I use Todoist in a very light weight fashion. I add tasks and they sit on my screen until they're done, basically identical to a text file. I've never used the points, projects, labels, etc.

It does one thing a text file struggles at: scheduling recurring tasks and adding notes to a recurring task. I have annual reminders for infrequent, but important stuff. For example, I have a recurring annual task to review my insurance. Each year, I add context and details that are easily forgotten. Then, when the reminder comes up next year, I can refresh my memory and complete the task quickly.

Totally agree, Todoist rocks. Recurring tasks are necessary for any kind of regular maintenance tasks, and Todoist supports all natural language scheduling "every month on the 15th" or "every 8 weeks starting Thursday". Textfile certainly isn't going to do this for you. Article author writes:

> Todoist: Great until I realized I was gaming the points system instead of doing actual work. Turns out completing “drink water” 8 times a day doesn’t make you productive.

Why didn't he turn off the points system if it was distracting, instead of migrating to the next shiny new TODO workflow? Not sure I understand, but I guess that might've left nothing to blog about.

Recurring tasks or tasks far into the future is what has me locked into Todoist. I love how comprehensive the plain-English scheduling is, such as "Do task every third Friday of the month". It's clearly got a lot more power than I use too.

While this may work for others replying in support of, you can't use this software without logging in. That's a showstopper for me. It leads me to believe it'll begin syncing my data outside of my local environment. Can you put details about an upcoming employer meeting there without notifying your employer you've shared this data with a third party vendor? Can you put sensitive customer information in it without a governing contract without notifying the customer? ;)

I'm a heavy Todoist user and I think it's great. I used to use org-mode, but all the Android apps I used for it were clunky and had issues with syncing when my file was concurrently edited somewhere else.

Todoist's API is pretty good too, so I've ended up building my own little webapp that fills some of the gaps in Todoist's functionality (e.g. finding a list of the projects that don't have a next action defined).

I have a similar setup in Todoist, it's just a reminder for scheduled recurring tasks like bills.

Funnily enough, I was quite savvy with the features several years ago but as my work changed and things aren't as easy to list down like a routine or in neatly defined projects and such.

And when regular tasks becomes freeform, it's no surprise that a plaintext file is sufficient.

Can you please advise on how to keep it open everyday? Many tasks accumulated there so it became an inconvenience to open it so I just write everything for today on a daily note. In this case using txt is the least resistance path but it's much less effective.

Came here to say this, thanks.

Only thing to add is that I like the "inbox" feature in Todoist (plus a single catchall project). I get overeager during the day and add a bunch of stuff. The inbox makes it easy for me to mostly just remove things I won't actually do but then file away the stuff I might for later.

I've put weekly chores into a single recurring task and do them on Sundays or kick back another day or two (or just skip) if I'm busy.

It’s hypocritical for me to offer personal productivity advice, but here I go.

Weekly chores should be on a printed checklist on a clipboard kept in the kitchen or similar. These are wholly predictable items and are just clutter in a todo application, which should be devoted to making sense of the “everything else” in life.

I must say todoist is the best kind of app for this. Not affiliated. I've been using it since 2010 and it has gone the un-enshitification path ever since. I'm grateful for it and it's everything I want to create as a maker.

Well said.

I've wondered how blueksy affords the bandwidth to let anyone stream the full firehose.

Not an answer to your question, but I suspect most people don't -- my bot (a pi searcher bot, of course) just runs on Jetstream, which is pretty lightweight and heavily compressed.

(The website in question uses jetstream also.)

From what they say, it is a lot, but it's generally on the order of a few hundreds of connections total at the moment

This is not true. There are thousands of cases at various stages still in progress. This ruling was specific to one specific avenue being pursued. Source: the body of the article you posted.

Can you quote the part about thousands or provide a source? I see that there is an ongoing executive lawsuit and one for managers but didn't see anything about thousands of individual lawsuits.

Fair point that it wasn't quoted. Here's a summary: https://www.twitterlayofflawsuit.com/case-summaries

You're not misunderstanding anything, it was just a bit lucky that the person had their phone number issued in that city. If they moved, they'd take the number with them and this story wouldn't have worked out.

Sharing location seems very different from the other things discussed in this article. Day-to-day it's convenient to have bi-directional location sharing amongst close family. It's also fairly simple to circumvent in the name of privacy (e.g. 'accidentally' leaving a phone somewhere or having two phones)

Reading texts? That's borderline abusive.

> Reading texts? That's borderline abusive.

Would you mind explaining why you think so? To me, reading someone's texts is impolite, but I cannot comprehend why it would be in the same category of misdeeds as physical beatings or sexual abuse.

Abuse is a very broad category, for example neglect and emotional abuse are still abuse.

> Reading texts? That's borderline abusive.

I’ve noticed a trend of people using increasingly dramatic language. Words like “abuse” and “harm” are being tossed around to describe conduct that really deserves blander words.

I’ve also noticed a kind of social feedback loop happening, where people hear these exaggerations and then come to believe they are victims of “abuse” when, really, someone was just rude.

Anyway, I don’t think reading your kid’s texts qualifies as borderline abuse. I’d reach for a word like “strict” or perhaps “overbearing”.

This is kind of meta, but you're taking issue with the descriptive term I've used and implicitly dismissing the possibility that we simply disagree on the severity of the transgression.

If I said a 63 degree room was freezing. That would be an exaggeration and misuse of the term and you'd be objectively correct in pointing that out. But in the case of how severe the transgression is - we can only use descriptive terms as it's not quantifiable.

I think it's far worse than rude and is controlling in an abusive manner. Reasonable people can disagree on that and we likely do. But, declaring that on I must be misusing the word seems like a distraction from that.

> implicitly dismissing the possibility that we simply disagree on the severity of the transgression

I do think we disagree, and very fundamentally. I wouldn’t personally characterize this even as a “transgression”, much less abuse. Depending on the kid’s age, I’d even call it responsible parenting!

Nevertheless, I doubt you believe monitoring your children’s texts is truly adjacent to burning them with cigarettes, molesting them, humiliating and calling them names, and so on. This is what “abuse” used to mean.

My pet theory is that this escalation in language has been part of a social feedback loop, where people have become more sensitized and less able to cope with relatively minor nuisances.

The texts part depends on your perspective. We share most accounts with my wife because we literally have no secrets and it makes life so much easier. We don't really text, but we also grab each other's phone quite often when it's closer than our own. Then again, we don't really use our phones a whole lot either, a battery charge lasts 4-5 days.

'We?'

That all sounds very odd.

> share most accounts with my wife because we literally have no secrets

I mean, I don't have secrets either, but if one of my friends from work wants to invite me bowling any scenario that doesn't involve us directly messaging each other seems just convoluted and weird.

I mean, the article specifically talks about parent/child interactions, so I'm sure you appreciate my confusion.

Right. I was referring to the "family" aspect, trying to point out that having full transparency can be both good and bad, depending where you are coming from.