In this system, plaintext files are used for most of the backbone of your organizational system.

Future proofs your journal entries by saving them as plain text and organizing them as you go. This means you can read or create entries when you don’t have DayJournal.

It’s flexible in precisely the way so many modern apps aren’t, and if you like tweaking things until they’re just right, I can’t recommend it enough.

And if all else fails, you can just use a text editor.

Plain text is software and operating system agnostic. It's searchable, portable, lightweight, and easily manipulated. It's unstructured. It works when someone else's web server is down or your Outlook .PST file is corrupt. There's no exporting and importing, no databases or tags or flags or stars or prioritizing or insert company name here-induced rules on what you can and can't do with it.

Countless productivity apps and sites store your tasks in their own proprietary database and file format. But you can work with your todo.txt file in every text editor ever made, regardless of operating system or vendor.

Most to-do lists give you no control over your data. Your tasks live inside the app, not in a document you can edit, and syncing is handled by whichever company made the app. If you don't like this, todo.txt is a great alternative.