Simple yet powerful task management with Todoist

Over the past years I've been using task managers on and off, but one I always come back to is Todoist. While there are certainly more powerful options out there (Remember The Milk), Todoist, to me, is the perfect balance between power and simplicity.

If you take a look, you can't argue that it has a superb no-frills interface, and you can shoot out and manage tasks very easily. It supports inline tagging (use @tag to quick tag a task) and priorities (use !p1 or !p2 or !p3 to quickly add a priority), notifications, task indentation for hierarchy, and a handy search box, which you can use to search based on any word, or task data.

So far this is not unheard of for task managers, I just simply connect with this one better than others. However, where I feel Todoist excels is that it offers a wide range of ways to add tasks, best of all, complete Launchy integration.

If you log in, and go to Todoist Help (if you have no tasks yet, you should see this page displayed anyway), you can see a section named plugins. Apart from finding Netvibes and iGoogle and a Mac dashboard widger (all excellent), you can find instructions on how to use Launchy to add tasks without even opening your browser. I usually find that ideas come in the stupidest situations, where I don't want to be distracted from my work, so pressing alt+space and quickly typing a task is much easier than going to the site.

Another way you can use laucnhy is from your iPhone, using the application named Doings. I have not tried this personally, I will purchase it in the next few days, so if any of you have first hand experience, share your thoughts in the comments please! It looks as simple as the online counterpart, and supports offline mode too, so you can be sure your tasks will all be there wherever you are. Apart from the name sounding like something you do on the toilet, this seems like a perfectly usable application.

If you really love Todoist, you can also opt for a paid version. The developer stylishly chose to include features in the paid versions which only the most avid users need, so the free one is extremely useful on its own. The paid version gets you Email, Phone, or Twitter reminders, an improved label system and SSL security. At $3 a month, if you really need these, I think they are at an affordable rate.