Have you tried https://www.beeminder.com/? It is more flexible than it appears at first, and you can easily use it on top of a traditional todo app (https://www.beeminder.com/todoist) or just a plaintext document (https://blog.beeminder.com/nebulous/).

No product can solve the problem of self-discipline. The problems you're describing are an aspect of human nature. At some point, users will become particularly busy with something for days or weeks. After which they will dread seeing an app full of missed reminders and unread items, and they'll avoid it like the plague.

If you come up with a good enough solution, people will use it and you could be quite successful. But the day will always come when you have to declare Productivity App Bankruptcy

The issue that most productivity apps ignore is context.

Lots of them don't account for real life events. Having to go to the doctor, going shopping, cleaning the household, spending time with your loved ones and doing sports aren't necessarily unproductive.

Most productivity happens for me when I have an idea and am able to start working on it immediately while keeping the focus on it without external distractions... It would be amazing if a productivity app out there is able to "juggle around" all the necessities of the day while respecting external dependencies (like an appointment at the doctor) that cannot be rescheduled.

I'm working on something that. It's reactive instead of proactive (it asks what you did instead of what you're planning to do). Just jot something down for now and deal with your todo apps at the end of your day.

It can do Pomodoro sessions, but I'm adding a couple of variant timers (alarms, actually) that are designed to eventually work around your schedule:

https://radleymarx.com/2021/time-journal-wireframes-round-tw...

if I have to enter something into an app, I will eventually forget to do it. and if I miss entering too many appointments I'll eventually have to declare bankruptcy

not trying to be negative about your idea. but the best app is one that will know automatically what's on my schedule, without me having to enter it explicitly. that way I can't forget. I have no idea how to do this, it doesn't really sound possible. Just trying to convey my experience with projects like you described

You won't have to enter your schedule - there's APIs for Calendars. You'd just have to determine which calendars are considered "busy".

As for upkeep, I found that the app is self-motivating. It's not measuring anything so if you miss an hour or a month it doesn't matter, there's no overwhelming guilt. The only thing you miss is being able to review what you worked on.

This is an important observation. Most productivity apps don't end up "working" because they vastly underestimate the complexity of the problem they are trying to solve.

We need to do a far better job of addressing the psychology of self-improvement, one of the most important aspects being how to deal with the inevitable "falling off the wagon".

As you describe well, a naive approach to productivity tends to work at first, but then, as soon as you disengage for a time, they actively work _against_ re-engagement.

I think there is a lot to be figured out in this area.

One other related point is that although an app can't "solve the problem of self-discipline" it _can_ reduce the amount of energy required to "do the right thing" (e.g. by providing a easy to follow system). Since willpower requires energy which is a limited resource, this leaves more of it to apply towards continuing to work towards a goal instead of figuring out how to configure a goal achievement system.

I did some brainstorming years ago on a similar idea, and the one part of it I would like to see implemented some day is tracking progress towards goals.

Trivial examples would be weight loss (or gain) to a goal weight bracket; or budgeting and building a retirement fund.

More complex one might be a career change, say going from programmer to lawyer, which involves lots of things over several years.

I think I had some decent ideas about measuring fuzzy progress but didn’t get very far with connectedness. For instance you have reading goals and a goal to read before bed (not on screen) and you want to get that law degree, so reading Book X might be working on all three, but each has a different kind of progress.

Anyway I agree it’s worth (someone) doing this and I wish you luck with it!

I’ve been thinking about productivity apps a lot lately as I’m building something that resembles todo productivity apps.

I’ve started compiling a list of knowledge management apps.

https://listifi.app/u/erock/knowledge-management-apps

There are a lot of them out there, some with diehard fans, but they never quite fit everyone’s use-cases. The popular ones now like obsidian.md, roam research, etc. are all leveraging a graph database.

The market is super saturated and I wonder how much of them are fads. Productivity apps are fun to work on because the developer's can actually use the app without any network effects.

Good luck to you!

I think you've nailed it. There are very few tools that help you connect the long term with the current week and day, at least in a meaningful way.

https://www.habitstack.com/ is geared towards this. You enter your goals for the year and chunk them down to the quarter, month, and week. Then the software prompts you to stay engaged with the system.

As Scott Adams wrote, "Losers have goals, winners have systems." :)

I'm the founder. Happy to dialogue about the future of productivity and goal setting any time!

$45/month? good luck

I assume you are being sarcastic.

I am not the author you are replying to but the grandparent. I thought of pricing for my system the same way.

If your productivity isn't worth 45 a month then this isn't the app for you. On the flip side, if this app makes you one percent more efficient then you generate thousands or millions of dollars in additional value, the price is well worth it.

That price, combined with the fact that pricing comes first in the menu is just off-putting. It seems to be more focused on extracting money than on being an actual good product. Signing up and seeing it just confirmed that for me. It's not even optimized for mobile screens.

I'd be fine to pay such amount if the app was polished and had great UX. Not arguing with what you stated.

Seems like this is a common thing people need and I too tried to make an app for this. I gave up on it because the complexity grew fast, but my plan was to release it for free and have some sort of premium. I wanted to have a good product first before asking for money.

HabitStack founder here. Your points are well taken! For some context, for the last few years, we've been a service company with a software product. You're seeing us at an awkward transition point to a product first company. So, sorry for the rough edges in the app! We're excited smooth them out.

What jumped out at you as needing immediate attention?

I think this is much needed, I've spent half a decade switching between solutions, and I agree with the problems you listed. I have recently found two apps with new solutions, Slash and Serene. I have not had the chance to try them out thoroughly yet, but they show some promise. What I would prefer is an app that draws inspiration from Franklin's way of journaling.

people running multi billion dollar enterprises usually just hire people to be their personal productivity app. I mean, personal assistants and secreterial staff.

Even in fairly developed countries it's not too expensive to just hire a low wage person to act as the productivity app between a few executives.

Are you planning to publish or open source this? I might be interested in contributing or giving feedback!

Have you seen WorkFlowy? It doesn’t sound like what you’re looking for exactly, but it’s easy to contextualize small goals with larger goals in that app, by just using nested lists

workflowy.com

Not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy user

I'm all talk here but this system you've described is an aspect of my dream, which is a personal ERP. Something to not only manage these goals / activities as you've described, but also to contain various aspects of information for your life. A repository for important documents filed in a manner that makes sense, profiles for the various people in your life containing various information (things they like, allergies, gift ideas, etc). Lots more in my head that I will continue dreaming about but certainly not lift a finger about.

This is a good idea. I am a follower of GTD for over a decade and always the annual reviews, tickler file management etc., (long term to TODO) was a challenge. I wrote a python script to keep all my long term ideas in a separate file and transfer to my todo. I open sourced it. You can find it here https://github.com/vivekhub/todo-tickler

I’ve been searching for something just like this and haven’t found ‘the one’ yet.

Something that goes from goals to milestones mapped to specific days and times on those days (I’ve learned that todo lists not mapped to calendars are far less productive).

Amazing Marvin comes close when you customize it a certain way, and their recent ‘Goals’ feature is well implemented, but it’s not ‘purpose driven’ to do what you’re describing.

Would be interested in following your journey on this if there is an email list you’ve created to subscribe to...

One system I've been using recently that does something sort of like you're describing is Futureland (https://futureland.tv). It has a "streak" feature that gamifies making contributions at a daily cadence which is nice. So there's a psychological nag to get in there and check something off the daily list of things to do.

As someone who works on a bunch of projects this is actually a big pain point for me as well. I haven't found anything that I have really liked that lets you roll up from the "todo" level all the way back up to the long term portfolio level and actually just started trying to build my own app for this myself.

If you want to chat on this topic sometime feel free to reach out.

All of us building this should get together.

My approach is to program myself with Python. Think dynamic time-blocking on steroids.

Let's all meet there: https://matrix.to/#/#gtd:matrix.org

You're saying that you can add your long term goals and you would split it into more and more smaller parts finish could be at the end even daily tasks? Interesting. Would you combine this with daily operational tasks or would you handle them separately?

I agree that this is not a solved problem. I even reviewed all the GTD apps some time ago. None fit perfectly my understanding of GTD. This individual aspect might be a challenge for a product solution, but still worth trying imho.

I had the same realizations as you and have been working on my productivity application for over a year. I've learned a lot about human motivation and decision making. Good luck.

It sounds like we might have converged onto similar visions. I've got a terrible prototype, are you looking for a collaborator?

I'm also working on a todo app, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and I see the same problems you do. Good luck with yours!