I have a day job, hobbies, two kids, and volunteer work. I am, in other words, busy in the completely ordinary way most adults are busy — and for years, my system for handling it was "remember everything," which worked right up until I started forgetting doctor appointments.
So I tried to fix it. This is the story of everything I tried, why none of it stuck, and the slightly ridiculous place I ended up.
The notepad era
I started planning everything on a physical notepad, breaking tasks into subtasks so I could get something done even when I only had twenty free minutes. This genuinely helped — small pieces of big tasks are much easier to start.
As long as I didn't forget where I put the notepad.
The screen on the kitchen wall
Timed things — doctor appointments, school events — already lived on my calendar. To stop forgetting them, I mounted an Echo Show on the wall by the kitchen so the next few days were always visible without anyone having to think about it. For scheduled events, this worked well. It still does.
But most of my life isn't scheduled events. It's the other pile: the hobby projects, the house tasks, the "whenever I have time" list. For that, I needed a real to-do app.
The apps, and the six ways they lost me
There are a lot of genuinely good to-do apps. I tried many of them, and every one lost me in one of these ways:
- 1
Some won't let you add anything without a due date. For a dentist appointment, fine. But a huge part of my list is hobby tasks that are simply whenever I have the time. Forcing a fake deadline onto those turns my hobbies into homework.
- 2
The overdue red. When I'm already overwhelmed, the last thing I need is the app showing me everything I forgot, in red. Overdue markers don't motivate me — they cause anxiety, the anxiety causes procrastination, and the cycle feeds itself until I stop opening the app entirely. (I've written a full comparison about this one.)
- 3
Some are just hard to understand. When every list, folder, and tag looks identical in the interface, I genuinely couldn't tell where my projects were supposed to go versus my tasks versus my subtasks. I paid for one of the most popular apps and still felt like I was using it wrong. (That story, in detail.)
- 4
Some look exactly like the scrum boards I use at work. I'm sure that's a selling point for somebody. But I don't want to think about work in my free time, and I definitely don't want my garage cleanup to have a kanban swimlane.
- 5
Family sharing is an afterthought. Most apps have some way for a household to share tasks, but it usually comes with real limitations — per-person pricing, everything shared or nothing shared, no way to keep your own stuff private.
- 6
Almost none integrate with Home Assistant. This one is admittedly niche, but it matters in my house: I wanted household chores — garbage every Friday, bulk pickup every other weekend — visible on the smart home displays we already look at.
The hack that got out of hand
I eventually accepted that no single tool was going to do all of this. But I have some programming experience, so I figured I could close a few of the gaps myself.
I picked the app with the best API and wrote a small program that ran on a schedule, pulled my tasks, and displayed them on the Echo Show in the kitchen. And it worked — the kitchen display started doing exactly what I wanted.
Then I'd pick up my phone, open the same app, and be right back inside all six problems.
That's when the obvious, slightly unhinged thought arrived: if I'm going to put in this much work, I might as well write the to-do app too.
If I'm going to put in this much work, I might as well write the to-do app too.
Where that ended up
That decision became ProgressCove — a to-do app where nothing is ever overdue, due dates are optional, your projects have an obvious home, one subscription covers the whole household, and the smart-home integrations I hacked together are being built in as real features.
I don't believe I'm the only person whose busy life outgrew every to-do app on the store. If any of the six problems above sounded familiar, that's exactly who I built this for.
Next post: what "nothing is ever overdue" actually means in practice, and the design decisions behind it.
A calmer to-do app — nothing here is ever overdue.
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