Todo Emojis

Launching on Product Hunt as usual took a bit of effort to prepare the visual assets, decide what to say, and prep enough people to at least give it a few upvotes!

Luckily it peaked at 154 upvotes, and got some great feedback. We still use it in our Slack channel, so that's all we need really.

The idea was always to Open Source the emojis and have them be used far and wide, so anyone can use them in their Slack communities.

You can find and download the repo here (now with "paused" emoji!):

• https://github.com/davestewart/todo-emojis

If you like them, please add a ⭐️ to the repo.

Enjoy!

After months of reluctantly looking at Monday and Saturday morning's mess of bullets, text and mismatched emojis I had a bit of a brainwave – why not create actual emojis which could be used to represent to do status!?

After some initial sketching I created my first sketch designs, and output low and high res versions of:

• todo
• doing
• done
• cancelled

Then I launched them on our Slack channel and it changed both the look and feel (hooray!) but more importantly, the way we do things, overnight!

No more ASCII **** – just people listing their tasks, and getting them done.

Woot.

On the Weekend Club Slack, we have a #shipped channel where we list our todos for the week (Monday) or the day (Saturday).

After introducing markdown-like ASCII checkboxes to track progress...

• [ x ] Did a thing
• [    ] Do a thing

...it caught on, and quickly became a free-for-all of mismatched markdown*-like* checkboxes and emojis, with members adding all kinds of marks to give it their best attempt:

• [] No spaces
• [ ] One space
• [ ] Two spaces
• [x] An x with no spaces
• ✅ An icon
• [✅] Even this!

The designer in me wept, the developer in me howled!

But I had no idea (other than reveal my inner pedant) what to do, other than grin and bear it.