The Best To-Do App For Windows

Windows has a few good to-do apps up its sleeve, not to mention more web apps than you can shake a stick at. Our favourite of the bunch is Wunderlist, a syncing, full-featured and free app for multiple platforms.

Wunderlist

Platform: Windows, Mac OS X and More
Price: Free
Download Page

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  • Syncs with the Wunderlist web app and the Wunderlist app for Mac, Android, iPhone and BlackBerry
  • Share lists with friends via Facebook, Twitter and other apps to collaborate with (or motivate) each other on certain tasks
  • Add notes to tasks
  • Organise tasks through a drag-and-drop interface
  • Assign deadlines to tasks
  • Filter tasks by status or date
  • Star important tasks
  • Add tasks via email
  • Choose from several themes to personalise Wunderlist

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Wunderlist isn’t the simplest to-do app around (that would be “notepad” or “pen and paper”), but it is the easiest to use. Its main goal is to make task management simple and available on all your devices, which it does very well. Adding tasks, dragging them around, starring them, and otherwise managing them is very easy. It’s available on pretty much every platform you can want too, which is important for to-do apps — and, if you’re on a computer that doesn’t have Wunderlist installed, you can just as easily check the web app and manage your tasks from there. Plus, it’s all free.

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Wunderlist would be just about perfect if it had a few more features, like the ability to tag tasks or make them repeat. Right now, you can only filter by status and date, which is fine — and you can create different task lists — but it’d be nice to see a bit more organisational power. However, it’s a good middle ground between the features you need and being incredibly easy to use, two things that often butt heads with one another.

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If you’re more a fan of the GTD method of managing your tasks, GeeTeeDee is a great client for Windows. Its interface is very simple, but its got a lot of more advanced features that Wunderlist doesn’t have, though they can just get in the way for most people. If Wunderlist is a bit too toned down for you, GeeTeeDee is a good alternative.

If you prefer things on the other side of the spectrum — that is, super minimalist — you might try TodoPaper or our very own Gina Trapani’s Todo.txt. TodoPaper is a Windows clone of the Mac favourite Taskpaper, which puts your tasks into a very simple text file with a few extra to-do features, like checkboxes, tags and projects. It’s a bit pricey at $US30, though, so if you want something more low cost, Todo.txt is very similar. Instead of working in a window, though, you add, remove and view tasks from a Terminal application. You can use a client like Todotxt.net if the command line is a bit too intimidating, though.

If you’re OK with using a web app, you have even more options. Remember the Milk has long been a favourite of users everywhere. It’s available on multiple mobile platforms, and has a lot of organisational features (but, frankly, takes a lot of clicks to do anything in the web interface). Many people like Google Tasks for its integration with Gmail and Google Calendar, though its a bit feature-poor for those that want more advanced management. It also isn’t the most intuitive to use. If you want a more advanced to-do app that integrates with Google Calendar and Gmail, Producteev is a better option, which has some nice advanced management, helpful collaborative features, and an app for the Mac (with a Windows version on the way). Lastly, Toodledo is a very powerful manager that’s a bit hard to get started with at first, but lets you heavily customise how you manage your tasks, so you don’t need to be stuck with any one method pushed by an app.

These are just a few of the great to-do apps out there — as there are very many — so if you have a favourite we didn’t mention, let us know about it in the comments.

Lifehacker’s App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.


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