🛠️ todo
ToDo is a task management app I made for myself:
For the past 15 years, I've been using Asana to organize my work and personal life (and before that, there were various other apps, like Remember the Milk). But, I decided to write my own to deal with one major issue: overwhelm.
Task management apps make it easy to capture tasks and tend to an every-growing set of lists. They usually keep my mind at peace: once I enter a task, I can drop it from my mind, knowing it's in the system (and that it would pop back into my awareness if I scheduled it to). But, every once in a while, I would get the "task management ick" and revert back to paper; eventually I realized why: on most days, I do not want to be reminded of the infinite list of things I have yet to do.
One of the main things I've come to learn about task management is to do the "management" part sparingly. Constantly organizing and reprioritizing tasks is an anxiety-inducing time-sink. I used to get stuck re-evaluating what to do multiple times during a week, or for bigger things, multiple times during the month. But now, I try to keep a ~20:1 ratio of "planning" vs "doing". (For example, by triaging what I would attempt to do in a week once, at the beginning of the week, and then "trusting the plan".)
My task management app tries to keep me sane by helping me adopt the following workflow:
- let me easily capture tasks for any project (or subproject, or sub-sub-project)
- once a year (-ish), let me review tasks for a project and identify the ones to tackle "this year"
- once a month (-ish), let me review tasks for the year and identify the ones to tackle "this month"
- once a week (-ish), let me review tasks for the month and identify the ones to tackle "this week"
- once a day (-ish), let me review tasks for the week and identify the ones to tackle "today"
- during the day, work from a short list of tasks (that hides everything else away)
So far, the design has worked pretty well.
The app supports a bunch of other little features like:
- separate "schedule for" dates vs "due at" dates
- arbitrary nesting of tasks
- "voting up" of tasks
- (for example, every time I wish I would get around to fixing some bug in my Music Player, I would +1 the related task, helping me prioritize later)
As with many of my other "primarily for myself" apps, I figured that I'll be using something of the sort for the rest of my life, so I might as well invest in something tailor-made for me (and under my control).
Plans
- support for recurring events
- fix tons of little UX paper-cuts
- somehow integrate with the TODO text files I keep for my projects