Whalespeak

There’s nothing makes me wince more than hearing that someone is making another web-based to-do list app. There are about a gajillion already and none of them seem able to keep up with my pen and A4 pad.

So that said, I’m making a to-do list app.

You see it occurred to me that a piece of paper can’t tell me to stop writing, but a web page can remind me that I need limits. This isn’t true of the web apps I’ve already used. I tend to add more and more things until the list is very long. The longer a list becomes, the less inclined I am even to look at it, never mind do any of the tasks. So it has to be short. Restrictively so.

Putting a deadline on things can be useful, but I find that I don’t feel any guilt when they zip by. So marking overdue items doesn’t change my behaviour. But I do like to split tasks into chunks – usually of about 30 minutes or an hour. So it might be good to only accept tasks that are substantial enough to warrant writing down but small enough that they can be completed easily within an afternoon.

So what I’m doing is making a to-do list that will work for me, not one that will necessarily work well for other people.