Then she’d interrupt them, checking to see what the volunteers actually remembered.
#Any todo series
In a now classic set of experiments, she gave volunteers a series of tasks (assemble a cardboard box, make a figure out of clay, do some arithmetic). Lewin’s student, a Soviet psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik, became fascinated by this phenomenon. After that, they couldn’t remember any of those details at all. As one version of the story goes, Lewin realized that the waiters were able to meticulously recall specific food orders-until they’d served the food and the customer was gone. In the 1920s, the German psychologist Kurt Lewin was dining in a restaurant and noticed something remarkable.
#Any todo software
But rarely is a category of software linked to such vistas of despair. I’ve written about software for years, and I can tell you that people often have surprisingly deep feelings about their apps. The question is, why? Not just why it’s so hard to make a to-do app that works, but why people often feel so distraught by their hunt for the perfect organizational system. Sure, we’re getting work done! But we always feel slightly out of control, haunted by the to-dos at work and home that we just aren’t nailing. Maybe this will do the magic!” as Randy Shulman, editor and publisher of Metro Weekly, Washington, DC’s LGBTQ paper, tells me. We bounce from app to app, never quite finding a home. But most of us? We’re just sort of … meh. An equally tiny minority simply Cannot Even and are curled in a fetal ball awaiting imminent firing. A scant minority of us check off everything every day. It seems easy enough.īut when I talk to folks who use these apps, I see a strange inconclusiveness. Ideally, that improves your productivity, which broadly is how many things you can actually get done in a given amount of time. Every one of these apps attempts to handle the same kind of basic actions: Give people a way to write down tasks, like “Get milk” or “Finish the sales memo,” and offer tools to sort and prioritize those tasks.
#Any todo cracked
The creators of personal to-do apps-or task management software, as it’s sometimes called-generally agree that they haven’t cracked the nut. Today it has a relatively small user base, but in general, productivity apps are big business Americans downloaded them 7.1 billion times last year.Ĭhen and Guzman’s experience with trying to make one turns out to be common. Fifteen years ago he created one of the first productivity apps, Good Todo. “There are hundreds of commercially available to-do lists right now,” says my friend Mark Hurst. And that doesn’t even count the whackload of us using one big ol’ Notepad file on our computers, or even plain old paper. It’s a crazy Pokémon deck of options: Trello, Todoist, Gmail’s tasks, Microsoft To Do, Remember the Milk, Things, OmniFocus, Any.do, Evernote’s Tasks, and Clear, to name just a few.
I think I know why: It might be impossible. But its creators couldn’t shake the feeling that building the perfect system to effectively manage tasks was itself a task they couldn’t accomplish. IDoneThis isn’t gone you can still use it today. “We felt like we’d exhausted what we knew to do,” Guzman says. After five years of working on IDoneThis, they sold the company to a private equity firm. Chen and Guzman became gradually chagrined. But that didn’t seem to help with completing them. “It involved a lot of, not dilettantes, but people who wanted to try something new or were interested in a different system,” Chen says. A minority would mind-meld with IDoneThis, but most would, in time, drift away on a seemingly endless hunt for the best way to manage their to-dos.
Which they might have, if they’d hung around-the founders noticed a frustratingly high churn rate. If to-do lists weren’t helping people accomplish stuff, what was the point? But they worried that users would squawk.
The more Chen and Guzman pondered it, the more useless to-do lists seemed to be.
0 kommentar(er)
