You want to be productive. Software wants to help. But even with a glut of tools claiming to make us all into taskmasters, we almost never master our tasks.
when they talked to people about their to-do lists. “They abide by the norm of ‘We need to be productive citizens of this world,’” Leshed tells me. Doing more is doing good.
Jesse Patel created the app Workflowy because he had ADHD and wanted a tool that worked as his mind required. In the late 2000s he was working as a head of business development, with “five different big-picture opportunity areas and, like, 30 different subprojects in each of those. It was just so overwhelming.” He noticed that each work task tended to spawn tons of subtasks. But most software, he found, wasn’t great at allowing for that Russian-nesting-doll quality.
So the software is opinionated, as are its makers. But they’re also weirdly humble. Most of the app builders I spoke with admitted that, for many who try their tool, it won’t help. Maybe their app doesn’t match the way that customer’s mind works. Maybe the customer is a hot mess. Maybe their workload is unreasonable. Either way, the app creators are surprisingly willing to admit defeat.
So I decided to make the app myself. I’m a hobbyist programmer, and I figured this spec was simple enough that even my hazy coding skills could pull it off.