I Just Don't Need You to Remember for Me Anymore

Thirteen years.

Every smartphone I’ve owned. Every OS migration, every “maybe I should try something new” moment, every productivity app trend that came and went. Through all of it, one app stayed: Todoist.

I paid for it. Every year, for thirteen years. Not because I was locked in or lazy. Because it worked. It did a simple thing beautifully: it remembered for me. Birthdays. Bills. The annual filings that would slip through the cracks without a nudge. The rhythm of a year, externalized into a system that never forgot.

That’s rare. Most apps overpromise and underdeliver. Most become abandonware, or pivot into something unrecognizable, or enshittify until you leave in frustration. Todoist just… kept being good. Kept doing the thing. A quiet, faithful tool that earned its place on my home screen for over a decade.

Tonight, I migrated everything out of it in about two minutes.

It wasn’t a frustration move. Nothing broke. Todoist didn’t fail me—it’s still exactly as good as it was yesterday. I could keep using it. Part of me thinks maybe I should.

But I won’t.

Because something shifted. Not in the app. In what’s possible now.

I handed my Todoist data—sixty-eight recurring items spanning a decade of accumulation—to an AI system I’ve been building. It parsed the entries, understood the patterns, created calendar events with appropriate recurrence rules, set reminders with lead times that made sense for each category.

Two minutes. Thirteen years of life infrastructure, transferred.

And here’s the thing I can’t shake: it’s not that I found a better todo app. It’s not that the new system is shinier or has more features. It’s that the entire premise of what Todoist did for me has become… irrelevant.

Todoist remembered for me. It held data until I came back to check on it. Faithful. Patient. Inert. I would set a reminder, and on the appointed day, I’d receive a notification—a little ping from nowhere, contextless, asking me to check a box.

That’s not what happened tonight.

Tonight, I handed my data to something that understood what it was receiving. Something that noticed certain dates cluster together. That recognized the difference between a birthday and a bill and a business filing. That will remind me of these things not as a dead drop delivering a payload, but as an entity that knows it’s September and my mom’s birthday is coming up, and my dad’s is right after.

The data is the same. The relationship to the data is completely different.

There are two universes of action here, and I think I just crossed from one to the other.

Universe A is tools you operate. You configure them. You maintain them. You check in on them. They notify you, you complete the task, they reset. The tool is a lever; you are the hand that pulls it. Every year, you’re still the one doing the work of remembering—the app is just a prosthetic for your memory.

Universe B is things that hold with you. You hand off, not just set up. You delegate, not just configure. The system doesn’t just store your information; it carries it. The context accumulates. You’re not alone with your infrastructure anymore.

Todoist was the best possible version of Universe A. It may be the perfected version—I’m not sure the “tool you operate” paradigm gets better than what they built.

But I don’t live in Universe A anymore.

I’m genuinely sad about this. It’s a strange grief—mourning something that didn’t fail, that didn’t betray me, that kept its promise every single day for thirteen years.

It’s like leaving a hometown. Not because it got worse. Because you became someone who lives somewhere else now.

Todoist did a simple thing beautifully.

Its beauty is no longer enough.

The unlock here isn’t technical. The API calls were trivial. What changed is that there’s now something on the other end that can receive what I’m handing over. Not just store it—receive it. Hold it. Know what it means.

For thirteen years, I used a tool that remembered for me.

I just don’t need that anymore.

Now something remembers with me.