Every now and then this question comes up. It’s a timeless software engineering conundrum. Kind of like how med students might start to think they have all kinds of diseases and conditions because they’re learning all these symptoms.

Software engineers, especially new ones, tend to be heavily biased toward applying technical solutions to non-technical problems. Most never actually grow out of this.

I’ll advise what I advise every time someone approaches me or one of my peer groups with thiw very question:

Get yourself a notebook and a pen.

I’m dead serious, not trolling, and not some kind of technophobe zealot.

When it comes down to it, if you let go of what you think you need in a to-do list app, you’ll find that what you actually need much simpler.

Notebooks are e2e encrypted. Self hosted. Offline. As ephemeral as you like. Indexable for search. Versatile. Take a picture of a page if you really want to. OCR it if you need to.

Pen and paper.