The Best To-Do App for Windows [Windows App Directory]

By Whitson Gordon Oct 18, 2011 10:30 AM 12,095 14

Windows has a few good to-do apps up its sleeve, not to mention more webapps than you can shake a stick at. Our favorite of the bunch is Wunderlist, a syncing, full-featured, and free app for multiple platforms.

Platform: Windows, Mac OS X, and More
Price: Free
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Syncs with the Wunderlist webapp and the Wunderlist app for Mac, Android, iPhone, and BlackBerryShare lists with friends via Facebook, Twitter, and other apps to collaborate with (or motivate) each other on certain tasksAdd notes to tasksOrganize tasks through a drag-and-drop interfaceAssign deadlines to tasksFilter tasks by status or dateStar important tasksAdd tasks via emailChoose from several themes to personalize Wunderlist

Wunderlist isn't the simplest to-do app around (that would be "notepad" or "pen and paper"), but it is the easiest to use. Its main goal is to make task management simple and available on all your devices, which it does very well. Adding tasks, dragging them around, starring them, and otherwise managing them is very easy. It's available on pretty much every platform you can want, too, which is important for to-do apps—and, if you're on a computer that doesn't have Wunderlist installed, you can just as easily check the webapp and manage your tasks from there. Plus, it's all free.

Wunderlist would be just about perfect if it had a few more features, like the ability to tag tasks or make them repeat. Right now, you can only filter by status and date, which is fine—and you can create different task lists—but it'd be nice to see a bit more organizational power. However, it's a good middle ground between the features you need and being incredibly easy to use, two things that often butt heads with one another.

If you're more a fan of the GTD method of managing your tasks, GeeTeeDee is a great client for Windows. Its interface is very simple, but its got a lot of more advanced features that Wunderlist doesn't have, though they can just get in the way for most people. If Wunderlist is a bit too toned down for you, GeeTeeDee is a good alternative.

If you prefer things on the other side of the spectrum—that is, super minimalist—you might try TodoPaper or our very own Gina Trapani's Todo.txt. TodoPaper is a Windows clone of the Mac favorite Taskpaper, which puts your tasks into a very simple text file with a few extra to-do features, like checkboxes, tags, and projects. It's a bit pricey at $30, though, so if you want something more low cost, Todo.txt is very similar. Instead of working in a window, though, you add, remove, and view tasks from a Terminal application. You can use a client like Todotxt.net if the command line is a bit too intimidating, though.

If you're okay with using a webapp, you have even more options. Remember the Milk has long been a favorite of users everywhere. It's available on multiple mobile platforms, and has a lot of organizational features (but, frankly, takes a lot of clicks to do anything in the web interface). Many people like Google Tasks for its integration with Gmail and Google Calendar, though its a bit feature-poor for those that want more advanced management. It also isn't the most intuitive to use. If you want a more advanced to-do app that integrates with Google Calendar and Gmail, Producteev is a better option, which has some nice advanced management, helpful collaborative features, and an app for the Mac (with a Windows version on the way). Lastly, Toodledo is a very powerful manager that's a bit hard to get started with at first, but lets you heavily customize how you manage your tasks, so you don't need to be stuck with any one method pushed by an app.

These are just a few of the great to-do apps out there—as there are very many—so if you have a favorite we didn't mention, let us know about it in the comments.

Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.

You can contact Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
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