Clew.app

I've been interested in time management techniques and personal productivity tricks for many years. I feel like I tried all the task management apps out there. And yet somehow, none of them worked for me.

A few years ago, I figured out why task management doesn't work (for me).

A task is an instruction of what exactly (and sometimes when) has to be done. I see the following problems with tasks:

• defining a task is already work;
• while completing a task gives us dopamine release, not completing a task creates stress;
• giving ourselves instructions feels like self-micro-management;
• tasks are only about "what?" and don't answer the question "why?".

And that's how I came up with the idea of process management and created an app — https://clew.app

To me, a process is something that can be started very easily but doesn't have to be completed in one attempt (or even at all). You can think of a process as a problem. Problems appear on our radars but don't immediately translate into actionable points, and don't contain any instructions on how to solve them.

Also, processes (problems) compete with each other for your time. Prioritizing these things is tough!

Enter process management.

In fact, the idea is very simple. Here is my flow:

1. I write down my processes as a list
2. the most important process is always on top
3. when I have even 15 minutes to work on my processes, I spend them on that first process in the list
4. working on a process means reading all previous updates (the context), coming up with what's next, and doing anything that moves this process on
5. then I add my update to the process which makes it fall down to the bottom of the list
6. repeat

Note how instead of telling myself what to do, I maintain the context which essentially answers the question "why?". Also, note that any amount of work matters. Sometimes you just need to google something and record your findings — that's work, too!

My app — https://clew.app — implements this flow I described above. But also, it offers a few additional tricks:

• subprocesses (sometimes a process is so big that it serves rather as a container for smaller processes)
• snoozing (a process can be snoozed until a particular date or even forever)
• pinning (some processes should remain on top of the list even after I update them)

Try this technique (and my app) and let me know what you think!