My previous attempt at reviewing Any.do was a bit of a failure. I felt my experience was left hanging in mid-air or like a book left open at the last chapter. Over many years I have experimented with all manner of task managers. I have Toodledoed, Remembered The Milk, and sought Yogic task management bliss with Asana. I played with TickTick but found it too flaky. I remember a thread on the app’s sub-Reddit regarding how secure it was being Chinese. I pondered to test this by adding “Assassinate Xi Jinping” for the following Thursday as a task but thought better of it.
In the end I settled on Todoist and have been a premium user pretty much since the service launched. This does not stop me from looking at other services, hence the exploration of Any.do.
This time around I decided to approach it from a different perspective. Using the Android app, I could create tasks and calendar events which would sync across my mobile devices and desktop and browser apps. However, with the desktop/browser, I cannot create events. This puzzled me then and it still does to some extent, but after a “conversation” with an excellent tech support executive I realised that if I create an event in a mobile app or Google Calendar, this worked reasonably well. Syncing was instantaneous, but an native Any.do calendar module still makes better sense as it removes Google Calendar from the equation, especially if you are trying to de-Google your life.
Any.do is a freemium app and while the free version gets you through the basics easily, paying a modest amount for the premium version gives you a stack of added bonuses. These include advanced recurring reminders, customised themes, WhatsApp reminders, colour tags, location reminders (mobile) and an unlimited daily planner. The advanced reminders, colour tags and daily planner were reason enough for me to go premium. Coloured tags help me easily remind me which list a task is in, although on my smartphone the tiny tag dot is hard to identify if you have aging eyes.
Any.do integrates with a lot of third party services including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom / Google Meet, WhatsApp, Gmail, Google Calendar, Zapier, Jira, Trello, Clickup, Asana and Todoist. If you are into Zapier the list adds a stack of extra third party services to link to. The web site says you can link to 5000 separate apps via Zapier which makes my brain start to spin.
At the core of Any.do is My Day. This is a private space in which you can plan your day using tasks or events, enabling you to prioritise things that have to happen on a particular day. This is done by using with the Reminders or Events tab and drag and dropping either a task or an event into the My Day space. You can also chose the time when the contents of the My Day module resets it, wiping out all previous content and allowing you to start afresh on a new day.
As a retired old fart, I do not need the workspaces module but this is an interesting collaborative tool for teams. I won’t go into this is any detail but you can tread more about it here https://www.any.do/chat-and-collaboration/.
Another interesting feature is the ability to set reminders for geo-locations. You can set it to fire up when you leave a specific destination, i.e. home, or when you arrive, i.e. a supermarket. I am not sure I will ever use it. If I drive to my local supermarket, I know when I have arrived and the purpose of going there.
One area which Any.do wins over Todoist is the ability to create lists and sub-lists easily. For example I have travel lists for various trips and sub-lists can include areas for documentation, clothing, equipment etc. It is so quick, spontaneous and intuitive.
So, to sum up, for me Any.do is a fast, powerful task management service with a beautiful, clean interface that syncs almost immediately across a range of devices. Will it take over from Todoist? We will have to wait and see.
See more here: https://ambassadors.any.do/?fpr=kevin-86
