A couple of years ago I took some time to start teaching myself app development for iOS, and I ended up creating my own weird to-do app: Do-dono. Yes, the name was probably a mistake, but I thought it was funny and spent too long superimposing the relevant hat on a dodo silhouette to turn back now.
I've been using it myself ever since but I'm not very good at marketing or explaining how it would work for other people (if it does). However I've finally gotten around to fixing a couple of deficiencies in it (namely, introducing notifications and UI fixes) and I figured it's probably time to mention it somewhere.
The idea behind it is that I am not going to manually order my to-do lists. I use them all the time to try and keep track of things, but when using the default Apple reminders system I just keep postponing the notification over and over if I don't want to do the thing. So this is a to-do app that embraces the resistance to doing things. The list ordering is automatic and only marginally chaotic.
There are three ways of adding items to the list:
- Brain mode
- Due-date mode
- Already-completed mode
#1 is where the "magic" happens (and by magic I mean a very basic algorithm). You mark each item with two values: your resistance to doing it, and the importance of doing it. If something isn't important and you don't want to do it, it'll probably sit at the bottom of your list forever. Important items will move up the list faster, measured against your resistance to doing them. Things you want to do will naturally sit higher up on your priorities.
#2 brings in the concept of deadlines but with an ADHD spin. We all know it's not getting done until right before the deadline, so these items start off low on the priority list and move up to the top as the deadline approaches.
#3 is just a helpful way of tracking things you've already done. I find it hard to remember what I accomplished in a day, and what I did is often not what I intended to do. This gives you a nice simple way of tracking your successes.
The overall goal of building this app was to capture some aspect of how I think about things in app form, rather than trying and failing yet again to convert how I think to the format of existing solutions. I've reached a point in my life where I'm fairly certain I can't fundamentally change how I work any more. My prior usage of the Apple Reminders app was extremely chaotic, and I never managed to get on with more complex to-do list applications as they just didn't fit how I approach the concept of to-do lists.
Anyway, that's my logic for my own to-do app and it makes sense to me. If you end up giving it a go, let me know if you have any problems or ideas for additional features. I do know I'd like to support shared lists in the future, for use-cases like shopping lists, but I'm always open to other ideas as well. Even if you don't try it out, I'd be curious to know whether this concept fits into your way of managing your daily life as it does for mine.