Every learning system needs somewhere tasks live. I went through three tools in fairly quick succession, and each one taught me something useful.

TickTick — The Comfortable Choice

I started with TickTick because I already knew it. Simple interface, good mobile app, doesn’t require an hour of setup to get started. For general life tasks it’s perfectly good.

The problem was the edges. TickTick doesn’t connect naturally to Obsidian. There’s no clean way to link a task in TickTick to a note in Obsidian, and no way to query TickTick tasks from inside the vault. Every time I finished a lesson and wanted to log it, I was switching apps, copying information, doing the same thing twice.

More importantly, TickTick has no Claude Code integration. I wanted tasks to flow automatically from the vault — lesson completed, review task created, calendar updated. TickTick sat outside that loop entirely.

Todoist — Closer, But Costly

Todoist was the obvious upgrade. Better API, more integrations, proper natural language scheduling. And it does have a Claude Code connection through MCP — I could, in theory, have Claude create and update tasks directly.

In practice, the token cost was brutal. Each Todoist operation went through multiple API calls. Rescheduling a week’s worth of overdue tasks — which happened regularly when life interrupted the learning plan — could burn through tokens fast enough that I was spending real money on what should have been a five-minute admin task.

This was the moment I realised the problem wasn’t the task manager. It was asking Claude Code to do scheduling at all.

Reclaim — AI Does the Scheduling, CC Stays in Its Lane

Reclaim.ai takes a different approach. You add tasks with priorities and time estimates, connect your Google Calendar, and Reclaim’s own AI schedules them automatically around your existing commitments. Meetings move, tasks shift, the calendar stays coherent without you touching it.

The key insight for my setup: Reclaim syncs with Google Calendar natively. So when Claude Code creates a review event in Google Calendar — which it does as part of the /lesson-review skill — Reclaim picks it up automatically. No direct integration needed. No extra API calls. No token cost.

Claude Code now does exactly one thing with scheduling: create calendar events. Reclaim does everything else. Each tool stays in its lane.

What I Actually Use Now

The Obsidian Tasks plugin handles lesson tasks inside the vault — notes with checkbox items that the Tasks query engine surfaces on the dashboard. These are study notes, not reminders.

Reclaim handles time allocation — when will I actually do the evening practice session given that I have a meeting at 7pm?

Google Calendar is the shared layer that connects them.

Three tools, three distinct jobs, minimal overlap. It took three wrong turns to find that arrangement.

Next: rebuilding the vault structure around this model, and what the DevOps Learning Command Center looks like now.