I have too many ideas and no focus — so I built my own planner

I'm Tony, a developer/founder who is always full of ideas and too easily pulled off the important one. Maybe that's just founder brain; either way, my attention scatters and my goals drift. I know what I'm capable of. What I kept lacking was a system that actually held my focus.

So I tried basically everything: WorkFlowy, TickTick, Todoist, Asana, Evernote. I liked them. None of them fit me.

As a developer with a lot of ideas, I'm constantly breaking big things into 10, 20, 30 small tasks a day — and doing that inside those apps is slow and tedious. I ended up living in WorkFlowy and Evernote because they were the fastest to dump into, but they aren't real task managers. Evernote especially: nice, but buggy, and no minimal always-open mode I could keep in the corner of my screen all day. Even Todoist with dictation was too slow once I had 20+ things to move around.

What I actually wanted was narrow: capture a task the instant I think it, keep my goals and habits in view (not buried under a flat list), and get out of my way. I couldn't find it, so I built it — and it's the tool I now use to run my own scattered, idea-heavy day.

Plainlist is one plain-text .todo file. TaskPaper syntax. It opens in any editor, lives in whatever folder you already sync (iCloud, Dropbox, Git), and keeps working when the app is closed. The app puts a real planner UI on top of that file

- Day — type "call sam 3pm 30m" in plain language, get a week plan and a today focus view.

- Habits — fixed (every mon/wed/fri) or flexible (3x/week), with streaks and history.

- Goals — mark an outcome, give it a timeframe, nest tasks under it.

All three layers, one file — so my goals and routines sit next to the day, not in a separate app I forget to open.

A few deliberate bets I'd love pushback on:

1) Pay once, not subscription. Because the core product is local-first, I don't need to run a task database for every user forever. There are still support and update costs, but the pricing bet is simple: $19.99 once, then I earn trust by making the app worth keeping.

2) Plain text you own. After years of moving between apps, I wanted the planner UI without making the app the source of truth. The file matters because capture stays fast, bulk edits stay easy, and leaving the app doesn't strand the work.

3) macOS first, solo. Windows and mobile are in progress (I've been building the phone UI this week). Shipping narrow and deep beats shipping wide and shallow when it's just me.

Honest state: it's the tool I built for myself, I use it every day, and I'm launching it on Product Hunt on Jul 15.

Question for other founders: if your brain runs on ideas and tangents, what actually keeps you focused on the few things that matter — and would owning the underlying task file make you trust a planner more, or is that just my nerd preference?

If it's useful, Plainlist is at getplainlist.com with a free trial. Mostly I'd love a roast of the thinking.