Best Todo List App for Personal Projects

I spend more time thinking about how I'm going to do something than I do actually doing it. Writing down my ideas is super important so that I don't forget what I've thought about. I needed a quick way to write down tasks and their associated thoughts or notes about how to do it. All of my projects tend to go like this - I have a list of tasks and then each task has its own set of ideas about how to get it done.

Pen and paper don't work so well - I just ended up with page after page that I could barely read.

Having to jump through multiple screens and confirmations just to create an item is too much work - that's how other apps are. Turnboards reduces additional screens, popups, and confirmations for creating items. With everything, I have tried to reduce the number of taps and clicks it takes to do things. If I have to wade through to many steps, I'm not going to do it. Most apps are like that - a screen for this a screen for that, a popup for this, are you sure you want to to this? I'm sick of it.

Turnboards gets rid of all that. You hit the delete button - it doesn't ask you - it's just gone. Want to create an item? You have zero additional screens to click through - do everything right from the action panel in the workspace. When you're done, just slide it down.

If something takes to long, I'm not going to do it. That's the design philosophy here. Creating items in Turnboards is just as simple as text messaging or writing on the Notepad app. You don't have to tap a plus button, go to another screen, fill out multiple form fields, hit submit, then go it all again. Turnboards only has a few options such as assigning tasks to other people and adding a due date. If you don't need to add those, just ignore it. The goal is to give you a tool that has the power of a full featured project management app but at the same time it's easy to use.

We are hoping for zero learning curve, and when you sign up you get some pre-filled example items so you see how everything works. 

The main reason for this app was my need for a way to keep track of long todo lists across several different projects. These are not small projects - one of them is building a motorcycle, it's actually just an adult sized mini bike that going to be made really well. As I think of things to do, I need to write them down. I used to do this on Google Keep and then Apple Notes, but I would end up with really messy lists. My project lists would get mixed up with other random notes that I would write. And these apps do have checklists that you can embed into the note, and I tried this with the Apple Notes app. I just ended up with extremely long checklists, and all the old items stayed there unless I deleted them. It was unmaintainable. Such apps are not designed for this use case.

Turnboards groups checklist items by project, and each item can have it's own state - backlog, active, or complete. It's very simple, but it keeps thing moving. Checking something off as done makes it go into the completed list, and that is paginated. So your workspace stays clean or only has a few items on it for you to look at. I wanted to avoid the endless checklist problem.

As soon as it was functional enough, I used Turnboards to finish building Turnboards. Building any app is task intensive - keeping track of lots of different technical things, functionality, and just random stuff is what app building is all about. It's a very creative process because you're building something as you go. I'll think of five or ten things todo when I'm not at my computer, have to write them down, or I'll forget them. So I would just enter them into the active column, do them later when I was working on the app, check them off, and keep going like that. My workspace stated pretty clean. I could burn through my active todo list and add more for the next coding session.

This system has worked so well for me that I've now got all my personal projects in Turnboards. A "Board" represents a project. My only issue now is finding time to actually do the things on my active todo lists.

I've found that I write down a lot of todo items that I never end up doing. Some of them are just ideas about how I should do something, but then my plans change. I take a totally different approach, so I need to go back and delete a lot of these items.

I've tried to make deleting something really fast. I don't want you to have to go to another screen, have it ask you if you're sure you want do delete this, and then have to tap yet another submit button. Turnboards is designed to be fast and not ask questions. Every millisecond that you spend on this fluff adds up, and pretty soon you have wasted a lot of time. But the energy that you waste is what turns you away from even worrying with the app at all. Past a certain point, it's not worth it anymore. I can just go back to remembering things in my head and picking up where I left off the day before. Or maybe I would use pen and paper again, which is still a good thing by the way. I still use it - I have a green notepad that I draw on with a pencil.

I've stopped using a lot of productivity/note taking/project management apps because they are just too much work. Years ago, Evernote was all the rage. Everyone had Evernote - now you never hear about it. Maybe it has a core set of users still, but other tools came along that made it obsolete. But more importantly, it tried to be everything for everyone, and that's what Turnboards is trying to avoid. Evernote became a bloated mess because it tried to do too much - it tried to appeal to everyone and ended up not really appealing to anyone anymore.

Managing todos for personal projects is simple, and Turnboards is going to keep it simple. I'm going to put forth effort to improve the platform, but I won't be added features everyone that asks. Everyone who uses a software just wishes it would do this one specific thing, and it's different for everyone. We can't build all that. Turnboards will try to be the best at organizing tasks and keeping things simple!

If it ever gets to the point where using this app is more trouble than it's worth, I will consider it a failure. I will add it to the trash heap along with many that have come before.

Turnboards should be in beta testing, but I skipped that so it's testing in production. I haven't had time to create any sort of monetization or in app purchase subscriptions, so that mean everyone gets to use it for free! Depending on if this catches on or not, I'm hoping it can stay free for personal use. Businesses can obviously pay for a subscription plan. It does have features for businesses to assign tasks and boards to employees.

Give it a try, see how you like it, and hopefully it catches on! I welcome any feedback and suggestion you might have.