Summary
- ChatGPT’s Tasks can’t yet handle reminders as well as dedicated to-do apps.
- The 10-task limit and notification issues hinder ChatGPT’s effectiveness.
- ChatGPT needs more scheduled task slots, critical alerts, and improved consistency.
Tasks is a new beta feature in ChatGPT that you can use to create scheduled actions. It has the potential to work as an AI-powered to-do list manager. Having taken it for a spin, however, I won’t be replacing the Todoist app any time soon.
What Are Tasks in ChatGPT?
Tasks in ChatGPT allow you to schedule actions within the app. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to test you on the capital cities of the world at 8 am every day, and each day a prompt will pop up within the app, along with a push notification or email if you want.
When I first learned about Tasks, I was excited, as it sounded like it might make ChatGPT an excellent way to keep on top of my to-do list. I’ve tried multiple different to-do apps in my time, and currently use Todoist. It’s fine, but I can’t help feeling there must be a better way. Unfortunately, right now, ChatGPT just isn’t it.
What Works Well When Using ChatGPT to Manage Your To-Do List
The most obvious benefit of using ChatGPT to manage your to-do list is natural language processing. Todoist has this to some extent; you can enter a task such as “Remind me to buy a birthday card at noon tomorrow” and the task will be created with the appropriate date and time. However, a task such as “Remind me to put the recycling out every other Thursday at 8 am” only creates two entries, at which point the reminders stop.
ChatGPT can understand far more complex requests. I asked it to create a reminder to tell me to put my green bins out one week, my black bins out the next, and to keep alternating in that pattern. So far, this has worked as expected; all I had to do was ask.
Natural language processing is also useful for marking tasks as completed. If you finish a task, you don’t need to remember exactly what you called it when you first set it up. Just describe the task you’ve completed to ChatGPT using any language, and it should be able to understand and remove the task from your to-do list.
ChatGPT Isn’t Ideal For Multiple Tasks
Unfortunately, some key issues mean that I won’t be saying goodbye to Todoist just yet. The first is a significant limitation: you can only have a maximum of 10 scheduled tasks at once. As soon as you hit the limit, you can’t create any more scheduled tasks until you delete some.
This means you can have a maximum of 10 different schedules for reminders before ChatGPT stops being of any use. I found that it was possible to combine multiple to-do tasks into a list and have ChatGPT remind me about the entire list, and this would only count as one Task.
However, this only works if you need reminding about all of your to-do items on the same schedule. If you want to be reminded about different tasks on different schedules, then you have to split them into separate Tasks, and the 10 slots soon get filled up.
ChatGPT Alerts Are Too Easy to Miss
When a scheduled task becomes due, I want to be reminded of it then and there. ChatGPT can send push notifications and emails, but unfortunately, these are all too easy to miss among the mass of other notifications you may have on your device.
Setting ChatGPT to use persistent notifications on my iPhone helped a little, but it was still the case that if I wasn’t using my iPhone when the notification arrived, I would frequently miss it.
What I’d really like would be the ability to send critical alerts that make a sound when delivered even when my iPhone is on silent, although to be fair to ChatGPT, Todoist can’t offer this either. Other apps such as Due, however, can send critical alerts, which are far harder to miss.
I Can’t See My Tasks on My Home Screen
One of my favorite features in Todoist is that I can add a widget to my iPhone Home Screen that displays my current tasks. It means that whenever I pick up my phone, I see the four most important things I need to get done.
Currently, there’s no simple way to mimic this using ChatGPT. There are no ChatGPT widgets available as yet, so I’ll have to stick with Todoist to see my to-do list on my Home Screen.
ChatGPT Seems to Stop Following Instructions
This one is a real pain. This isn’t exclusive to Tasks; ChatGPT will often decide to stop following some instructions. I got very excited when I realized that I could ask ChatGPT to get progressively more annoyed when reminding me about tasks on my to-do list if none of them had been completed between each reminder.
The first few times, this worked a charm, with ChatGPT starting gently and then ramping up to the point where it was shaming me into wanting to check at least one thing off my to-do list. However, after a while, it simply started repeating the same text each time, and then eventually gave up trying altogether and just started showing the list with no other text.
Tasks are still in beta, and it may be that issues like this will be fixed in later updates, but for now, the inability to consistently follow instructions is a major flaw.
What ChatGPT Needs to Become a Solid To-Do List Manager
Tasks give ChatGPT the potential to become an excellent to-do list manager. However, it will need some significant changes before this happens.
The most obvious change is that it needs to offer far more than 10 scheduled tasks at a time. Even when combining tasks, this is unlikely to be enough for most people’s needs. If you add ten reminders for people’s birthdays, for example, that’s all of your slots filled up straight away, unless some of them happen to share the same birthday.
It also needs the ability to send critical alerts, or at least use notifications that are less easy to miss. Many tasks won’t be time-sensitive, but if you miss a reminder for a task that is time-sensitive, it can be a real pain.
Finally, ChatGPT needs to get better at following instructions. It’s all very well being able to do clever things such as becoming increasingly irate when the longer tasks are left incomplete, but it’s only useful if it works every time rather than grinding to a halt after the first few responses.
Tasks in ChatGPT have the potential to be an excellent way to manage your to-do list, with the possibility to harness the power of generative AI to make your reminders complex and personalized. Currently, however, it’s just too limited to be useful as a genuine replacement for dedicated to-do list apps. For now, I’m going to have to stick with Todoist, but I’m hoping there will come a point when ChatGPT will take over the job.
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