The idea of losing my personal to-do list hadn’t occurred to me. It was backed up daily to Dropbox. I’d been using the same app since before 2015 and I turned on backups as soon as the feature was available. It worked great. I’d actually had to recover from backup a couple of times when transferring to a new phone or when Android updates went astray in the early days and it was grand. Until 2Do failed me. Last week my phone died a terrible death and whilst Google’s recovery and backup for the device and apps worked great, 2Do’s data didn’t recover and was massively out of date and all broken-like. No problem, I’ll just restore from Dropbox. That’s when I discovered that nothing recent had been stored in the official Dropbox sync either. Groan. I lost a bunch of stuff. Mostly my personal task list is just day-to-day stuff but the to-do list had a bunch of longer-term project tasks (DIY supply shopping list, measurements for joinery, etc) and notes (which I can’t recall from memory). These, it seems, were lost forever. Rubbish.

Lessons have been learned!

So how do I future-proof myself from my own future screwups? I’ve plumbed for Todoist. I’ve restarted my to-do list there from memory over the past few days and it’s nice to try an interface that’s better set up around syncing across desktop and mobile (my list has always just been mobile… and before that it was paper). But that still felt a little risky in a “once burned twice shy” kind of way so I’ve set up a Google Sheets AppScript to gather all tasks each day via their developer API and save them out to a spreadsheet (with a message to me if the backup fails) - worst case I’ll end up with my tasks in a list ready to port them somewhere else should Todoist ever break.

I’ve got two “projects”/lists - recurring and one-off. I try to off-board as many things from my memory as possible - my brain is better at thinking and processing and solving problems and DOING THE TASKS  than remembering things so having it written down lessens distractions. I like a to-do list app that lets me push today’s tasks to tomorrow. It has to let me prioritise things within the day. I need to be able to close a task with subtasks today and know it’ll be back refreshed with those subtasks in X days time. So far Todoist has all that. I’ll report back if it doesn’t work out!