During my time in high school, I began to struggle with completing my work and often fell behind. This led me to prioritize schoolwork over everything else that brought me joy. The assumption was that if I focused solely on schoolwork, I would be able to get it done. College made me realize that even when I focused exclusively on school, each assignment expanded to fill the entire day. Now that I’ve finished my undergraduate degree, I want to blend the things I want to do with my responsibilities.
This led to an idea: I need a tool that allows me to build my day—to choose the things I want to get done before the clock strikes midnight. I need to be able to log tasks for the day as well as tasks I want to do at some point in the future. Daily tasks represent the minimum required for me to consider the day a good one. Tasks saved for later, on the other hand, allow me to capture things I want to do without interrupting the flow of my day-to-day responsibilities.
There are popular methodologies such as time blocking. My issue with time blocking is that even if I plan to work on a task at a specific time, I often go over the allotted window. This creates a feedback loop where I stop respecting the time boundaries of other tasks. To counter this, my tool will use the end of the day as the only time limit for daily tasks. I can have a “good day” whether I complete everything before noon or in the very last hour of the day.
My day job already has its own schedule, and this tool is meant to complement the other tools I use to track work. Additionally, the tool is designed for brief task descriptions only. All other forms of writing and deeper thinking will happen outside of it.
I'm going to call this tool minilist pronounced "meenee list". You can check on the progress here minilist.app