I have been addicted to productivity apps for years, and for years Things 2/3 has been my weapon of choice. No one has come close from 2012 to 2024. It’s been so dominant that I got bored of new task apps launching and seeing how bad their feature sets were.
A few weeks ago I got a bit excited because I finally saw an app that had some future potential. Lunatask was tackling too much ( tasks, journaling, habit tracking), but the task UI had some good new ideas and showed promise of being usable down the road.
Then out of the blue, in an amazing video from A Better Computer … I found out about GodSpeed. No other new task app has had such a comprehensive offering in such a short time…and none of them have been command line apps…
Command Line Apps
Before getting into Godspeed, I just want to give a little more context on command line apps. Basically these are apps with a very powerful pop up window for navigating apps with keyboard based commands. These apps also tend to come with really good keyboard shortcuts, so you can do everything more efficiently without touching the mouse.
My first interaction with this type of app was Superhuman. As a Gmail keyboard shortcuts user, I was already sold on how much faster you could navigate email with just your keyboard, but Superhuman just took things to the next level. They refined these shortcuts, added more, and wrapped it in a speedy desktop app that looked nothing like Apple Mail or Outlook.
The next command line app that got me hooked was Vimcal, which is effectively Superhuman for calendars. The UI isn’t quite as good, but the keyboard shortcuts are just as powerful, and the app is very snappy. By this point, I knew I wanted command line apps for basically everything I do.
My initial thoughts on GodSpeed
So what is there to like about Godspeed? A lot. I apologize in advance for gushing and rambling, but I’m excited about this tool!
First, I love the spartan look. It’s not quite as pretty as Things 3, but ultimately I care about productivity and efficiency more than I care about pure aesthetics.
Right away you get pulled into the onboarding flow, and it’s great. It guides you through all the critical features, it’s not too long, it automatically checks off the steps for you, and at the end you’re pretty competent with the app in a very short time.
Next, I love that they have a strong perspective on what their app should be. You can see that perspective in the fact that there’s even a keyboard shortcut to subscribe to the app, and an option to completely disable the mouse. They’re pushing the command line concept to the extreme, and I like that.
Now for the big one, speed. This thing is fast, like Superhuman fast. It’s almost as if things happen before you’re finished typing the command. It made me smile the first time I used it :)
The specific shortcuts that I loved and seemed like real time savers were:
- using j / k to reorder tasks
- Adding a task by simply hitting ctrl v
- Indent / outdent to add subtasks
Last, there were a few features that fix current pet peeves I have with the Things 3 app. I LOVE that I can add attachments to my notes. It may seem strange to be this excited about it in 2024, but Things 3 doesn’t let you attach things to your notes. Images in particular are critical to my workflow, but I’ll cover that in more detail below. The other big one is being able to see tags in the mobile app.
In terms of what’s missing, I didn’t find much. When using the keyboard shortcuts to navigate projects, it seems to cap out at #9. The projects and subprojects also have room to improve, clicking on the top level folder just displays a big folder icon. I’d probably want to see what’s in the sub projects.
The Wishlist
So is it perfect? Nope. Is it shockingly good for a V1 with very few major flaws? Yep.
Here’s my nitpicky wishlist of features that would make it a no brainer for me to then move over to Godspeed.
Wish 1 - “This evening”
This is one of two features that I use in Things 3 that I couldn’t find in Godspeed. Keep in mind, I probably use fewer of the Things 3 features than most task geeks. But within the today view, you can set a task to “This Evening” and it puts it in a different section within the today view. This helps me separate my work tasks from person tasks in Today.
Wish 2 - Anytime
In Things 3 I use the “anytime” section to be able to look through all my areas and find tasks that I want to pull into my “up next” tag or into the Today view to work on them today. I couldn’t find a way to search across all projects in Godspeed, so I couldn’t recreate this functionality.
Wish 3 - Rich text and images in notes
In my current task application (Things) I cannot store images, and it drives me crazy. For more complex projects I end up with tons of photos and screenshots that contain the information I need to get a project done. Think screenshots of product pages if it’s a project that requires researching a product to buy, or photos of my sink if my project is to fix the sink.
Since Things 3 doesn’t have the ability to put photos in the notes, I put those things in Craft. Craft has the ability to very easily take in images, but it also makes it really easy to format those images so that it’s not just a long page of images . You can indent and outdent images quickly, and Craft also will format the images on the page automatically like a photo album to make them easier to see.
So i love that I can have notes and I can have attachments for images, but ultimately all this stuff needs to be in one place and immediately visible when I open a task. I don’t want to have to click on each image one at a time to view them.
Conclusion
To say that I’m excited is an understatement. I’ve been happy with Things 3 for a very long time, but their pace of development is glacial. I love that Culture Code has a strong perspective and stick to it, but there’s a fine line between having discipline and being frozen in time and becoming antiquated.
Godspeed is a welcome new entrant, and one that I think is going to put a ton of pressure on the task management space. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
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