App School: 5 things a day

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.