Description
Writing down tasks and offload thoughts from our brain onto paper or any physical form is supposed to help us clear our mind and focus on the task at hand. However when there is too much in life to juggle with, as it often is, our todo-list could get too long too easy.
When there are dozens of todos in our todo list, checking it becomes overwhelming, the very tool meant to liberate us becomes a source of stress. That's why so many to-do list would have folders, tags, priorities, and all kinds of other sorting mechanism to manage tasks.
However I find that kind of mechanism to be quite useless and mechanical, how can you quantify a task's importance and urgency? when something is urgent enough, wouldn't you just do it instead of write it down in your todo list? If something is not urgent now, wouldn't it automatically becomes urgent in the future?
Wouldn't it be wonderful if instead of the arbitrary folders, manual labels and made-up priorities there were a more organic way to manage tasks?
Actually, there is, your tasks could be managed by TIME.
Think about it, no matter how many things you got at hand, you can only do one thing at a time, and if something is important and urgent you would want to do it in the near future (or now), if something is not so urgent, then you would arrange it in a more distant future. And there are also things that cannot be done until a certain time, so it need not to be shown in our todo list NOW.
Thus, problem solved, when we are presented with a lot of tasks, instead of just do everything (which is honestly not possible) or just leave it there because you couldn't do it which is frustrating, you could just POSTPONE your tasks. If it is something you want to do or relatively urgent, but you don't feel like do it now, or certain conditions are not met so you cannot do it now, then you can postpone it to the near future such as 40min later or even 15 minutes later, and then the task is gone, no longer something you need to do now, if it is something not very urgent or important, but you still want to do when you got time, you can postpone it to maybe 3 or 4 days or even a week later.
Thus based on your intuition, you can quickly determine how far in the future you would like to postpone a task. The process in and of itself is stress free, because the task is not gone, it is just rearranged to a later time, you don't have the remember the task's label or tag or which field it belongs to or anything, it will reappear in the future, and if you really do not have anything to do at hand you can look into the calendar to see the tasks you postponed into the future.
In P.Todo, this POSTPONE action is made crazy easy and intuitive, you can just swipe a task item to the left to postpone a task to the future and the harder you swipe the more distant the future the task is pushed to, and if you wish to delegate a task to reappear in a certain date you can swipe the task item all the way left to call out a calendar to delegate an exact date.
For task that you do want to do now, you can swipe the task item to the right, depending on how much you swipe a timer will show up playing white noise music and helping you to focus, if you swipe a bit further you can also mark the task as complete or swipe even further to delete the task.
With this simple app, I find my chaotic and dramatic day become much more manageable. It becomes significantly easier for me to get into the zone, and get things done. On the other hand, it becomes much less likely for me to miss important deadlines, as everything is organized in my todo app's calendar.
P.Todo is a project that I build for my own need, as all other todo app couldn't satisfy me, but it turns out other people seems to like it as well. So I decide to pack it up and share it in app store, hope you enjoy!