A.R. Knight's Blog, page 3

Paragon’s Fall: The Recruit – 3

You’re not sure what’s going to happen when the leaders ditch the lot of you underground. The eleven others in your group stare at the elevator along with you as it whisks away the only guidance you have, leaving your squad to determine who gets which of the scattered bedrooms, who gets a hot shower, and which of the assembled bags of clothes goes to whom.

“Our first challenge,” announces an intrepid girl as it becomes clear nobody is going to be offering commands. “We have to act like Paragons and work together.”

“Work together to do what?” a boy says, and while you notice the wide diversity of skin tones, hair styles, and body sizes, the omnipresent blue uniforms have a way of blending everyone together. “Choose our beds?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” the girl replies.

“Maybe they want us to fight?” another girl says. “Like in those movies. The winner gets out alive?”

The words kick off a cascade of ideas, from a powers competition to forming teams to a full-scale breakout, a push that gains traction until everyone remembers they’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s cold outside.

You’re pretty tired, so in the silence that momentarily takes hold after that dismal revelation, you decide to speak up and throw your lot in with the first girl, who’s looking a little miffed on one of the two couches in this otherwise sparse living room.

“I think she’s right,” you say, proud that your voice isn’t trembling in the slightest. Exhaustion breeds a disregard for consequences. “Why don’t we pick out the beds, grab some clothes, and if you want a shower, take one.”

Questions and demands come back at you, and the spotlight makes you wince. But you’re still tired, and you still want a bed, and yeah, maybe a shower too. So you shut them up in the new way you’ve learned, the way that brought you here.

You breathe, but more than that. Targeted, and as your lungs fill with the scrubbed air, your mind fills with the feelings of everyone in the room. Like instinct, like intuition, you know who said what, and you know why.

The girl in the back, still demanding a fight, is doing that because of a lifetime spent scrabbling with her brothers for every toy and after-dinner dessert. The questioning boy is too frightened at being away from home, being ripped away from his family to accept anything right now. He’s craving certainty, is too afraid to accept it.

You parade through the rest of the room in an instant, and then you exhale and all the buzzing fades from your head. Everyone’s quiet, too, until you send them back their voices, their mouths open like gulping fish. They start coughing, one laughs in a shrieking, scared sort of way. The girl whose side you’re on, whose only thought when you looked her way seemed to be an exasperated frustration with her fellow recruits, gives you a steeled appraisal.

Showing your gift, though, turns out to be a huge mistake. Even with the insights into each and every one of them, your knowledge proves to be a poor weapon against the desire to show off. One kid after another pops their power, and eventually you grab your clothes, slink off to the shower, and collapse in a bed with the sounds of crackled lightning, laughter, and future problems echoing the halls of your new home.

Paragon’s Fall: The Recruit – 2

The plane takes a while to land due to some exiting storms, which means you disembark in silver shadows from the runway’s glow lights. No off-ramps here, only stairs down to crunchy gravel. Atlantis, apparently, doesn’t give its future Paragons the flashy treatment.

Your skepticism must have made it to your face, because one of the people greeting your flight – looks to be about six of them, one for every ten of you – aims a flashlight in your eyes and asks if you’re happy to be here.

“How could I be?” you reply. “I don’t even know where here is.”

“Here is where you belong,” the man says, full of authority, as though some god has deigned to give him absolute power over this little airstrip. “Here is where you, all of you, will learn how to make the best use of your abilities. You will become heroes, here. You will become Paragons.”

You wonder how many times he’s given that little speech, but keep the estimate to yourself. The man loses interest in you, turning his bright lance on the next bumbling one to get off the plane. Another of the soon-to-be Paragons bumps you, and when he mutters a sorry, you ask where he’s going.

“Aren’t you listening? They’re calling names.”

Five of the hosts are, anyway. You hear yours, and shuffle over to the growing crowd. A combination of excited eyes and those just awakened from various naps surrounds you, all clad in the powder blue uniforms of Paragon trainees. The clothes aren’t uncomfortable, but do little to keep out the chilly Fall weather, and you miss the apple cider that would be in your mug at home.

Still, this is the opportunity that 99 percent of the world doesn’t get. You try to keep that in your mind as your host calls your group off to one of the buses on the side.

These, at least, are newer models. No drivers, and their batteries keep the inside warm in a soundless way that’s always struck you as mystical. Your parents keep saying the world’s magic now, with the Paragons leaning on a few key members who produce innovations like you produce annoying habits.

Guess you’ll be getting rid of those too. The Paragons are for heroes, and it’s about time you started being one.

PF: Day Two

The plane takes a while to land due to some exiting storms, which means you disembark in silver shadows from the runway’s glow lights. No off-ramps here, only stairs down to crunchy gravel. Atlantis, apparently, doesn’t give its future Paragons the flashy treatment.

Your skepticism must have made it to your face, because one of the people greeting your flight – looks to be about six of them, one for every ten of you – aims a flashlight in your eyes and asks if you’re happy to be here.

“How could I be?” you reply. “I don’t even know where here is.”

“Here is where you belong,” the man says, full of authority, as though some god has deigned to give him absolute power over this little airstrip. “Here is where you, all of you, will learn how to make the best use of your abilities. You will become heroes, here. You will become Paragons.”

You wonder how many times he’s given that little speech, but keep the estimate to yourself. The man loses interest in you, turning his bright lance on the next bumbling one to get off the plane. Another of the soon-to-be Paragons bumps you, and when he mutters a sorry, you ask where he’s going.

“Aren’t you listening? They’re calling names.”

Five of the hosts are, anyway. You hear yours, and shuffle over to the growing crowd. A combination of excited eyes and those just awakened from various naps surrounds you, all clad in the powder blue uniforms of Paragon trainees. The clothes aren’t uncomfortable, but do little to keep out the chilly Fall weather, and you miss the apple cider that would be in your mug at home.

Still, this is the opportunity that 99 percent of the world doesn’t get. You try to keep that in your mind as your host calls your group off to one of the buses on the side.

These, at least, are newer models. No drivers, and their batteries keep the inside warm in a soundless way that’s always struck you as mystical. Your parents keep saying the world’s magic now, with the Paragons leaning on a few key members who produce innovations like you produce annoying habits.

Guess you’ll be getting rid of those too. The Paragons are for heroes, and it’s about time you started being one.

Paragon’s Fall: The Recruit – 1

The anomaly on your left whispered that you’d crossed into Canada. Not that Canada existed anymore, but changing a name doesn’t change the feel. Atlantis this side of Niagara Falls seemed calmer, more serene with all the trees — there’d been a big push, you recall, to reforest a lot of this territory as food production ramped up efficiency — than the urban streets you came from.

You ask the anomaly how she knows, because there’s no maps inside the plane ferrying all of you to Atlantis’ training facility. You’re all mashed into seats without much for entertainment, presumably as some bonding measure, but all you really want is a chance to stretch your legs, but the bulky dude to your right conked out ten minutes in and you don’t want to risk shaking up the snores.

You’re all anomalies here, and there’s no telling what the guy might do if you wake him up.

“That’s my gift,” she says. “You want to know where we are, I can tell you. Great, isn’t it?”

You suspect sarcasm, but you’ve never met her before and she’s still looking out the window as she talks, so you play it safe and say, “Is it?”

Because having a gift replicated by every Tama on every wrist on the planet doesn’t seem high value. The anomaly, who looks near enough your fourteen years, droops her shoulders a bit and sighs.

You understand that sound.

From the moment the test comes back positive, life’s a whirlwind of doctors, Paragons, parents and choices to be made before you’re ready. You barely processed the doc labeling you an anomaly before the nurse had you pressed back on the chair, the tracer getting shot into your arm. They don’t take any chances anymore – too many rogues running around to give people any freedom. 

Classes, careers, those get realigned over the next year. You fill out surveys with your interests, your teachers fill out forms about your ability, and then you get slotted. One of your parents mentions it being like drafts in the old days, something your great grandparents dealt with. A collection of confused, scared, and forced youngsters getting involved in matters too heavy for them to understand.

But you’re here now, and as the plane starts going down, you’d be lying if you’re not a little bit excited. You’ve grown up listening and watching the legends perform, and now you’re going to get the chance to be one. Your ability might not be as cool, but it’s something, and you think, in the right circumstances, you could make a pretty good name for yourself.

“I don’t know,” she finally says. “They think so. It’s not just where I am, but it’s where things are in relation to me. Like, I know you’re exactly twelve centimeters away from my right arm.”

You lean back against the seat’s hard cushion. Consider what she said. Whether a power like hers compares to yours, and whether the fact that she’s in your group means good or bad things for your Paragon prospects. Whether it’s bad you’re even thinking like that.

Because you’re part of the machine now, and the introduction video made that much clear: You are nothing without the Paragons, and the Paragons are nothing without its people.

PF: Day One

The anomaly on your left whispered that you’d crossed into Canada. Not that Canada existed anymore, but changing a name doesn’t change the feel. Atlantis this side of Niagara Falls seemed calmer, more serene with all the trees — there’d been a big push, you recall, to reforest a lot of this territory as food production ramped up efficiency — than the urban streets you came from.

You ask the anomaly how she knows, because there’s no maps inside the plane ferrying all of you to Atlantis’ training facility. You’re all mashed into seats without much for entertainment, presumably as some bonding measure, but all you really want is a chance to stretch your legs, but the bulky dude to your right conked out ten minutes in and you don’t want to risk shaking up the snores.

You’re all anomalies here, and there’s no telling what the guy might do if you wake him up.

“That’s my gift,” she says. “You want to know where we are, I can tell you. Great, isn’t it?”

You suspect sarcasm, but you’ve never met her before and she’s still looking out the window as she talks, so you play it safe and say, “Is it?”

Because having a gift replicated by every Tama on every wrist on the planet doesn’t seem high value. The anomaly, who looks near enough your fourteen years, droops her shoulders a bit and sighs.

You understand that sound.

From the moment the test comes back positive, life’s a whirlwind of doctors, Paragons, parents and choices to be made before you’re ready. You barely processed the doc labeling you an anomaly before the nurse had you pressed back on the chair, the tracer getting shot into your arm. They don’t take any chances anymore – too many rogues running around to give people any freedom. 

Classes, careers, those get realigned over the next year. You fill out surveys with your interests, your teachers fill out forms about your ability, and then you get slotted. One of your parents mentions it being like drafts in the old days, something your great grandparents dealt with. A collection of confused, scared, and forced youngsters getting involved in matters too heavy for them to understand.

But you’re here now, and as the plane starts going down, you’d be lying if you’re not a little bit excited. You’ve grown up listening and watching the legends perform, and now you’re going to get the chance to be one. Your ability might not be as cool, but it’s something, and you think, in the right circumstances, you could make a pretty good name for yourself.

“I don’t know,” she finally says. “They think so. It’s not just where I am, but it’s where things are in relation to me. Like, I know you’re exactly twelve centimeters away from my right arm.”

You lean back against the seat’s hard cushion. Consider what she said. Whether a power like hers compares to yours, and whether the fact that she’s in your group means good or bad things for your Paragon prospects. Whether it’s bad you’re even thinking like that.

Because you’re part of the machine now, and the introduction video made that much clear: You are nothing without the Paragons, and the Paragons are nothing without its people.

Insertion Part Nine: Sideline

Three shots. Count’em. And Aurora said Eponi didn’t do enough when Sever started fights.

Not that those three shots — blistering bolts fired from the small spitter DefenseCorp regulations made Eponi carry — seemed to bother the swamp creature. Sever’s pilot watched from the front nose of the drop shuttle, steadily losing its war against the loose sludge drawing it down, as Gregor, Sai, Rovo, and Aurora dashed around tentacles and splashed through goo to try and figure out how to hurt the thing. The whole scene felt like a bad flick, one of those where all the budgets went to special effects and nothing to the plot.

“Why is this thing even here?” Eponi said into the squad’s channel between a warning call from Aurora to Rovo and a curse from Sai as his sword stuck again into the mud beast’s side. “Out of this entire swamp, we happen to land right on top of it? What are the odds?”

She aimed the spitter as a tentacle swept up Gregor, pulling the big man towards the top of the beast’s bulk. On the side of her weapon, a yellow strip slowly shifted towards green as the spitter sucked spare electrons from the atmosphere, charging up its own batteries to, well, spit death back out. Tech that’d started in weapons like this and then made its way to the racers she loved, giving way for days-long contests where managing battery power took as much skill as navigating the course. The prize purses for those… she’d get back to them.

“You chose the landing spot!” Rovo bothered to reply.

“Kill it!” Aurora played her part, shut down irrelevant conversation. “Eponi, help Gregor.”

Eponi squeezed off another yellow bolt towards the top of the beast. It vanished into the mud with a sizzle, doing nothing to assist Gregor as the mud beast threw him into a nearby tree. Gregor hit the trunk, a rotting thing that looked more like a harbinger of horrors rather than a plant, and broke it, landing on the tree’s gnarled roots below. Eponi grimaced—that looked like it hurt—and stood. Gregor didn’t move, except for his right leg’s slow slide towards the muck. Guess she could help him avoid drowning in the disgusting swamp.

With the boosters kicking, Eponi leapt off the nose of the drop shuttle and flew over Sai’s swinging blade, a sliding tentacle, and Rovo’s scattershot spitter blasts. For a hot second, the roots seemed like they might be beyond Eponi’s grasp, but, as ever, the helmet’s calculations proved correct and Eponi landed right in the middle of the green zone her visor had highlighted. Racers had strict limits on their autopilots, their computer assists, so natural skill took precedence. Out here? The less DefenseCorp could leave in the hands of its soldiers, the better. Took a lot of the thrill away.

“You alive, big guy?” Eponi said, reaching Gregor and dragging—with the help of energy augments in her suit—him away from the liquid. She sent the words through the touch-comm, a near field link that’d send the sound right to Gregor without muddling the squad’s open channel. “Fight’s still going. They could use your hammer out there.”

A hammer that, Eponi noted, still occupied prime position in the mud thing’s crown. Though it seemed like Sever had made some headway – much of the mud had been burned or cut away, revealing a grassy-green set of scales and fur, as though the creature had blended a bunch of species and chosen the ugliest parts of each. The fight’s good news did nothing to spur Gregor; the man stayed still.

“Clear to wake him up?” Eponi tossed out to the channel.

“Clear!” came Aurora’s reply.

“Sorry, buddy.” Eponi pressed in on a tiny pair of notches beneath Gregor’s helmet, against his neck.

Those notches ran a quick verification scan against Eponi’s gloves, making sure she had friendly credentials. Her visor screen split into halves, the left green and the right red. Eponi winked with her left eye, and when the visor flashed all green for a microsecond, she let go of her teammate. Stepped back and watched as Gregor’s suit hummed to a whining, glass-breaking sound. At the noise’s apex, Gregor twitched, his hands and feet flaring out followed by a heavy sigh. His eyes opened, found Eponi’s, and then shut again.

“I hate that,” Gregor said on their near-field channel.

“How many times?”

“Lost count after a dozen.”

Eponi stopped herself from noting DefenseCorp regs suggested all kinds of harmful effects linked to repeated shock-jock tech. Sever held a fuzzy relationship with DefenseCorp, and that may as well extend to this too. Impossible missions demanded impossible compromises, or something like that.

The mud creature let out its first real noise of the fight, a gibbering, wet cough arising from its middle as Sai finally managed to get his sword through the creature’s liquid sludge armor and cut into the good stuff. As death rattles went, Eponi had heard far better screams from pilots as their racers plummeted into endless crevasses or slipped into lava rivers. Aurora and Rovo apparently agreed, taking advantage of the creature’s distress to boost their way near Sai and concentrate their fire into the fresh wound. Like a poorly chosen microwave meal, the heat built up through the middle of the monster before it exploded, raining prodigious muck and worse all over the squad.

Except for Eponi, who’d taken Gregor’s rise as an opportunity for cover and crouched behind the large man. Guts and glory splattered around everyone except her, and Eponi didn’t give one single damn. She’d lived, made it one step closer to that pay day.

“Look at you,” Rovo said roughly five minutes later, as the squad turned to unloading essentials from the drop shuttle. Aurora tasked Eponi and Rovo with the foodstuffs, which they were throwing into expandable buoy-packs, so named for their negative pressure pockets designed to repel gravity enough to make heavy weights an easy carry. “All clean. The rest of us have some natural camouflage.”

“Just doing my part,” Eponi replied, shoveling micro-energy bars by the armful into one of the gray packs. “I’ll draw all the fire.”

“Fire from what?”

Eponi had already forgotten Rovo had the rookie disease — all threats were hypothetical, because Rovo hadn’t experienced them yet. Not outside of a simulator, anyway.

“Did you miss the skiffs?”

“They weren’t that dangerous, and we made it away from them.” Rovo filled his pack to the brim and tugged on the taut string towards the top. The pull triggered the pack’s closing mechanism, and the buoy-pack compressed around the more substantial meal packets Rovo had chosen, creating a rounded cube the Sever, with Eponi’s help, slotted into a pair of back notches on his armor. “If that’s all we’re dealing with, minus the swamp monster, I think this ought to be simple.”

“We don’t get simple missions. Don’t know what they told you when you signed on with Sever, but we’re here to handle what DefenseCorp won’t touch with its legitimate squads. That means high risk, high reward.”

“Is that why you’re here? The reward?”

Seeing someone’s expression through their mask required x-ray vision, so Eponi couldn’t quite tell whether Rovo had asked the question honestly or not. Then she realized she didn’t care.

“I’m here. That should tell you the reward isn’t all that good,” Eponi replied. “But we get to stay away from the rest of DefenseCorp’s crap, and we can ditch out whenever we want. No contracts, no clauses, no complaints. That’s enough for me.”

“Kind of hard to ditch out now.”

Eponi finished her own pack, and as Rovo slapped it into place on her back, Aurora made the general evac call. Time to get away from the drop shuttle, march through the muck, and figure out where this VIP happened to get himself stuck.

“That’s the real secret,” Eponi said as she punched in the drop shuttle’s self-destruct code. It’d take a couple hours to go off, long enough for Sever to get far enough away from any eyes attracted to the fire. “Once you’re a part of Sever, there is no way out. Not alive, anyway.”

Todoist – A solid blend of features and function

I’ll say it straight up – Todoist, and specifically Todoist PRO (not all that expensive at a yearly rate) is my current task list of choice. It’s not perfect, for reasons I’ll get into, but of the forces on this particular battlefield, it has the best overall blend of tools and ease of use for a single person (me!).

So what’s the experience? Well, Todoist goes the minimal route. While it’ll integrate with Google Calendar, it doesn’t play quite as smooth with gmail as Google Tasks, nor does it prompt you to assemble teams with pictures like Asana. Rather, it strikes a balance by being quick to load, fast to interact with, and brings a couple of big time savers to the table:

Dynamic due date typing – I didn’t know how much I’d use this until I started, uh, using it. It’s natural to say that you want something done tomorrow, or in a week. In most task managers I’ve played with, you can’t simply type that in the title of the task and have the manager parse it out, but Todoist does. Typing pay the rent tomorrow will get you a task, due tomorrow, to pay the rent. It’s fast and easy.
Project Templates – You need the pro version for this, but like I noted in some of the other reviews, many of the things I do are repetitive. Every book needs a cover, needs to be formatted, needs a spell check and so on. Rather than typing out those tasks every time (and, more dangerously, forgetting one and then publishing a book without a key piece…), I can load up a previous project and I’m good to go.

Todoist offers a bunch of fiddly extras too, but you’re welcome to ignore those as you go along. Do I care about all the colors, or use the ‘comment’ feature? Nah, but I guess it’s nice that they’re available.

Unlike Google Tasks, Todoist lets you easily group projects that are related to one another, making it easier to see, at a glance, how many tasks I have to do to keep the house from falling apart (so, so many) compared to how many overdue tasks I have to update this and other websites (also so, so many). You can do this with Asana too, but it’s a bigger deal than click-and-drag.

And that seems to be the guiding principle for Todoist – it knows that it’s on a screen, and not everything’s going to be check-the-box simple, but it tries. Most things are a click away, from weekly/daily task views to any of your projects you want to examine more closely. Tasks themselves have zero required fields to fill out – no teams here, really.

So Todoist is winning the war by sheer efficiency. But that’s for me, and it may not fit you.

If you’re working within an enterprise, Outlook gives you benefits that may be impossible to ignore. If you’re working with teams, Asana brings a lot of benefits Todoist just doesn’t have, provided everyone’s willing to play their game.

And if you want a simple day-to-day list that you mark up and down, Google Tasks is as no-frills as it gets.

Or, you know, you could pull out that pen and paper.

Asana – For When You Need It All

If Google Tasks puts all its chips on integration, Asana takes the opposite approach and scatters its strengths all over a wide swath of features that make it a clear stand-out if you’re working with a bunch of goons you’ve got to boss around.

For my purposes, and in general as a solo task manager, spending a lot of time assigning things to ‘me’ and tracking ‘my load’ and such means a whole lot of wasted effort. Like buy a big truck when you live in the middle of the city, or a Rolex when you just need something to tell you the time – it’ll get the job done, it just may not be the right tool.

But boy oh boy if you like pretty interfaces with lots of color, unicorn sparkle animations, and options to include head-shot circles of every team member so you can stare at their stock-photo smiles every time you’re once again delaying the due date because of their incompetence, Asana is for you.

All this, of course, presupposes that your team-based environment isn’t on some other enterprise project management software like MS Project or even a moldy set of Excel spreadsheets running macros like that weird guy you once knew that now runs seemingly every marathon and posts endless pictures of each of them.

Anyway, point being, Asana is going to fit those groups that don’t have an integrated solution but depend on team-based timing to get things done. As a writer, even those outside folks I work with aren’t going to bother getting Asana just so I can send them tasks that they could do by email. And if they’re not going to buy into the system for me (one client), then it’s not worth it for me to deal with all the extra fields for what amounts to a splashy to-do list.

You’ve fought a good fight, Asana, but this just isn’t your war to win.

Google Tasks – The Integration Almost Gets There

Believe it or not, but creative projects are much like all other projects in life. Writing a novel consists of a number of steps, and writing a novel on schedule requires completing those steps by the deadline. You can’t just wake up, pour some bourbon in your coffee and expect epiphanies to stroll in through the door. You either treat it like a job, or it doesn’t happen.

To that end, we look at our first entrant in this To-Do List War, the relatively fresh Google Tasks. One of the world’s largest companies took a look at the hordes of task managers out there and all their giant features lists and said hey, we can integrate with gmail. What more do you want?

And to be fair to Google, that one feature is almost enough. They brought the ultimate weapon to the fight – the instant access to your task list while you’re emailing away – and figured that would be enough.

The Google Tasks icon hovers over on the right side, next to the Calendar and whatnot, in gmail’s tableau. In a single click, Tasks creeps in from the right and hangs out, not being all pushy. If you don’t have any tasks there, a pleasant little message informs you of your apparent success. Sometimes I open it to a blank list just to make myself feel better.

Unfortunately, Tasks built out this integration, which functions just like Outlook, and then failed to make everything as easy as Outlook. It’s not just a single click to turn an email into a task, and it’s difficult to sort tasks efficiently or group them into projects. While you can create ‘lists’, you won’t be able to see all your lists at once, sorted into tasks only due ‘Today’, or ‘Tomorrow’, which both Outlook and Todoist fulfill.

There’s also no dynamic dating from typing, meaning it’s difficult to stream-of-consciousness rattle off a bunch of tasks and slot them into their due dates without using a mouse. All of these claims, by the way, are based on me testing them out. I consider myself an average user, not a hyper-savvy savant who can parse out macro hotkey sequences as if by magic. If something’s not self-evident, I’m not gonna find it.

So here we have this killer gmail integration that could be perfect, and Tasks forgets to bring the rest of the war machine to the fight. Everything else is difficult. Subtasking exists, but there’s no templates in sight. It’s hard to move tasks around or color code them appropriately. In short, it’s a bummer that’s going to, nonetheless, be perfect for some people.

And who are those people?

The ones who want a quick and dirty way to digitize their daily tasks and have them hang out in gmail because that’s where they spend most of their time. It’s a perfect melding, and setting a time in the task squeezes it right into your Google calendar. Dynamic dating doesn’t matter if you’re gonna do everything either before or after lunch, and you don’t need templates to note that you’ve gotta get those TPS reports to Bill by five.

But for a novel, or anything that’s going to take weeks and months from start to finish, you don’t want to be starting your list from scratch every day, and you don’t want to retype a 70-step project every time you start the next book. Thus, Google Tasks falls ever so slightly short.

Just goes to show that the biggest weapon doesn’t always win the war.

The To-Do List War

As a way of displacing my own faults in my disastrous efforts to find and stick with a to-do list system, I’ve come to favor thinking of all the apps and websites as equally incompetent armies vying for the prize at the center of the battlefield. In this flight of fancy (and possibly only in this flight of fancy), the prize is me.

So who do we have fighting for the privilege of letting me click boxes, type in due dates, and sync with my Google calendar?

Let’s meet the contestants:

Google Tasks – the peasant horde, this easy to-do-lister offers painless execution that is utterly confounded by larger, more complex project management.

Strengths: Quick and agile, good at the basics. Has a great relationship with Google Calendar and is easy to access from within Gmail.

Weaknesses: Too simple to handle project templates, easy nesting of projects within one another, and has a Sword of Damocles hanging over its head due to Google’s willingness to kill products like a hangman during the French Revolution.
Asana – a lumbering war machine built for vast enterprises and team-wide efforts. Loaded with features that are useless for the solo tasker, but stuffed with fun animations that make it attractive nonetheless.

Strengths: All the nested tasks, due date stringiness, and project templates you could ask for. Asana comes ready to bring industrial-strength features without the sheer scale of something like MS Project.

Weaknesses: We’re not trying to project plan the Olympics here. Asana’s simply too much for a day-to-day manager. Like buying a Hummer when you live in the city – it might be fascinating for a few days, but then you’ll just be asking why?
Todoist – the savvy crew that brings the right level of sophistication, but lacks the overwhelming firepower to claim the prize straight out, this task manager has the current lead.

Strengths: Dynamic date-placing while typing the task name saves clicks (e.g. typing buy groceries tomorrow and hitting enter will create the buy groceries task and set it due for tomorrow). Simple click-and-drag for arranging projects and tasks is, well, simple.

Weaknesses: Pro subscription isn’t expensive, but it’s damn near necessary to make this mercenary group useful. Project templates don’t have an easy relative date function that I’ve found – e.g. set the final due date to X and have all the other tasks swap to X-1, X-5, etc.
A pen and a piece of paper – the old standby that’s been coasting on experience and dependability for a long time now. Always in the running yet never quite good enough.

Strengths: Best-in-class performance for a day’s tasks. Incredibly satisfying to physically check those boxes. Customizable, and easy to flip back and see how many boxes you’ve checked as a morale booster.

Weaknesses: Difficult to plot out big projects on paper unless you’re willing to make a big ol’ mess of a journal. Requires a journal, a pen, and having both on you to make adjustments or look up tasks in question.

Is this a comprehensive list of all the task management apps and methods out there? Nah. Is this a comprehensive list of all the ones I’ve tried to use with any degree of effort? Yep. I’ve looked at others and written them off for one reason or another, so these are the four I’m gonna look at more closely and we’ll see which one comes out on top in the end.

It’ll be a no-holds-barred battle to see which of these worthy contenders winds up as the champion of the checkboxes, the king of the kalendar, the duke of the dailies… you get the idea.