The Problem With Putting Things Off...

…is remembering to do them again.

A couple of weeks ago I started out trying to use Due as a replacement for the Reminders app that comes as standard as part of iOS, and prior to Mountain Lion was shoehorned into iCal in a completely unusable form. I was hoping to also bin The Hit List as the cost of the paid sync service just does not seem worth it, especially if the reports of it being rather buggy are to be believed.

Due has proved itself to be very good at “Fixed Time” reminders. I could write pages that are basically just a copy of the app’s feature list, but I won’t. You can check out the site yourself if you want to see all it does. It is a very well designed app, which makes using it very quick. I particularly like the auto snoozing reminders and that it handles natural language parsing for picking up dates and times out of the reminder text. My experience of the sync (iCloud) has been flawless. Where it falls down however is “someday” reminders. If I see a link for something to download later, I want to make a reminder, but it is not time constrained, I just want to go back to it at some point in the future.

I’m still going to keep using it, as it does fixed-time reminders very well, but it cannot completely replace my current workflow for now. I’m still looking to get rid of The Hit List however, so, with the upgrade to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion I’m going to give the desktop Reminders app a try. The first step to this was moving my script that automatically added any tweets I have added to my favourites as reminders to work with the Reminders app. The new version is on my GitHub account and works with the same configuration as the version for The Hit List.

Obviously, Reminders is not as powerful a GTD solution as The Hit List, but at this point in time I do not need all that added power, so I’m looking for a simpler solution that just works.