Finishing the Hat

What do you do when the most precious girl in the world keeps downloading to-do and task-management apps, only to fall back on her physical sticky notes notes on a white board, which she can't bring with her when she travels (and she's always traveling)? You make her a to-do app of her very own, trying to capture the feel of that white board, crumpling the notes to toss them in a jar, make the iPhone, iPad, and macOS versions all talk seamlessly and work seamlessly so she doesn't feel like she's losing flow, and throw in as many bells and whistles you think will feed her brain as you can come up with.

So you end up with an Eisenhower-matrix based grid, the way she likes it (important, not-important, urgent, not-urgent), with color categorized sticky notes, estimated time to completion, live timers, a satisfying crumpling dynamic for completion, a 'next session' or 'daily tasks' line, a running total of your estimated tasks and time (both for your entire board and your lineup), the option to add multiple boards if you want to have a work/life balance, space for extra info on the back of the sticky notes, the ability to offload to-do items via email to someone else (like me) to get them out of your brain, a robust log feature to see what you've done each day, strong recurring logic so you can have certain to-do items come back, and so much more.

And, the feature set will continue to improve. As she uses it and finds ways to better organize her flow, or to maximize her efficiency, or learns new techniques from the constant pipeline of time-management and ADHD books she's reading, the app will iterate and grow. Just like her. Just like our love.

This is a to-do list. It's also a love letter. For the brain I love more than anything in the entire world. If your brain is anything like hers (you could only be so lucky), hopefully it will prove useful to you too.