I'll add to this to say that I think there are different kinds of todo lists as well. I wrote about [1] a struggle I had with digitizing a whiteboard household chore tracker.

Lately I've been wondering if LLMs can help personalize software. There are so many difference needs users have, yet software is written with a pool of users in mind. I'm very skeptical of LLMs for traditional software projects, but small one-off personal utilities or tweaking existing tools seems more viable.

[1] https://alexsci.com/blog/personal-apps/

It's surprising how many "to do lists" don't really model "to do"s correctly. They confuse reminders (I do not want to forget something so I want to be reminded) with todos (I want to do something), they confuse a start date (I want to start working on something now, but if it's still not done tomorrow it's OK) with a due date (if I don't do it by then I'll be in a lot of trouble), and they give us a lot of knobs to turn, like priority, tags, dependencies, sub-lists and so on, which are not always useful.

At the same time, absolutely basic recurring functionality is surprisingly often broken or not implemented correctly, like "I want to write my update on every work day, but if I forget it once, I don't want to write it twice". Even things, one of the top apps in the space, annoyingly doesn't allow me to check off a recurring item before its start date.

I absolutely love the simplicity of Bullet Journal here: A piece of paper, a dot, some words, that's the todo. Add some doodle next to it, like an asterisk or an exclamation mark, if you need to highlight it. That's it. Too bad recurring tasks come with a lot of manual overhead there.