Why TickTick is better than Apple Reminders (Digital Timeblock Planning)

[@ave_smirnova]

I don't know how to explain it, but you seem like a kind person :) also, the video is very helpful! thanks )

[@DavidManuel]

Thank you! That's nice of you to say and I'm glad you found it helpful!

[@tylergriffsmith]

Great video mate, thanks for making. Learnt a lot, well produced, and you’re a good vibe. Subbed and thanks :) (also, your audio levels and choice of background music is spot on, just enough to not be too distracting and also not dead quiet to be a bit boring in between speech 👏💫)

[@DavidManuel]

Really glad you liked it!

[@4hoolie]

Thanks! I’m just starting to get my self more organised digitally. I found your video very helpful.

[@DavidManuel]

You're very welcome! I'm really happy to hear you found it helpful :) I was just talking to a friend yesterday who's also starting to try get more organized digitally and one starting place list of resource that I pointed them towards was this list from Tiago Forte (the guy behind the Building a Second Brain [BASB] brand): fortelabs.co/blog/12-steps-to-build-a-second-brain/ The main I use from his suggestions is the PARA folder (see the 4th item in the list from the link). I find it helps me with my file management a lot. Anyway, just thought I'd share that! One other quick recommendation is Cal Newport's podcast -- it's Q&A format and the answers are often really helpful. It's on youtube too, with clips.

[@DigitalCaru]

amazing channel and great editing! i am a huge ticktick fan also lol

[@omgsharon]

I have reached the end of your KZbin internet. I find your videos interesting and look forward to the next video. I love digital organizing, though I have a 20 Years of Photos project that I am finding a bit daunting. I just need to block out 5-10 minutes each day to work on it and it will eventually get done. This probably goes back to your video where you talk about motivation/action and I need to take my own advice and find a different why so I can actually start doing it. Have a great day. Keep filming.

[@DavidManuel]

Thanks for all your kind and thoughtful moments Sharon! Like you were saying, I do think sometimes it’s just a matter of splitting what seems like a daunting mountain of a task into small doable 5-10 minute blocks. It adds up and the suddenly we’re over the psychological mountain!

[@rayraman3243]

Hi David, thank you for sharing your insights. TickTick dose look more intuitive and I like it. What I didn’t like is the subscription model.

[@DavidManuel]

Thanks Ray! Yeah, that’s true, for sure! As far as free options go Reminders is a great option (if you’re in the Apple ecosystem - although there are costs to that too).

[@angelakoenig1927]

Hi David! Nice job on these videos! I have also been trying to find the perfect task management tool and integrating it with other apps and I keep coming back to TickTick. Although its a fantastic tool, I find the UI pretty unintuitive. Thanks for pointing out the shortcuts - maybe learning these will help.

[@DavidManuel]

Thank you! Yes, totally agree, their UI is pretty unintuitive in a number of ways but the actual feature-set is pretty great!

[@wherezthebeef]

Great video, also ditched Apple Reminders and Todoist after using TickTick for a few hours.. I find it perfect.

[@alexe2255]

Is there a way to shift all timeblocks that remain in the current day forward simultaneously (like how Cal Newport does in his paper-based timeblock system)? The problem I'm running into with TickTick is that if I fall 30 minutes behind schedule, I have to manually shift every individual timeblock of the day forward 30 minutes. I'd like to 'multi-select' all of them and move them forward 30 minutes as a group, but I don't see that feature in the calendar view. Thanks, great vid.

[@DavidManuel]

I wish they had that feature, but so far at least they don't. Here's hoping that becomes a thing in the future! Thanks for watching!

[@botistelockhart5078]

For time blocking have you previewed Sorted 3?

[@DavidManuel]

I have! I tried it about a year ago, but at least at the time I found that despite parts of the UX being a delight to use (especially on mobile) it was missing some features I rely on. But it felt like something that might grow over time! Have you been liking it?

[@alexanderrand1277]

Hi, I appreciate your video and clarity and I am loking to hire someone to teach me one on one how to best use ticktick. Is this something you are open to?

[@DavidManuel]

Hi Alexander, Thank you! I'd be happy to chat about that if you'd like. My email is [e-mail]

[@matrhein]

Hi David! Great video on tick-tick, thanks! We have a lot of interests in common it seems only I am not doing KZbin videos about them (yet?). While watching, an interesting hack to this time-blocking thing came to mind: Using the Focus timer, you could time-track the REAL time and duration the daily tasks took (and keep you focused in the process). You can then overlay the Focus time in the calendar and have both perspectives into one.

[@DavidManuel]

Thanks Mat! Cool to hear that you’re into this stuff too! I like the focus tracking idea, too! I do something similar myself - previously using toggl and more recently with a MacOS app called Timing. But I haven’t tried using the built in focus tracking in TickTick very much. Would definitely be cool to play with some more.

[@hugocast]

I really like your approach, I tried TickTick years ago, but realized that dragging the task into my calendar didn’t make my calendar “unavailable” for those times so people could still book meetings on top of the times that I had selected. I ended up time blocking my calendar with generic names like “Laptop Time” or “KZbin Time” or “Communications Time”. The names match my tags in Things 3 so I just look at my list whenever the time I allotted for them comes around. I still keep windows of time open for meetings with people and allocate Thursdays as a potential only meetings day. Not sure if Tick Tick supports time blocking your calendar when you drag the task inside the TickTick calendar now, but I am curious if they’ve addressed that. Great video as always, thanks for sharing your workflow!

[@DavidManuel]

Thank you Hugo! Your approach to timeblocking with a calendar app + Things 3 sounds great. Definitely some advantages to chunking time for projects/areas that way anyway.

[@DavidManuel]

For what it’s worth, one potential workaround that could be an option with the current feature set in TickTick would be to synced the output from your TickTick tasks as a calendar feed of its own and then import that feed into the calendar app that aggregates your calendar and determines your bookable times. Not sure if it would be worth it though. My approach is to use calendly for booking and give it a generic starting point of bookable time zones but then tell it to also consider the additional times during which I’m unavailable based on the times I have added events (synchronous tasks/meetings) in my “synchronous meetings” calendar to determine case by case overrides or my availability.

[@hugocast]

@@DavidManuel That sounds interesting. I agree that it may be a bit too much. The thing about doing feeds is that I am not sure the sync is fast enough and personally it would lead to a bit of cognitive stress i.e. “What am I missing?”. Comes with ADHD though :)

[@hugocast]

@@DavidManuel If you like Calendly you’ll love Google appointments scheduling. Very neat feature: kzbin.info/www/bejne/kJm2YaadmJaYhK8

[@DavidManuel]

True! The sync into TickTick has been good in my experience (~30 seconds to refresh) but I haven’t tested the sync out much, and I have run into sync out problems (too long to refresh) with apps like this (Todoist) in the past.

[@ricardohernandez9053]

Any reminder App that allow you to attach a video clip?

[@DavidManuel]

TickTick has that feature!

[@darius1b]

Hi David. Great video on how you use TickTick and time blocking. I see you have quite a few tasks in some projects. Do you find TickTick slowing down like Todoist does when you have 100+ tasks in projects? Thanks again.

[@DavidManuel]

Thanks Darius, glad you found it useful! So far I haven’t noticed any slow down at all with TickTick with my current task loads, and I do have some larger backburner projects/tasks. That said, I had a similar amount in Todoist and never noticed it slowing down for me either, so maybe you just have even more tasks? Or could be because of attached audio/video files maybe?

[@darius1b]

@@DavidManuel Thanks for replying. I did reach out to Todoist and they said it does slow down when some projects get close to 300 tasks and it recommended I break them down into smaller projects to speed things up! Having said that, I am preferring TickTick these days. Especially the Eisenhower view which I can edit and filter to really focus in on what needs doing. Keep up the great videos. Thanks, Darius

[@samueltremblay275]

Excellent video! It's a joy to see real work project without task like "Feed the cat" :D By the way, instead of typing "tomorrow", you can just type "tmr". Since two weeks, I'm wondering whether I wil switch to Notion with something like "The ultimate brain by Thomas Frank" but even though Notion can do a real great job about task management, it's not an application dedicated to this specifically and while trying to do everything, it's not as excellent as Tick Tick for quick capture and time blocking.

[@DavidManuel]

Thanks Samuel!! And thanks for the "tmr" tip, too!! Yeah, Notion is definitely a tempting tool as an everything app. At some point a few years ago I tried using it for task management after watching some of August Bradley's videos, but I found I preferred having a dedicated time management app. That said, I've heard rumblings about Tana's potential as something more Roam/Logseq-like but which could properly handle robust task management. And so I'll probably take a peek at that once Tana is available. Overall though I think I've at least partially come around to accepting the "different tools in your toolbox" mindset.

[@Ayosubzero]

Good video. Check the title error.

[@DavidManuel]

Thanks for pointing it out!!

[@hugocast]

Nice thumbnail! Definitely made me click :)

[@Aarron656]

why not just use google calendar?

[@DavidManuel]

TickTick is sort of like getting to have Apple reminders and google calendar synthesized into one app, where you can switch between viewing your tasks in list view (like Apple reminders) or in calendar view (like google calendar). Since I switch some tasks back and forth from being scheduled for a specific time and being something that doesn’t have a date assigned to it, being able to transform the same “object” (which could be both a task or a calendar entry or just one of the two) is useful to me!