I’m a productivity nut, but I’ve become frustrated with the current landscape of available tools.

I’ve not been able to find a “Goldilocks” tool with the perfect balance of simplicity and complexity I require. With Grok’s help, I researched to see if my same frustrations with most productivity tools are echoed by others. Short answer: a resounding yes.

Grok’s research turned up the following:

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The top three frustrations users commonly report with productivity apps (such as Todoist, Notion, Asana, Trello, and similar tools) are:

1. Overwhelming complexity and steep learning curves
   Many apps, especially all-in-one tools like Notion, require significant time to set up templates, databases, and workflows. Users often spend more hours customizing the app than actually completing tasks, turning it into a “procrastination trap” or time sink rather than a helper.
2. Excessive notifications and distractions
   Constant pings, reminders, and updates from apps like Asana or Slack interrupt focus, leading to notification fatigue, context switching, and reduced deep work. This ironically makes users less productive, as the tools designed to organize tasks become sources of anxiety and interruption.
3. Failure to address underlying motivation and psychology
   Apps excel at listing and tracking tasks but don’t tackle procrastination, lack of motivation, or individual psychological differences. Users frequently abandon tools because unchecked tasks pile up, creating guilt without providing real behavioral support or adaptation to personal habits.

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When building an app, there’s a strain of advice that says to build something for yourself. If you’re the target customer, you’ll build a better product. Strange as it may sound, I did no research prior to building the MVP, precisely because I wanted it to be a product for me. The bet is that there are more “me’s” out there. From the sound of it, there totally is.

My tool fixes all of the above frustrations and more. I ruthlessly resisted the urge to add “more, more, more” just because “I could” or because “other tools have these features.”

Walking the tightrope of feature bloat and usefulness has been fun. I set out to build the 80/20 todo app. The app that produced maximum productivity while eliminating the feature bloat that causes endless tool tinkering.

For example, my app does not have “repeating todos.” In fact, it did not have repeating logic at all for the first few weeks of its experience. Why? Because the app is obsessively focused on “today.” Most tools I’ve used make so much of “planning” that you’ll spend all of TODAY planning what you are going to do TOMORROW. In a productivity app, that is counter-productive, which is a bug by definition.

I knew, though, that one important element of this app would be habit tracking. It would need to seamlessly integrate into the process of creating a task. No separate tool. No complex dashboard. No judgement if you missed a day.

So here’s what I came up with:

With the click of a button, you toggle through common habit intervals. If you are 100% consistent with a task, the task card lets you know.

If you are falling behind on a task, it also lets you know:

In the beginning, habits were only daily. I worked like that for a few weeks, desperately wanting to delay the addition of new intervals. I cycled through numerous UI changes. When I landed on the current UI, it clicked. This UI would allow me to easily create habit intervals without a clunky, bloated experience. And bonus: This is easily the 80/20 of repeating tasks/habits.

I’ll admit, this tool cannot handle complex repetitions. “Every 3rd week when the moon is yay-high in the sky, blah blah blah.” If you need to do that, you need a different tool. A reminder app. Which comes built into most smartphones! But if you simply need to do something once a week, month, year, or quarter, you can do it with my app, and all by clicking one button until you get the chosen interval.

Let’s talk about another example: Notifications.

This will be one of the most controversial and love/hate ideas within the app. There are no notifications whatsoever. In fact, I’ve no plans to release this as an iPhone or Android app. You may not have realized, but browser-based PWA’s (Progressive Web Apps) are really good now. This app works fantastically on an iPhone or Android, and all you have to do is add it to the home screen from your browser. I predict you’ll see more and more of this happening.

“Steve, you’re telling me my todo app can’t notify me?! That’s insane?!”

And to you I’d ask… “Why?” What about that is insane?

Insane to me is yet another app commanding your attention. And the majority of those frustrated with productivity apps tend to agree. If you are looking at the app to help schedule your day, why do you need to be notified about something? You are paying attention to the app. The info is all there, whenever you want to look at it. (There’s even an offline mode, so no worries there.)

If you NEED to be reminded about something (hence, get a notification) you should use the reminders app. That’s what it is for.

Now in the spirit of walking the tightrope, I have built in some (and plan to build in more) “power user” features. For example, the app allows you to add calendar subscriptions so you can sync all your calendars into it, and tasks will schedule around them. When it comes to notifications, I plan to build in webhooks that power users can use to create automations that notify them if desired via test or email. But the app itself has no push notifications of any kind, and I plan to keep it that way.

Let’s talk about the final big issue: Motivation and psychology.

By far, my two biggest frustrations with todo/habit apps are streak tracking and task pile-up. These drive me nuts. Alas, we must have regular habits, and we must do tasks if we’re going to be human beings. So our apps should accommodate them. But how can we do so without creating demotivating effects?

My app takes two approaches:

First, there are no “streaks.” For years in productivity circles, the Jerry Seinfeld chain link story was used to create a sense that your mission in life ought to be to never break a habit streak. This is insane. Life is flexible and too uncontrollable. Our natural bent as humans is to guilt or shame ourselves if we miss, despite circumstances being out of our control.

Instead, we need useful information to help us self determine whether we are living with consistency and integrity. Streak trackers move the motivation to the extrinsic—outside of you—realm. Lasting change almost always happens from the intrinsic—inside of you!—realm. So we display a useful bit of information: a consistency score.

Are you 100% consistent? Only 10%? 60%? 0%?! This is not a judgement (You missed a day, you filfy animal!)—this is information (“You said you wanted to do this…but do you really? It doesn’t seem important to you.”) This invites introspection so you can make changes, whether by improving your consistency or getting honest with yourself and changing your expectations to ensure they line up with reality.

Second, the app provides multiple protections against a stale, endlessly growing task list.

Want to clear your entire schedule with one button and zero guilt? Do it! We have such a button. It will even give you a nice message letting you know you’re free the rest of the day 🙂

Overwhelmed by the list of tasks you’ve amassed? Click “clean the slate” and tap again to confirm, and watch your worries disappear. (It’s risk-free to try; there’s an undo button. You can just see how good it feels!)

Want to make sure tasks are not allowed to get stale in the first place? Enter destruco mode. Choose whether a task becomes stale in 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year. Stale tasks are destroyed, sight unseen.

I hope, by now, you are wondering how to get your hands on this app. I will be inviting people into the beta very soon. At the bottom of this post, just enter your name and email address so I can notify you when it’s time.