It started with a keyboard shortcut
I used to be on Microsoft To Do. The problem: I couldn’t just “jot it down the moment it pops into my head.” On Mac, specifically. On Windows I could pin it to the taskbar, hit Win + number then Ctrl + N, and that was fast enough. On Mac there was basically no global quick add. Open the app, find the input box, then type. More than once, the thing I wanted to capture was gone by the time I got there.
So I started with one simple question: is there an app with a built-in global quick add?
A few candidates came up. Things 3 has the best input feel if you live entirely on Mac and iPhone, but I bounce between Mac, Windows, and mobile. OmniFocus is for people doing serious GTD, which was overkill. TickTick is all-in-one with tasks, calendar, habits, and Pomodoro, but that wasn’t what I wanted. What was left was Todoist.
”The first app that had everything I wanted”
My first requirement was simple: I should be able to capture a thought instantly, whether I’m at my desktop or on my phone. The moment an idea or a task surfaces, I want to dump it somewhere. Todoist nailed exactly that. What I actually said after trying it: “This is the first app that has everything I wanted.”
What did it have?
- Capture: a global desktop shortcut that opens an input box without switching to the app.
Option + Spaceon Mac,Ctrl + Spaceon Windows. It parses natural language, too: typedoctor tomorrow 3pmorevery monday workoutand it figures out the date and recurrence. - Sort later: throw everything into the Inbox first, organize later in one pass. Because you just dump it, your train of thought doesn’t break. “Write it down first” beats “organize it well.”
- Projects + sections: you can split a project (category) into sections underneath.
And you get all of this on the free plan. Free caps you at five projects (Inbox included), which is plenty to start as an individual. Tasks, projects, due dates, priorities — all there.
One more thing struck me while using it: “the devs really sanded this down.” It’s not an app with a pile of features bolted on; it’s an app that stripped away every extra step between having a thought and writing it down. Projects, sections, labels, filters, priorities, recurrence are all in there, yet on first open it looks like a single input box. Complex, but it doesn’t feel complex. All the product effort went into not interrupting that brief moment when you jot something down.
The real strength was elsewhere: the API and MCP
If that were all, this would just be “a good to-do app, recommended.” What sealed it for me was this: Todoist opens up an API.
At https://api.todoist.com/api/v1 you can read and write tasks, projects, sections, and labels. For auth you just grab a personal API token under Settings → Integrations. Using the API itself is free, and even on the free plan you can pull the basic todo data — tasks, projects, due dates, priorities.
Most users never need this. But for someone like me who wants to bolt on automation, it’s the biggest thing. Put simply, Todoist has two faces:
- For humans: an instant-capture input box behind a global shortcut
- For automation: a task store you read and write over an API
Having both in one app is the whole point.
Next up: actually wiring it in
That’s the case for “why Todoist.” The app catches your thoughts before they leak, and on top of that it leaves an opening — an API/MCP — to bolt on automation. I did plug into that second opening, wiring my task management into a single capture → sort → plan → execute line. But the story of why I started with a sorting skill and why I build and sand down skills first belongs in the next post.
Wrapping up
Picking a to-do app sounds trivial, but for me it was about finding a tool that doesn’t let thoughts leak away. Todoist did that for free, and because it also opens an API/MCP, I could extend it to fit how I actually work.
On a feature checklist, other apps look similar. The difference was whether there’s an opening to layer my own automation on top.