[midrus]

I followed a similar path.

Nowadays I just use the Notes app from my mac. I keep a primary note named "daily" where I write at the top the date and everything interesting for the day. If there is anything important enough I want to keep it for more days I move it to a separate note. If I realize I need something I did 3 weeks ago it is easy to find too. It syncs with my phone, works offline, and imposes as little structure as possible which is something I like for the reasons you explained.

[mojuba]

Same here! I think at least outside of your day job if you have one, as a tech-savvy person you should use your OS with its standard tools as the TODO app.

Of course you could find a better 3rd party mail client, probably a better Notes app too, but the improvement in terms of your productivity will be marginal (if not negative in some instances). Good OS makers copy many of the good things from 3rd party apps anyway, right?

Team collaboration and productivity though is a different beast of a problem. I hate Trello, Asana, Jira - all of them. Because this kind of tools are generally B2B, the decision to buy is usually made by the wrong people. They are generally made to please the decision makers more than the actual every day users. "Let's use X, it has the timeline feature!". Well how about its UI for actually dealing with tasks (creating, closing, moving, etc) is pretty awful?

All in all it feels so strange when looking back at the decades of the evolution of the PC (and the Internet!) that we still haven't figured out how the computers can help us collaborate more efficiently. But then maybe it's because the way we collaborate changes all the time - just take the move from corporate to modern startup-y way of running companies.