The productivity application we’re building for James is a to-do list, with a twist. We held a pretty intense three hour workshop yesterday to discuss everything about the applications beginning with the typical who / what / why / how / when / where discovery questions and ending with deep discussions about price plans, notification options, interface restrictions etc. It was a very productive and gave us everything we needed to get going. I talked to James about his idea, and its core principle of doing 5 things a day…
If you did only five things a day that are working towards your goals, you’d wake up a year later having worked 200 business days and completed a thousand tasks. A thousand completed tasks would definitely help achieve pretty much any goal you can come up with. That’s the ’secret sauce’.
At Contrast we’re building the application to support this five-a-day idea. So, what are the differences beween this one, and every other GTD/ToDo application and system on the net?
Yes, there are bagillions of to-do lists out there on the web. This is a different angle on what it takes to get things done. We have two differences
1. 5 things a day is simple and seems achievable. It stops the “neverending list” problem.
2. There is a built in buddy system that either embarrasses or motivates you to complete those tasks.
So, by limiting the workload it lets people focus on doing a small amount of what is important, and then by sharing their progress with others, the Hawthorne effect can kick in, hopefully improving the overall amount of work done. What does James want out of this?
I’m shooting for an application which has a market (coaches that can sell on to their clients as a productivity tool) but has an angle cute enough to make it stand out.
So that’s we’re working on. If you’ve been following our Twitter feed you can see our progress, and some early sketches / designs / prototypes. James is also talking about the app over on his blog.
4 Comments
I find that #2 is the real kicker in terms of getting things done, particularly outside of your main work. A friend and I have been meaning to write up a short film synopsis for the last 2-3 months but, without real accountability, it hasn’t progressed and we’ve spent time on other things.
If the app can assist nail this part of the spec, it’ll be very interesting indeed.
Posted by David Barrett at 4:14 pm on 21 October, 2008.
The way #2 is enforced is by constant disclosure of workload.
In the same way you feel guilty about watching someone tidy up, this app lets you know when your team mates are completing tasks.
So if you all have to work toward booking a holiday or something, and tasks are dished out, then you’ll feel bad about what you didn’t get done. Especially as the messages start to arrive.
Posted by Des at 12:06 pm on 22 October, 2008.
Should one of your tasks per day be to set the tasks for tomorrow ?
Posted by Brian Kenny at 6:10 pm on 28 October, 2008.
Yet another “To Do List” manager, I think I must have looked at and tried out 75+ of these over the years. In general they have fallen into two camps, the simple & the complex. The former runs out of steam as the list gets longer and longer and there’s no way of organizing it; the latter usually involves adopting an ideology before it works. GTD is without a doubt the most sane ideology if you have a logical mind and provides a means of taming your list but all of the software implementations I’ve seen are way to complicated or have a miserable UX. Congratulations on sane and simple approach to getting things done, the UI is adequate (I can think of lots of improvements) but the buddy system is a stroke of genius.
Posted by Frank at 12:04 pm on 31 October, 2008.
1 Trackback
[...] morning. We’ve already told you about the application, and it’s core principle of Five things a day. We listened to his pitch, and once we agreed on the requirements, we got to [...]
Posted by Contrast | The Blog | App Launch: TaskFive at 6:56 pm on 24 October, 2008