Notifications for the items with date

I was disappointed to discover that Dynalist doesn’t have built-in date notifications. For now I’m trying to use the Google Calendar integration as a workaround. If it works, I can live with that for now.

As a complete newcomer, my apologies if I missed something. “Recurring dates” is a good example of why some kind of notification mechanism is needed. Why have the ability to check off a recurring item, and have it immediately add itself back with the new date, if there’s no built-in way of bringing it to the user’s attention when that date arrives?

At the very least, there should be a special view within the app that lists all the items that are due or overdue, even if this doesn’t result in a push notification. It would be a kind of “pull” notification. I believe CheckVist does this, but I may be confusing it with ToDoist or some other app.

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Hi Tad_Davis. I use a custom search for this. For example, searching for until:today will show all items that have a due date of today or older. until:1w will find all that plus tasks in the upcoming week. There are lots of ways to slice and dice this. I also like using the flat view and sorting by date – it shows me an ordered list of everything that’s coming up.

Edit: You can also turn these searches into bookmarks or links for one-click access.

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What a useful tip! And it may be exactly what I need. I didn’t know this was an option. Note to self: read the docs. I do have other apps to handle routine reminders like “Take morning meds/take evening meds.”

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Buried treasure!

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I use Tick Tick with Dynalist for two features:

  • Repeating tasks that can be customised to the nth weekday of the nth month
  • A calendar view that will enable me to assign undated tasks in a list so I can distribute them evenly over a week

It’s rapidly developing to now include Kanban and markdown. There’s no chance it would replace Dynalist, but it wouldn’t complain if Dynalist took on some of those features.

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I suggested an API improvement that might help with this particular issue. Cross posting here to gather feedback.

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While I never used to use Dynalist as a task management app, the latest updates have made it look like an attractive alternative to Todoist. The lack of notifications (especially on iOS) is the main thing holding me back from doing this…

UPDATE: I tried using calendar sync, but the problem is that it syncs everything to Google as events, not tasks. If something has a date-range it appears on every single day in my calendar! This won’t work for me.

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Well, I get notifications for Dynalist events on both iOS and Android – it’s just awkward to have to set them up in Google Calendar instead of directly in Dynalist. I wish there was a way to set them up directly in Dynalist, while that notifications setup would be synced to Google Calendar along with all the other event properties.

And, yes, I agree: until I discovered Dynalist, I couldn’t imagine my life without Toodledo (a Todoist competitor, but dying). Yet Dynalist is so good, despite not being intended as a task manager per se, that it could replace Toodledo for me if push comes to shove. I still use both simultaneously, but I find myself using Toodledo less and less.

(Particularly, Dynalist’s note-taking abilities are phenomenal, so I stopped entering notes on tasks in Toodledo altogether, instead putting a link there to the Dynalist task where notes can be elaborated properly.)

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Yes. If you haven’t done so already, feel free to upvote Mobile notifications for dates n the Dynalist Roadmap.

‑Alex

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And Desktop Notification for Dates as well ;^)

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Is there a way to make a link to a certain item with a certain search? I would be very interested in this!

If I understand you right, then the answer is yes! Every search in Dynalist has its own custom URL. So if you had a saved search for “cheese” the URL at the top of your browser would look like this:

https://dynalist.io/d/DyNaLiStDoCiD#q=cheese

See that “#q=cheese” at the end? That’s the custom query. Paste that URL into your Dynalist doc and it becomes a search you can execute with a click. I create document-specific searches like this all the time:

  • Using the web version of Dynalist, create a search as normal, optionally zoomed in to a particular node.
  • Copy the URL to your system clipboard.
  • Paste the URL into your document.
  • Optionally create custom text for it by making it a Markdown link, e.g.: [Cheese](...)

And you’re done! Click the link to zoom in and search.

Craig

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This is awesome - thank-you very much!

Reminder is a very useful feature. I ended up in Dynalist after trying many to do list app. I know Dynalist is more than a to do list app. I was looking for an app with unlimited nested multilevel subtask and with a web version. I found Dynalist satisfying all I want from such an app except a push notification for reminder. I read that you dont have an intention to add a reminder for Dynalist. But my strong reccommendation is to have REMINDER to make it perfect app as many are looking for that feature. Then we dont want an extra app to give us reminder when we have Dynalist doing it for us.

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Well, reminders work fine for me via Google Calendar.

Requiring another app to fulfil the actions is not a good option in my opinion. There are another apps which can do it without the help of an additional app.

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If an app is USED to track ToDo items, then it IS a ToDo app. End of story. An app is whatever people think it is and use if for. If I can’t get reminders then I need to go back to a simple pad and pencil! A pencil and paper is not a ToDo app, but it works for that. It is not word processor, but people write notes and letters with it without thinking twice. Pencil and paper is not a calculator app … yet people use them to calculate. See where I’m going with this. How you “promote” it is simply beside the point of what the users want to use it for.

Taking this a step further, Dynalist has a mind map view, but it is not a mind mapping app. It just has that extra feature that some might like. There are ToDo apps which are not outliners, but when I needed an outliner, I would just play games with tabs, spaces, and numeric prefixes to get what I needed.

I guess if you are dead set against doing reminders based on a date I add to an item, then so be it. But seriously, you have to realize that people leave software that is user hostile. At the moment you have a nice light app that gives me about 80% of what I want. If it dips much below that, I’ll find a better solution.

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If I can’t get reminders then I need to go back to a simple pad and pencil!

Time for me to upgrade my pad and pencil, so I, too, can get reminders from those! (Sorry, I know, that was an easy one; I’m blame it on this being a Friday afternoon.)

-Alex

I must say, that’s not sufficient reason to go to pencil. I can’t quickly reorganize my todo list if it’s written on paper! For myself, I have no objection to Notifications being added to the program, but I get along fine without them. If it were added, there may need to be a distinction in date types. Not every dated thing deserves to remind me of its date.

Paper and pen are dead and useless, absurdly inefficient and even harmful that way. For reading books, paper is useless as well (I stopped reading printed books when iPads were invented), and it’s a hundred times more useless & inefficient for a to-do list.

And I apologize, but I don’t quite get all the moaning in this thread – the notifications are there, via Google Calendar. They are very robust there, and highly configurable. Would it be nice to have notifications directly within Dynalist? Yes, it would. But it’s not like they aren’t available at all.

And yes, Dynalist is the perfect to-do app, whether its authors originally intended it or not. (I’m currently in the midst of transferring my 400+ to-do tasks, many of them recurring & long-term, from the abandonware Toodledo to Dynalist.)