zushi's place

Given that I decided to migrate from Microsoft To-Do to Notion recently, I spent some time this weekend looking into writing my own Microsoft To-Do exporter (official exporter is broken) and testing out Notion's capabilities.

The Microsoft To-Do part went better than expected, all things considered. The public API hides some folder structure information about that I needed, but with some additional web scraping I'm about 85% sure that I can get all my data exported.

The Notion Importer part was a bit more questionable. To my disappointment I found that task descriptions cannot be exported or imported. This is not quite up to par with what I'm looking for.

So I shopped around a bit more for alternatives, and one option that I looked at briefly early in January seems to be a promising candidate – RememberTheMilk (RTM). It looks like this:

It's kind of cute!

RTM's been around since 2004 (!!) and seems to meet all of my minimum requirements: 1. Good keyboard shortcut integration. 2. Android widget app. 3. Expressive public API. 4. Don't lose data. 5. Good search feature. 6. Excellent export feature. 7. Support for offline use. 8. Few crashes. 9. Cross-platform.

(Well, “few crashes” remains to be seen).

As for my nice to haves, referencing the list again: 1. Multi-layer nested pages. 2. Automatic sync with Instapaper. 3. Automatic sync with Kindle. 4. Automatic sync with Audible. 5. Good app longevity. 6. Suitable for long-form quotes and notes. 7. Good developer community. 8. Don't have to write my own service for it. 9. Integration with Anki. 10. Ability to sync with Twitter. 11. Cross-linking functionalities.

I saw RTM has IFTTT and Zapier integration, so it passes all the integration stuff. Longevity is definitely not a concern, and there are a surprising number of dev tools out there for various languages. So ignoring the low pri “cross-linking functionalities” feature, the only thing it's missing is multi-layer nested pages & suitability for long-form notes.

RTM does not allow for folders of lists, and given that this hasn't been done over 13 years of asking from users, I'm inclined to think that it's more of a philosophical choice as opposed to a feature gap. TEM does have a handy “smart list” feature that lets you generate lists based on queries on date and keywords. There's also a tagging feature that can work like lists. I'm a bit worried about how the smart list feature will scale with several megabytes worth of tasks, but assuming that it scales, I can work with not having folders of lists.

That leaves the final piece of the puzzle – suitability for long-form notes.

RTM only allows plain text in task descriptions. This isn't a downgrade from Wunderlist per-se, but does mean that RTM will be less suitable for screenshot and sketch-based notes. This is a pretty common limitation of task-tracking apps, with good reasons. Pictures are incomprehensibly large – the entirely of War and Peace in English is is around 3 megabytes, about as big as any random photo you might see on a Twitter post. The storage requirements would have been tremendous, as would server requirements and coding complexity. It makes sense that most task-tracking apps wouldn't support it.

I think I'm not quite ready to give up pictures in my notes yet, but don't mind it if my tasks don't have them. If anything, the limitation should allow me to easily migrate my tasks to a different app in the future. And the fact that pictures are so heavyweight means that modern servers wouldn't give a hiccup transferring my notes as long as the code is robust.

As for note-taking, I think I'll stick with OneNote for now, and see if I can sync the text portions (with Optical Character Recognition as a bonus if possible) to a separate RTM list.

So it seems that I'll likely be migrating to RememberTheMilk in a few weeks. Fingers crossed for a painless API transaction that'll let me import my ~5 years worth of tasks and thoughts!

— Categorized under: #workflow