Thread by @then_there_was

Every To Do app makes the mistake of assuming humans make decisions based on time.

They’re wrong though.

All of them.

Most humans don’t decide to do something at 3:14pm.

They do things out of habit.

And depending on the context.

“I have my gym shoes on. It’s the evening. Time to go to da gym.”

New things are especially hard for us to do though.

And they’re hard because we don’t know where to start.

There’s so many different calendar and to do apps, because nobody has solved the problem people actually have:

“How do I keep track of all the things that I want to do and find the right context to do them in?”

Look.

It’s obvious our minds weren’t designed to handle large swaths of information all at once.

It’s why meditation is so attractive to people in Silicon Valley.

They live in a world of abstract ideas, competing and pulling at their attention.

Our brains have a working RAM capacity of about 4 chunks.

That’s it.

So what that means is you’re constantly accessing things in long-term memory, 3 or 4 chunks at a time.

Good luck trying to make progress there.

Trying to think about everything you have to do is like solving a math problem.

And you wouldn’t solve a math problem in your head.

No.

You’d write it down on a piece of paper.

Would you multiply 836*234 in your head?

No. Not unless you had developed a special heuristic to quickly multiply large numbers in your head.

In the old days, you’d take out a piece of paper, and write out the problem.

The paper would act as a long-term storage unit.

For whatever reason, the brain uses symbols to augment its memory.

And it does this very...very well.

I think it’s why humans can write and other animals cannot.

The next time you have a repeating thought or problem, write it down.

Explore the problem and what you’d have to do to address it.

You’ll notice you’ll stop thinking about it.

The brain has effectively distributed its cognition to symbols, paper, and words.

Throughout history, people have discovered new and more efficient ways for multiplying numbers like 836*234.

Like an abacus.

But nothing compares to software.

Nowadays, you press a few buttons and the problem is solved for you.

What I’m suggesting is that To-Do apps and calendars have been focusing on the wrong problem.

They think if they give people prettier tools, they’ll be able to solve more of their problems.

A calculator augments human intuition.

Current to-do apps do not.

Instead, they’re tyrants that demand why we’re not doing what we’re suppose to be doing.

That’s not pleasant at all.

Using a calendar should feel like less work, not more.

“Okay, that’s all well and good Andrew, but people need a way to keep track of events. What about appointments?”

Calendars work great for appointments.

For nearly everything else you do in life, they get in the way.

A good productivity app should basically just be a container of all the things that are important to you, but don’t want to forget.

It won’t be a tyrant. And it won’t demand of you that you complete everything on it.

It’ll be like solving math problem on a piece of paper.

Instead of scheduling events on time, you’d do it in chunks.

Like this

“I don’t want to plan out every minute of my day. Seems tedious”

The app wouldn’t demand that you plan out every minute.

It’s just a high level and general overview of what you want to get done in the day.

It’s a way of asking, “What’s most important to you?”

And of course that’ll change.

Your energy will change. Circumstances will change.

And your preferences will change.

So the software should be easily modifiable.