
Marvin – Customizable Task Manager and Daily Planner - tekacs
https://amazingmarvin.com/
======
kirktrue
Marvin purports to fight distractions and procrastination.

And yet it lets you customize and tweak things to get it "just how you want."
Sounds like a dream and a nightmare in one for OCPD people like moi.

~~~
1123581321
I used it for a few months in 2018 to get out of a mental jam. Basically, I
spent an afternoon reading through all the options and enabling a few
combinations until I found something that worked. Once I got up to speed
keeping my tasks in Marvin, I disabled a few options I thought I would use.
It’s fiddly but it needs to be to solve the particular problems of the user,
and that afternoon wasn’t going to be productive anyway. :)

(I used task notes, sub tasks, smart lists, calendar, duration estimates,
planning ahead, time tracking, time blocking, sidebar, autoschedule due tasks,
daily time targets, email to marvin, time block sections.)

------
unsignedint
I've moved from Todoist about 6 months ago to manage most of my personal
tasks, and so far, I'm happy with it. It certainly have aspect that's
overdesigned, and rough edges at times, but it provides me a room to adjust to
the style of tracking I want.

It doesn't offer any collaboration feature, and is really a personal task
management tool, so it doesn't scale to use in business let alone for
collaborative projects, but I feel it is a great tool for what it's designed
for.

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bruxis
The pricing ($12/mo) is rather steep compared to other
productivity/planning/todo apps on the market (Trello @ $0, TickTick @ $2.79,
Any.do & Todoist @ ~$3, etc.).

While this product looks great and I'd generally think it would be worth a
try, that price sets it as a non-starter for me as I don't get the
_impression_ that the advantage would be so large compared to other task
management tools.

~~~
skinnymuch
This is Hacker News. Always talking about being against big tech and for the
little guy. Trello is owned by a company approaching $50B valuation. The rest
of the apps you mentioned are funded or were early on and first to market like
Todoist and get pretty big press relative to Marvin or most indie stuff.

Meanwhile Amazing Marvin offers 50%+ off Black Friday deals. Year free trial.
And is bootstrapped solely by a husband and wife.

~~~
michaelcampbell
A good product at a good price is a good product at a good price, developer
notwithstanding. If the point of his post was to say he's paying this team or
that team because of the team vs. the product, then maybe this would be
relevant but otherwise I don't see it.

~~~
skinnymuch
It’s relevant to a huge vocal majority of HN as I stated the principles of
said vocal majority. Thus it’s relevant, no?

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omniscient_oce
Marvin is one of the better todo apps out there in my opinion. I don't use it
now but whenever I feel stressed out or anxious because of how much work I
have to do or I've picked an ambitious goal for myself, I read their blog
(especially this page) [https://blog.amazingmarvin.com/break-large-projects-
tasks-bi...](https://blog.amazingmarvin.com/break-large-projects-tasks-bite-
sized-tasks/) which contains a lot of useful information.

Nowadays I just use a notebook and a pencil and feel that is infinitely better
than any app. Every time I've decided to start using a new todo app, or
productivity app, I get this burst of motivation. It feels like I've already
made progress. Especially if you pay for one, it almost feels like you're
buying productivty at first "Yes, this is the start of me being super
organised and super productive!". In reality, you can't buy productivity. Pen
and paper for me, for now.

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rabidrat
I just gave this a 15-minute try. Their overall design and marketing is pretty
good and hooked me into seeing if I could give it a go. $300 Lifetime isn't
too bad either.

\- the initial tutorials are video-only, and the videos have a lot of filler
and so move quite slowly even at 2x speed.

\- it's about 20% over-designed (they have their squaresponge mascot ready to
be an MS Clippy in the corner)

\- I couldn't edit a todo item title/text. There's a little toolbar on each
item with 5 little icons, one of which is "edit", and you can edit everything
else, but you can't edit the text. This makes no sense to me given the rest of
their design is so slick.

So I stopped then because it seemed a little flimsy, and I don't want to get
my productivity cycle invested in a slick and flimsy paid service.

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rrggrr
The perfect to do app is the one that forces me to use it after I forget about
it and lose interest.

~~~
hirundo
This app works pretty much like that:
[https://www.goarmy.com](https://www.goarmy.com)

It even fills in the todo items for you. But you should read the EULA
carefully. It can be difficult to uninstall.

~~~
dvtrn
Is this a hilarious autocorrect or did you mean to link the United States Army
homepage? Because in a funny way, even if you didn’t the description you gave
is kind of fitting and is a bit amusing as veteran (cue: “that’s the joke”?)

~~~
rabidrat
Pretty sure it's a joke straight from r/outside :)

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Clownfused
I tried this briefly but ever since I discovered Roam Research I haven't
looked back.

