Using Todo Apps for organizing your storage / garage

Using Todo Apps for organizing your storage / garage

This might be a problem that’s extremely specific to small apartment city living, but that’s the predicament that I’m in. I’ve got a growing family, a kitesurfing addiction, and I live in a 6-floor walk-up. This means I’m constantly looking for ways to use the space we have more efficiently or to find ways to expand the space that I have access to. Enter the storage unit.

The case for storage units

For someone living in NYC, a $150-$200 / month storage unit can be an extremely price efficient way to help you make the apartment you’re already in better serve your needs. For a typical storage unit, you can easily put seasonal items like winter clothes, ski equipment, or summer beach equipment in the unit to get those things out of your apartment. If you don’t travel that much, you can also put your suitcases and other luggage there.

Those things can definitely free up some space, but it gets even more interesting if you find a storage unit location that’s extremely close to your apartment. Enter Local Locker; a local Brooklyn storage unit company that puts storage unit’s locations right in your neighborhood. I’ve got 2 locations within 3 blocks of me, and it completely changes the equation. Now I can store anything there that I don’t need to use weekly in my apartment. I can put all my kitesurfing equipment there, I can put my non-primary photography equipment and YouTube studio equipment there.

What I need from an app to track my stuff

Now for the problem, how do I find where my stuff is when I need it? I’ve tried everything from taking photos on my phone of each item I move, to a spreadsheet, and now I’m evaluating different apps in the hopes of being able to find a solution that is effective and sustainable (I can’t do 20 minutes of data entry every time I drop something off).

Requirements:

  • Kanban view - I have two storage units, a car, and my apartment so that’s 4 locations where an item could be located. I just create a column for each location in the Kanban view and drag a task that represents an item to the proper column.
  • Kanban search - the ability to search for an item and see which Kanban list it is located in. This is how I would locate an item in my system, especially when there are too many items to simply scroll through.
  • Add multiple photos to an entry fast. This makes it effortless to take a photo of the contents of a box, or to take a photo of an item that is hard to label.
  • Fast drag and drop between locations. If I grab something from storage and now keep it at home, I want to be able to quickly move it from one column to another in the task application.
  • Subtasks - this allows me to create a parent task called “Box 1” and then put subtasks in that box.
  • Good mobile usability - I rarely get to access my storage system from a desktop, so it needs to work effectively through a phone.

The Apps I’ve tried

I reviewed the following apps:

  • Sortly
  • BoxOrganizer
  • Elephant Trax
  • ToteScan
  • Any.do
  • Brite
  • TeuxDeux
  • Task Flow
  • GoodTask
  • Mindlist
  • Doneit
  • Do!
  • Tasks
  • Todo

All the dedicated box and inventory trackers had overly complicated UIs and were not quick to use.

Notion (free)

Notion is definitely the winner when it comes to covering the most functionality. Almost anything you want to do, you can figure out a way to do it with Notion. Where it tends to fall short is its mobile functionality.

Notion has great kanban functionality, and the search works great. When you do a search, it quickly filters down the kanban lists and shows you which list the item is in. Dragging and dropping is quick and intuitive. It also lets you upload photos to each item so that you can recognize the item or where it’s located.

The main issue it has is that adding images takes forever regardless of the platform, they are slow to upload, and you can only upload one at a time. The other issue is that the mobile UI isn’t nearly as intuitive as the desktop web app. I’d only recommend this if you’re going to be on a laptop or desktop the majority of the time. I used Notion as my storage unit tracker for 2+ years , and it was just too cumbersome when doing mobile updates to stay on top of things.

Apple Reminders (free)

Many people don’t know this, but Apple reminders launched their own version of Kanban boards. Given its native integration, it makes sense that the mobile app experience on iOS is great, adding photos to tasks is also super fast, and moving items from one kanban list to another is super fast. I also really like that the task can display a preview from multiple photos. The other practical feature it supports, is that you can create subtasks, which could be nice for displaying what items are stored inside a box. Though subtasks are limited to one level of subtasks, you can’t nest more subtasks in the subtasks.

The fatal flaw for Apple Reminders is its search functionality, it doesn’t really work with its Kanban feature. Sometimes if you search, you don’t get a result at all. For example, I have two boxes called “Winter box”, but a search for “Winter” doesn’t return anything at all. The other issue is that a search will not show you what kanban list an item is in. So if I search for “SUP”, I’ll see the two SUP items, but I can’t tell if they are in my “apartment” kanban list or in my “storage unit” kanban list. If I search for an item, it will show the item, but it won’t show which kanban list it's in. This is a dealbreaker because I could have 100s of items in storage or in my home, and if I can’t tell where it is, that defeats the entire purpose of search.

Todoist (48$ / year)

Todoist always needs to be in a list when you’re looking at competent task managers. It has a good kanban view, the search in kanban actually works, and dragging between the lists is really fast. The other nice thing is that the mobile app is just as good as the desktop view.

In the search results you can see not only the list that the item is in, but the Section as well, i.e. Apt, or Local.
In the search results you can see not only the list that the item is in, but the Section as well, i.e. Apt, or Local.

The only real downside here is that you can only upload images one at a time. The images also show up in the comments of a task, which makes it a bit harder to see the images quickly when viewing the task.

I think this would be a great option if you’re already using todo-it’s, or if your workflow isn’t as reliant on images.

Task flow ( $14.99 / yr, $49.99 lifetime)

The next app that I found that could do these things is Task flow. The main advantage here is they have a low annual subscription price and a lifetime purchase option that would keep the long-term cost of ownership low.

Task flow has a kanban view, the search actually works, and you can add multiple photos at a time. There is also a subtask feature that lets you group subtasks together in a parent task, but you can only go one deep. I don’t think the UI is as clean as the other options, but it is very usable.

Tick Tick ($35.99 / yr)

Last but not least is Ticktick, the app that I ended up using. Not only did I end up using it for the ability to track my storage unit items, but I’ve switched it to it full-time for all my tasks needs.

To start, Ticktick has Kanban functionality, and the search allows you to find out what list an item is in. The search isn’t perfect for Kanban, you still have to click on the item and click “move” to see what list the item is in.

You can add multiple photos quickly, and they get added to the text area within each task. Then you can nest tasks within each other, and you can nest multiple layers deep. Once way you could use this nesting is for putting specific items inside other items; Shelf 1 >> Box 1 >> Specific item.

Summary

So there you have it. Far too much work for such a niche topic, but it was driving me crazy never remembering where my stuff was. I’d recommend Notion for people who are on their laptop or desktop computer most of the time. After that, I’d recommend Todoist for people who don't need a ton of photos for tracking, and Task Flow for people who want a lifetime purchase option. Apple Reminders is a viable option for people who have smaller volumes of items to store.

Recommendations:

Best Overall: TickTick

Best for desktop: Notion

Best for text only: Todoist

Best for small systems: Apple reminders

Best Value: Task Flow

I’ll be sticking to Ticktick for the foreseeable future. The combination of nested tasks, quickly adding multiple images, and a fast mobile interface make it the best choice for me for my inventory needs, as well as my daily task tracking needs.