Your "work/chore/business", "fun/relaxing/pleasure" dichotomy seems to be universal. I can look at any task on my to-do list and instantly put it in one of those buckets. Probably anyone with a to-do list can.

Why is this?! Assuming this ability is universal (and not just something chime and I are good at:), there must be an innate psychological reason. Possibly even a "simple" reason.

I will venture a guess: real or imagined self-threat is always associated with failure to complete a "work" task. This is never true for an individual "play" task.

Thoughts?

My method of dividing the tasks into two buckets is very simple. Is it fun? If it takes me more than 5 seconds to answer that question, it's not fun. Fun is easy to categorize. So the complement of fun is thus easy to categorize too.

The reason I break it down into two is because of how I look at tasks with respect to stress. Nearly every task either adds (even if slightly) to my stress or relieves it. Very few are on the border and if they are on the border, I'd say they add to my stress just because they're not actually relieving it. My goal is to mix it all up in a healthy balance that best suits my personality.

I may not have posed my question clearly.

You say: "Nearly every task either adds ... to my stress or relieves it." My question is: why does this seems to be true for everyone?

The answer is not necessarily related to energy or time expenditure. For me, playing consecutive games of intense full-court basketball is fun/relaxing/play.

> My biggest gripe with traditional time management method is that you lose sight of the big picture and only concentrate on the small urgencies.

The Stephen Covey's method ("7 habits" fame) specifically deals with this issue. I highly recommend you to read the book "First Things First", but basically it's about scheduling the big stuff first (literally blocking chunks of time in the calendar), and only deal with the today/soon/whenever tasks on the remaining time. It's not as simple as that, you need to read the book to actually apply it effectively, but I can tell you that I've been following it at least for the past 5 years and it has been extremely effective for me.

I love the principle of Today/Soon/Whenever. Your app is a brilliant idea, and I reckon it will gel well with how my brain works.

I'm going to build something simple around this idea for our office.

Neat little app. I like the simplicity. Haven't quite figured out how the personality quirks/fun factor stuff fits into it all yet though.

Off topic: Oddly enough, I looked at the info about you and have actually run into your site before through your other project Sched. Cool personal page. I actually emailed yesterday regarding the Developer API on there to see if we could use it on our music festival site. Hope to hear back!

The moods/quirks aren't hooked into the tasks yet. The only one that's sort of active is the "stress" one that alerts you, depending on your stress-handling-ability, when you have too many "not fun" tasks with respect to "fun" tasks. My goal is to make the rest of the quirks gel with your personality and tasks and make simple but unobtrusive suggestions/recommendations. Like if you are a major procrastinator, the more you push down a task, the darker it's color gets.

Untodos is remarkably charming and friendly. I especially like how it teaches you to use it, sort of like Portal. I've already moved all my todo stuff over to it.

Does it have an API? Being able to use it easily from a cell phone app would make it perfect, and I've been looking for a project to learn the Android SDK.

No API yet. I haven't even publicized the app much other than linking to it in a few discussions like this. I guess it's still a work in progress and will be for quite some time, mainly because I'm still figuring out little tweaks that make it work better for me as a user.

If you really want an API or even a secure RSS feed, let me know and I'll see if I can set something up.

Untodos was kinda fun.