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Starting the first of 12 projects in a year

I wrote a post on here a couple of days ago about the difficulties I've faced in trying to finish projects. The outcome of which led me to challenge myself to build and finish 12 projects in 12 months. This is my first post for the first project 😃. So without further-a-do, let's get to it...


I'm building a distraction-free daily task and note-taking app

TL;DR: I want to see my notes and all the tasks I need to get done for the day, in one place. No distractions, no intrusive notifications, call-to-actions or sluggish feature bloat!


I know! I hear you saying "We need another Todo app like we need a hole in the head", but hear me out. I've used so many tools over the last decade to manage my daily tasks, my daily notes and projects and frankly, I don't love any of them.

You see the thing is, they're noisy, they have too many features in your face all of the time. There are notifications for your tasks in one menu. Another list for product release updates for the tool itself and don't even get me started on all the pushy prompts urging you to upgrade. Not to mention they're slow!

There are many people out there with neurological conditions such as ADHD (myself included) and for us, this abundance of call to action is overstimulating, very fatiguing and immensely distracting.

I want an app that allows you to plan your day and then gets out of your way. A tool that you spend as little time in as possible because you're too busy kicking ass. I want a zen-like experience and the focus to do meaningful work.

I want a single place where I can see everything I need to get done in a day. A place to see all of my notes and another to see all of my projects. I don't want to switch pages to track project tasks, that should be in my daily view. I don't want to switch pages to make notes. You guessed it. It should be in my daily view. I want it all in one place. Is that too much to ask for? I don't think so.


Requirements

Must-haves

  • One view to manage tasks and notes for each day (in a list view)
  • Ability to mark a task as complete
  • Ability to change a task's schedule date
  • Ability to write notes with basic markdown
  • Ability to reorder tasks & notes
  • Visual feedback when a task is overdue
  • Ability to search and manage all notes
  • Ability to search and manage all tasks
  • The app should load in under 1 second
  • Interactions and feedback should happen within 100ms

Nice-to-haves

  • Ability to assign tags to tasks and notes
  • Ability to view tasks and notes by tag
  • Ability to specify a template for each day's tasks
  • Ability to time each task

Deadline

30th November 2021


I'd love to hear any feedback, critique and ideas you have. Think this will be a hit or a flop?

I'll be sharing all stages of this project from the initial strategy, designs, dev updates and everything in between. Wish me luck!

Thanks for reading and stay safe

  1. 3

    Looking forward to seeing this when you finish it (which you will!!!). Plenty of products in this space, so there's a big proven market for it. Worth finishing this one for sure :)

    1. 2

      Appreciate the vote of confidence, @codemzy 🙏🏻

  2. 2

    Hello fellow ADHDer,

    I completely agree with your comments about the noise situation in almost every app. I am currently working on an email client for people who suffer from ADHD, for the same reasons as yours.

    I recommend you check out Notational Velocity and Simplenote (from Automattic) to see what you can do better and what you can do similarly.

    I think your most critical feature will be the UX. I recommend interviewing people with ADHD early on so you focus and prioritize the right features. And then have them test drive your app when it's ready to see if it solves the problems you identify with other note-taking apps.

    Happy to be your first ADHD interview if you don't have others around!

    1. 1

      Hey @ozzyozzyoz, thanks for the product recommendations, I'll be sure to check them out.

      I agree, the experience will be make or break for this one. I play video games maybe once or twice a week and I can't help but feel that there's just so much more attention put into certain elements of UX that are added to games that just aren't at the same calibre in apps (fortune 500 companies aside).

      Games are playtested to make sure they're joyful, not just to make sure they're understood and "work". I want to try and bring some of that to what I build here.
      After all, a significant number of people spend more time looking at their to-do lists than they do gaming. Making it more important to get whatever joy you can into the experience.

      Ramble over :D thanks for reading @ozzyozzyoz, I'll be posting a lot on here, it'd be great to keep getting your input as I progress through this project. It'd be really great to interview you once I have some designs together. I don't really know anyone else with ADHD so any help from the community is greatly appreciated. 🙏🏻

      1. 2

        Absolutely. I'm around.

        Best of luck!

  3. 1

    I totally agree with you.... for me none of the existing tools work. In my opinion they should be super lean. Ideally you can start a task. Gather all the information you need to get it done first in one place. And then start executing. Don't want to distract you :) But this is my opinion. Good luck. Happy to be one of the testers.

    1. 1

      Thanks, @xavn, this is is valuable feedback. It proves that there's someone other than me that has this problem :), I'll definitely reach out when there's something to test :D.

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