A task management system optimized for what I care about.

Modern task management systems are supposed leverage computers to:

• Lessen cognitive burdens
• Make us more reliable
• Improve prioritization

However, there are a lot of todo apps with different flavors, and people often switch between them. That’s evidence that the goals above are rather nebulous - i.e. we don’t know what exactly we want. When design a task management system, the most obvious takeaways are not very constraining:

• The system should replace human memory with computers
• The system should show us time-sensitive things before their due dates
• The system should show us valuable tasks when we have free time

These takeaways leave plenty of open questions. How to support more flexible forms of time-sensitivity? How to estimate value? Ultimately, the human must answer these questions, and their answers will inevitably change. A system true to its original goal of minimizing human memory must ingest those answers continuously to inform what it shows to the user.

Over time, I have arrived at a workflow that I believe accomplishes this naturally. It shares some concepts from existing systems (e.g. Inbox), but is ultimately quite different.

I’ll describe its design in terms of a more extreme and prescriptive breakdown of the goals above:

• Lessening cognitive burden
  • Minimum Interrupts
  • Single Inbox/View
• Improving reliability
  • Low Barrier to Entry
  • Dated Acknowledgement
• Prioritization
  • No Lists
  • Surface Valuable Tasks

I will first explain why each of the sub-bullets is important, and then how we can achieve it below.

System Objectives

Single Inbox

There should only be one view that requires regular checking in order for the system to function.

Multiple views results in having to remember when to check each view.