Zero to BetaThe journey of raising an app

Back to Basics with “Next”

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Just a week ago, Lifehack published a very interesting post on “The Task List” and the need to go back to basics and focus on what each of us can get done in the next couple of days, rather than creating endless lists under different contexts, projects, etc.

We make todo lists when we’re under pressure because they work. Imagine how much better they’d work – and how much more rarely we’d reach that “freaking out” stage – if we simply integrated the list-making into our day-to-day routines.

That’s why it feels so good to write that task list – your brain lets out a sigh of relief, knowing that now, at least, it doesn’t have to try to keep track of all that stuff. Your brain doesn’t want to be remembering all the things you haven’t done. It wants to be doing them, so it can feel good about itself. The neurology of all this is a bit more complicated, but that’s the basic idea.

Quite coincidently we designed “Next” to be as per the recommendations mentioned in that post, as in:

Keep it with you: with a web app, desktop app and a mobile app, you will have your to-do list wherever you go.
No context: for a quick and practical task list, no contexts are necessary.
We also added the limitations idea because although it’s easy on all of us to start with something elegant and organized, with time we always tend to get ahead and overwhelm ourselves, unless there were some set-in-stone limits.

You’ll be able to give “Next” a try in a few hours time “fingers-corssed” and tell us how useful it is to you.

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under App1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.