak: review overhead.

A classic weekly review in NotePlan for me looked like this:

• Scan daily notes for missed tasks
• Move them forward, or back to project pages, or into "someday"
• Make sure project pages still reflect reality
• Update links between tasks and dates
• Reconcile calendar events with what I thought I would do

By the time I finished this ritual I was often bored and slightly annoyed, so I did what most people do with high-maintenance systems. I started skipping reviews.

Third leak: mixed modes, mixed intent.

NotePlan is both a writing surface and a task system. That sounds efficient, but I noticed a pattern: I would open it to check what I had to do, and five minutes later I was editing some project note structure or refactoring tags.

I went in for output and got stuck in system maintenance.

NotePlan is not bad, it is just honest about its cost

I do not think NotePlan is a bad app. I think it is very honest. It gives you a lot of power, and it charges you brain cycles for that power.

If you love designing systems, that can feel fun. It did for a while. I got a kind of nerd dopamine from linking tasks across dates and projects, building my own little second brain that spanned work and life.

Then a busy client week hit, plus travel for baseball coaching. Suddenly I did not care about note linking syntax any more. I just needed a short list of things that absolutely had to get done before I left the house.

When life got noisy, NotePlan felt heavy. Not in performance. In cognitive weight.

The real cost: re-onboarding every Monday

The worst part was subtle. Every Monday felt like I was re-onboarding into my own system.

I would open NotePlan, see a mix of daily notes, project notes, archived templates, and half-implemented workflows. I could not shake the question: "Wait, how did I decide to use this again?"

That question is fatal. It means the system is not obvious from the inside. It means the system needs documentation. Which I am not going to read before coffee.

The result:

• Some days I used daily notes as the main todo surface
• Other days I stayed in project views
• Some weeks I tried to run everything through the calendar integration
• Periodically I declared tag bankruptcy and simplified everything, then slowly drifted back to complexity

I was effectively changing productivity frameworks every couple of weeks, without switching apps. That is the downside of high-flexibility tools. You never fully commit to one way to use them.

Why standard, focused lists felt attractive again

At some point I wrote a list on paper during a stressful week. No tags. No projects. A single column of things I wanted done before 4 PM.

It was embarrassingly effective.

That day I realised I was optimizing the wrong constraint in my digital system. I had been trying to build a perfect map of my work and life. What I actually needed most days was a clear next step and a way to not forget long-term commitments.

The fancy stuff, like linking notes, time-blocking directly in the editor, and giving tasks rich context, got in the way of that clarity more often than it helped.

I do not need my task manager to be a knowledge base. I need it to be a slightly opinionated, slightly boring to-do list that works even after a week of neglect.

Enter Todoist, again, but with rules

I used Todoist years ago, then bounced off in favor of more "powerful" systems. Which is another way of saying I got seduced by complexity.

This time I am doing the opposite. I am giving Todoist a 6‑month intensive trial with very strict boundaries. The goal is not to turn Todoist into NotePlan with worse typography. The goal is a durable, low-friction daily driver.

These are the constraints I put in place:

• One inbox, zero ceremony. Anything on my mind goes into the inbox. I do not care about the right project in the moment. Add first, sort later.
• Projects stay shallow. No deep hierarchies. A small set of top-level projects: Clients, Own Work, Coaching, Personal, Admin. That is it.
• Labels capped. I hard limit myself to a small set: @errand, @call, @deep, @quick. If I feel the itch to add fifteen more labels, I go for a walk instead.
• Natural language due dates only. "today", "tomorrow", "next week", "mon". No picking dates from a calendar widget unless I really need a specific day.
• Daily view as the home screen. I live in the Today view. Projects and filters are planning tools, not work surfaces.

I want Todoist to feel like a whiteboard list I happen to sync across devices. Simple, slightly structured, and extremely predictable.

How Todoist already reduces friction

After a few weeks, a few things became obvious.

1. Adding a task is brainless

There is one obvious place to throw a task. The inbox. I do not need to think about whether it belongs on a daily note or a project note or attached to a calendar event.

This sounds trivial, but I underestimated how much decision fatigue NotePlan created right at the entry point. Todoist treats capture as a separate concern from organization, and my brain likes that separation.

2. The Today view has teeth

NotePlan could show me what was scheduled for the day, but it always felt like a filtered slice of a larger system. I knew there were tasks hiding in project notes or undated lists.

Todoist's Today view feels harsher in a good way. If it is on today, it is here. If it has no date, it is not my problem right now.

This creates a simple behavior loop: each morning I clean up Today, and anything that ends up there has to justify its place. That friction is helpful. It happens at the right moment.

3. Projects feel like containers, not identities

In NotePlan I fell into the trap of designing each project note like a small system. Custom sections, clever headings, little rituals.

In Todoist a project is a colored bucket with a name. That is enough. It keeps my focus on the tasks themselves instead of how beautifully I modeled the project.

What I lose by stepping away from NotePlan

This is not a one-sided story. NotePlan does some things I genuinely miss.

• Time-linked journaling. Being able to see what I wrote on a specific day right next to the tasks and calendar events is powerful. I liked reviewing a day and seeing both what I planned and what actually happened.
• Freeform thinking. For brainstorming a new coaching program or mapping a technical architecture, a note-based system beats a pure list manager every time.
• Richer project narratives. In NotePlan, each project had a story: decisions, sketches, tasks, links. That context was great when I returned to something after a long break.

I am not pretending Todoist replaces any of that. It does not. Instead I am splitting responsibilities.

For thinking and writing I use a separate notes app that does not pretend to be a task manager. For doing I use Todoist. That boundary keeps both sides cleaner.

Task management should be boring most days

This is the main lesson for me. A task manager should be boring on 80 percent of days. It should feel like a slightly smarter checklist that never loses your stuff.

If the system is interesting, if I am frequently tempted to tweak it, that is usually a red flag. It means I am spending willpower on the map instead of the territory.

NotePlan let me build a very detailed map. I enjoyed that, but the maintenance tax became clear the moment life got busy. Todoist, used with strict constraints, feels like the opposite. Less expressive, more durable.

The 6‑month test: what will actually decide this

I am giving Todoist a full 6 months before I decide whether it sticks. That is enough time to cover calm weeks, insane client deadlines, travel, and the start of baseball season.

Here is how I will judge it:

• Did I stick with it through stressful periods or did I quietly defect to paper or ad-hoc notes?
• How often did I need to "fix" the system? If I am doing weekly refactors, it failed.
• Did I drop fewer balls on long-term projects compared to the NotePlan era?
• Do I feel less resistance when I open my task manager each morning?

If Todoist wins on those metrics, then the cleaner, more boring setup wins. Even though part of me still loves the elegance of an integrated notes-plus-tasks system.

If you are stuck in productivity hobby mode

If any of this sounds familiar, you probably already know the pattern. New app. New complex workflow. Initial high. Slow friction. Quiet abandonment. Repeat.

NotePlan just happened to be the stage where I noticed how much time I was spending on the system itself. Todoist is my attempt to swing the pendulum back toward simple, opinionated, and slightly boring.

I do not think everyone should use Todoist. I do think every builder should pay close attention to the friction cost their tools introduce, especially when life gets messy.

Your future stressed‑out self will not thank you for clever tags or sophisticated link structures. They will thank you for one short, focused list that tells them exactly what to do next.