It appears to tick every box

On my recent post about Things and other task management apps, Tom Atkins pointed out that Todoist recently satisfied both of my particular requirements: repeat tasks a period after their completion date and (in the paid version) have both “when” and “deadline” dates. It also has a Kanban board view of lists, which I’d either missed when I gave the app a try a few months ago, or had forgotten.

One extra bonus about Todoist is the philosophy of the founder and CEO, Amir Salihefendic, described in the post Why We Don’t Have an Exit Strategy (it’s annoyingly undated on the page, but the HTML says it was published in February 2016, last modified in December 2019).

The gist of it is that “taking VC funding or debt on unfavorable terms” can, and often does, result in losing control of the company and hence its direction and purpose. Or you can get acquired by a larger company but “most acquisitions outright kill your company.”

Sure, acquisitions are a way to make yourself and your team wealthy. But they are also a highly probable way to stop your mission.

Another option is to IPO, but “the major problem of being a public company is that the stock market rewards short-term thinking and the stock dictates your direction,” or you end up in fights with activist shareholders.

Some of the writing is a little self-help-tech-business-book, and the use of Mark Zuckerberg being a favourable example of not losing control would always have been a bit “really?!” And I’m sure there are companies that state many laudable aims but actually have plenty of business and workplace problems.

But, caveats aside, given everything, it’s still nice to see a tech company actively stating that they believe in sustainable growth, and treating employees well (“European vacation days”, working from any location, etc.).

And, of course, I was extra tickled that the section on acquisitions linked to my own Our Incredible Journey Tumblr.

§ So I’ll definitely be having a closer look at Todoist, because it appears to tick every box, even if it means a subscription of £48 per year for all the features. If there’s ever an update to Things – something that seems like a regular topic on r/thingsapp – I wouldn’t be surprised if that added a subscription too.

Whether I’ll switch to Todoist or not is another matter. As Russell wrote in his post about mine, after so long, using Things is a habit, and the older we get, the more useful such habits are.