It seems easy enough.īut when I talk to folks who use these apps, I see a strange inconclusiveness. Ideally, that improves your productivity, which broadly is how many things you can actually get done in a given amount of time. Every one of these apps attempts to handle the same kind of basic actions: Give people a way to write down tasks, like “Get milk” or “Finish the sales memo,” and offer tools to sort and prioritize those tasks.
The creators of personal to-do apps-or task management software, as it’s sometimes called-generally agree that they haven’t cracked the nut. Today it has a relatively small user base, but in general, productivity apps are big business Americans downloaded them 7.1 billion times last year.Ĭhen and Guzman’s experience with trying to make one turns out to be common.
Fifteen years ago he created one of the first productivity apps, Good Todo. “There are hundreds of commercially available to-do lists right now,” says my friend Mark Hurst. And that doesn’t even count the whackload of us using one big ol’ Notepad file on our computers, or even plain old paper. It’s a crazy Pokémon deck of options: Trello, Todoist, Gmail’s tasks, Microsoft To Do, Remember the Milk, Things, OmniFocus, Any.do, Evernote’s Tasks, and Clear, to name just a few. I think I know why: It might be impossible. But its creators couldn’t shake the feeling that building the perfect system to effectively manage tasks was itself a task they couldn’t accomplish. IDoneThis isn’t gone you can still use it today. “We felt like we’d exhausted what we knew to do,” Guzman says. After five years of working on IDoneThis, they sold the company to a private equity firm. Chen and Guzman became gradually chagrined. But that didn’t seem to help with completing them. “It involved a lot of, not dilettantes, but people who wanted to try something new or were interested in a different system,” Chen says. A minority would mind-meld with IDoneThis, but most would, in time, drift away on a seemingly endless hunt for the best way to manage their to-dos. Which they might have, if they’d hung around-the founders noticed a frustratingly high churn rate. If to-do lists weren’t helping people accomplish stuff, what was the point? But they worried that users would squawk. The more Chen and Guzman pondered it, the more useless to-do lists seemed to be.