Tell me about your experience with productivity apps

Question

There are tons of those apps: Any.do, Todoist, Microsoft todo (Wunderlist), Things, Omnifocus, etc. I want to do a small research on the use of those apps. I am thinking about three types of readers1. The user: A person who actually use a productivity app * What app do you use?* What are the features you use a lot?* What are the most cumbersome features you wish they didn't exist?* Have you ever been in a situation when you are using an app and you say "I wish I could do that"?* Have you tried other apps before using the actual app? Why did you quit?* Are you using different apps to organize a workflow? Tell me about it.2. The traumatized user: A person who once used an app (or several apps) and then decided to never use an app anymore.* What drove you to quit the app?* How do you manage your time without the app?3. The person who never used an app:* Why you didn't consider the option?* Do you have some particular fear/need (privacy, accessibility)?Feel free to talk about anything that I didn't ask above. I want to listen to you.

devchris10 · Accepted Answer

Not really feature specific, but I've thought about this issue for a long time now. I personally want to move a central application where location of user data can be chosen (s3, dropbox, etc). Mildly considering building an opinionated app for myself and open-source for devs, and paid for non-technical people.
IMO, paper/pencil is great for spontaneous unrestricted flow and manual transcription has shown to be better for synthesis than typing. But the advantages of digital in terms of persistence and accessibility is just too great.
For me, the biggest issue of productivity apps is they don't distinguish between "timeful" data (tied to dates like deadlines or calendar events) and "timeless" data that are more for recall and knowledge store. That's why our tooling is fragmented between todos, calendars, storage, and editors (sheets, docs, etc).