Took me some time to contemplate and in the mean time many others have responded as well, elsewhere on this forum. But if it helps, some thoughts.
In personal and professional life I have used two different 'platforms':
Office365 at work
Many have a love/hate relationship with it, but it is an ever growing toolkit for collaboration and personal productivity. Because it has to support a wide variety of use-cases and for wildly different organisations it hasn't a one-stop-shop for Todo/Taskmanagement. Though Microsoft is integrating front-ends to at least bring everything together.
So tasks can be tracked in ToDo, Planner, OneNote, Projects, SharePoint lists and Outlook. Each with pro/con for collaboration and personal workflow. For internal support I tend to quickly sort things out with starting questions about how formal/informal things must be tracked and if tasks has to be treated like 'data' with filtering/sorting/dashboarding or even KPI's.
The one thing I struggle with in this regard is the balance between 'jot down quick with OneNote' and 'wanting one place to have it all in view'. My OneNote app has some 20 notebooks for various projects and dossiers. Each with different collaborators. Downside: For my own actions I have to scrape every Notebook/Section/Page for my own stuff.
Sailforms at home
This isnt a dedicated app for something specific but sort of "MS Access for Android". Linked tables, buttons, forms, data, formulas etc and highly flexible. Super for tracking all kinds of stuff and it replaced a lot of other apps for me. BUT ... one retired developer, not open source and mainly if tracking and measuring is your thing.
Features
I deeply feel the need to have at least some overview how different features are used in different scenarios. For example:
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Jot down a checklist in a note:
Great for ad-hoc short lists for ephemeral topics. When ready it can be tossed away,
"Remember to pick the dry-cleaner and call your mom." Great with Joplin. -
Use a previous filled list in a note as a reference:
The list is a description of all the things to be done and helps to complete a task. Just looking at the list is enough so one note will do.
"All the things to be done in the weekly cleaning of the house". Great with Joplin. -
Use a previous filled checklist in a note as a reference and tick al the boxes for steps within a task:
Slightly different but if ticking 'feels good' or the list is long the check/uncheck state helps.
If I dont have a need for keeping all the 'instances' of this note I could use a plugin which just "uncheck everything in this note in bulk". To have a clean start the next time I use it. -
Use a previous filled checklist in a note as a reference, produce a note for every instance of this task with a template and tick al the boxes for steps within a task:
Same as the above, except every time I perform a task, I have a new note and can keep it. Great with Joplin, but I could use bulk creation of notes. -
Write a growing checklist of a project in a todo note:
During the preparation/orientation I encounter all kinds of stuff I have to do later on, in a project. When the project is done, the todo is checked at the note level. Although just 'archiving' would be enough.
"I have to measure and prepare for 2 extra wooden cabinets in the kitchen, so the list of materials to buy and other steps are documented" -
Write a checklist of a recurring event in a note as a reference and use it as a template:
A bit like a project, but for every instance of the event I want a new note.
"We go on a weekend trip 3 times a year and this is the packing list. Which I want to keep as a part of the memories about those weekends. Also they change slowly over the years." -
Use a recurring todo for repeating tasks with set intervals/frequency.
My main problem with these is they keep haunting me or I have to reset them even if they are not done.
"I set a recurring task for putting out the trash every thursday evening, now I forgot and the task travels with me on friday, saturday etc or I have to check it." For a lot of people this isnt a problem but I want to measure how often a task is and isnt done. To be fair, even todoist and MS dont have this feature. Its like a table with tasks on a page for every day, a page for every week and a page for every month. And at the end of the cycle you take a new page, but it is still visible how often tasks arent done in the previous. It would be possible to draw conclusions like "I perform 70% of my ideal routine, last year it was 60%".
Of course this list isnt complete but I wanted to share different scenarios and features.
I dont expect Joplin to support 'measuring' of tasks, because a note isnt a normalised database so to say. I do hope templating of reference checlists and maybe bulk creation could be enough for me. Bulk creation would be like: produce template-based all the day/week/monthly notes with checlists for the coming month october. If I revise a checlist template, I change it and it will be 'in production' the next cycle.
Anyway, my longest ramble ever here. Hopes sharing this helps others, gratefull this community helps me with Joplin!