10,000 Tasks Later

The year of high numbers concludes with a follow-up post to my 2024 Todoist review. The app continues to serve as my second brain and eliminates the mental load of remembering tasks. Despite being an easy recommendation for everybody searching for a productivity tool, I have noticed some shortcomings that I want to discuss here.

1. Checklists are an ideal use case for such an app. I maintain one for traveling. It includes everything I could possibly imagine. Once the list is checked-off, I can be sure to not have forgotten anything. Unfortunately, it grew quite large over time and duplicating the list would surpass Todoist's three hundred tasks limit, so I had to split it into multiple projects.

2. The reason for the task limit is stated as:

   Why place a 300 active task limit? Why cap projects to 500? These limits ensure Todoist stays fast, stable, and reliable for everyone. Having too many active tasks in a single project can slow syncing down and increase the risk of performance issues. […] That said, we're working to make our sync engine faster, so we can increase these limits.

   Todoist help

   I hope the last part is true, because performance is lacking, to say the least:

   Tasks	Sample #1 [s]	Sample #2 [s]	Sample #3 [s]	Average [s]
   10	5.85	3.60	4.58	4.68
   25	8.15	11.19	7.59	8.98
   50	20.52	15.59	14.90	17.00
   100	29.70	32.71	31.72	25.77
   200	60.66	78.19	71.06	69.97
   300	128.09	130.58	109.47	122.71

   That being said, I never noticed any issues outside of duplicating projects.

3. Markdown support is limited. I would like to see proper support on the level of GitHub. Tables and copy/paste inline images are a must, while file uploads would be nice to have. Currently, you can only add images and files by commenting on a task, which decouples them from the rest of the content.

4. Todoist will increase its annual price from €48 to €60. This won't hurt my bottom line, and I think the price is fair for the amount I use it. I support their vision of being a sustainable company without an exit strategy through acquisition or IPO. I worry, however, about the way this additional money is spent on AI features nobody asked for instead of focusing on community feedback.

Despite my criticism, I will continue to be a content customer of Todoist. I hope they realign with their community and steer away from unnecessary AI integration. Focusing on performance and polishing existing features would elevate this app to the next level. Post done — another task completed.