# A plain text file beats the productivity app carousel
After years of trying elaborate systems, one writer says todo.txt remains the simplest and most reliable option.
The argument for plain text is not that productivity apps are useless. It is that they often become the thing you manage instead of the thing that helps you work. In a long personal essay, the writer behind al3rez.com says he has tried most of the well-known task managers - Notion, Todoist, Things 3, OmniFocus, Asana, Trello, Any.do and TickTick - and even built his own todo app once. The end point, he says, is a simple file called todo.txt.
That conclusion is more practical than nostalgic. The essay suggests that the cost of modern task software is not just the subscription fee, but the overhead of setting up categories, tags, projects and labels. Every new system begins with the promise of order, and then turns into a small project of its own. The writer describes the familiar cycle: a new app looks like a breakthrough, a perfect setup takes hours, and then real work gets crowded out by the management of the management system.
The examples are familiar for a reason. Notion can become a sprawling second brain. Todoist can feel like a score-chasing game. Other tools can break sync, disappear behind pricing changes or simply become too much for a person who wants to write things down and move on. The essay’s point is not that these apps fail in every case, but that they create a burden of maintenance that many users eventually resent. A text file, by contrast, has almost no moving parts.
The author also says he is not alone. He points to Jeff Huang’s long-running plain-text list as validation that the method has staying power. That matters because it reframes the choice as a durable practice rather than a temporary workaround. A .txt file does not require a vendor roadmap, cloud sync or a feature release schedule. It is a local artifact that remains readable across devices and over time, which is part of why it keeps winning people back.
What makes the essay persuasive is not just the final preference, but the pattern of disappointment along the way. The writer says he has repeatedly invested time in building elaborate systems, only to abandon them when they start consuming more energy than they save. That experience will sound familiar to anyone who has spent more time organizing tasks than completing them. In that sense, the article is less a rejection of productivity software than a warning against overengineering the act of remembering things.
There is a broader lesson in the simplicity. Plain text is not flashy, but it is portable, durable and hard to break. It also avoids the psychological trap of thinking that a better workflow is always one app away. Sometimes the best system is the one that demands the least from the user. The essay’s quiet argument is that friction is the enemy of follow-through, and a tiny text file is often less friction than a polished dashboard.
For readers who have been through the same cycle, the conclusion may feel obvious. For everyone else, it is a useful reminder that productivity tools are only valuable if they help work happen. If the app itself becomes the task, the system has already lost.
