I rhetorically asked on Twitter yesterday if there was a better way to manage my todo lists of scraps of paper, my moleskine, jira and basecamp.  I'm not sure that I made it clear: I'm not looking for a replacement for those. They're not going away. I need a master-something that can manage the fact that my todos are spread over many mediums and systems (by necessity, rather than choice).  I can't manage a 5th system that I'd need to manually synchronise.

So. This is my "in a magical world of unicorns and rainbows" wishlist for a ToDo application:

• Has a web, desktop (not just osx) and mobile client.  If I can't get at it wherever I am, I won't use it.
• Pulls in and syncs assigned tickets from bug trackers - like Jira, Trac.
• Pulls in and syncs todos from shared workspaces - like Basecamp.
• Needs to be able to pull in tickets/lists from *insert future system a company I will work for will assume is the answer to all their problems*.
• Needs to be free-form enough to add items that don't have dates.
• If they do have dates, I want to show them on my google calendar.
• Needs to be as quick to throw an item onto the end of the list as it is to scrawl it on a post-it note.
• Have a public sharable view and also private items.  Bonus for levels of access to certain friend/colleague/family groups.
• Sets fire to any project manager who thinks sending me an excel spreadsheet of brightly coloured items copied out of Jira will help my day go more smoothly.
• Super dream world: should be able to OCR a photo of scrawled notes from my notebook/hand (ala Evernote) taken by the new shiny.
• Super bonus extra dream world: should offer to make me a cup of tea when it notices a complete nightmare of todos all happening at once.

I'm beginning to think that this was the most accurate response I received:

@phae Personal assistant?

by Paul Haine