Daily Four

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/daily-four

This means I actually finished my side project and am super happy with how it turned out. You can now also read the Product article in the Making of series: http://makingof.dailyfour.app/product

The feedback has been really positive and I got a lot more engagement than anticipated. To be continued?

Daily Four is all about getting the important things done with minimal stress. Long to-do lists can be overwhelming and full of low-priority tasks. With Daily Four you only get four todo's at any given time. Yes, that's it.

I like creating products with a small feature set, often designed with constraints in place. In the past I've designed products such as a weather app that only showed the Feels Like temperature.
Now this isn't the first time I've designed a productivity app. Daily Four is a combination of two products I designed many years ago. Called Priority and Made It.

Priority (2012)
Somewhat close to Daily Four where you could only enter five todo items. The design and product experience wasn't that great, and no, eight years ago is not an excuse.

Made It (2015)
A mix of a done list and journalling. I always liked the design but trying to combine a done list with a journal did not solve a real problem.

Daily Four is meant to compliment any todo system you are using. It's not a full blown productivity suite but your daily place to get things done. I keep a separate “future” list to help me keep track of things that need to be done so I don’t forget, or do forget when it's no longer important. I then pull the daily four from that list, often the night before. Now instead of ending each day feeling like I’ve fallen behind, I completed my four todo's!
Why four? It seems culturally many lists are often either three, five or ten. I've seen many systems use three items as a limit but I find this a little restrictive. Four is a nice balance. Giving you a little bit more space to work with while still keeping you focussed. I admit it's no exact science and somewhat arbitrary. But hey, it's my product.

Reflect
Since you are only adding important items, periodically looking back on your completed todo's can be very motivating. You often underestimate what you get done.
As we are renovating our Spanish farmhouse we keep a monthly list of things we've completed. Even though we see the results of our labor all around us, you loose the sense of when things got done. I always get positively surprised by the amount of things we got done in any given month.
I don't want this list to be judgemental of your productivity. This means items will not be grouped per day but per week and per month. We all have gaps in our productivity and that should be fine. My productivity is all over the place this year. Reflect regularly or simply whenever you need a dose of perspective.

Design
I am keeping the feature set small so I can design a well thought out product that's a joy to use. This will allow for things like dark mode, keyboard shortcuts and subtle animations.
The next article will all be about the design. Stay tuned!

I haven't made a side project in 5 years. There are a lot of reasons why this hasn't happened. Ready? Transitioning from client work to products > becoming a father > travelling the world > moving to Spain > renovating a Masia. Plus this whole pandemic thing isn't helping either. So while time is not in abundance, I'm making time.

Over the coming weeks I will be building Daily Four. A productivity tool that will help you achieve the important things.

Who is building this? I'm Mark, Dutch designer living off-grid in Spain with my wife and son. I've been a product designer for over a decade, mostly working for early stage startups. Nowadays my focus is on Wild Ventures. The company my wife and I run, were we make apps inspired by nature.

I'm intentionally keeping the product small. Making sure I can actually finish this and create something useful. There is no grand goal or business model. I'm building this for me. If I succeed others will hopefully find Daily Four useful as well.

It's also the first time I'm building in public. For years I have been following other people share their process, thinking I should do this too. But like a failed New Year's resolution it's something I never acted on. Until now...unless I abandon the whole thing and all you are reading is this.

I will cover each stage of the product development and post regular updates on (link) Twitter. Whenever I complete part of the project I will share an in depth article here on the entire process.