We all want to be more productive. Many apps on the Mac exist to help you do just that, including many To Do apps of varying levels of complexity. I've given many of these apps a shot, and while they often work initially, over time they get used less and less. Eventually you've just gone back to keeping stuff in your head or using paper notes. Others have reported similar outcomes when using To Do apps. That's no good.
Why does use of a productivity tool decrease over time? One common feature of all these applications are tools to organize your tasks. These tools are generally always "optional" (even though they aren't, which I'll touch on next paragraph). There are usually multiple ways to organize (I call them task buckets), like multiple lists, tags, projects, and due dates. And of course there are well designed on-screen options for easily accessing and manipulating your To Dos and organizing them into buckets.
Now, even though you can ignore all of these extra features and simply add and complete your tasks, these features can never really be turned off. You'll still see the task buckets in the organizer window and the options to add those pieces of data when you're adding new tasks. As you ease more of these buckets into your mental organization model, you need to do more work filling in data every time you add a new task - the whole value of an organization system is in its consistency.
Organization feels like productivity. It doesn't take long to do, it offers a quick psychological reward, and it makes you think that you're saving time down the road. However, that comes at the expense of time spent organizing up front, and increases the burden of entering data every time you want to add something new. Over time the system begins falling out of consistency, the user gets tired of the mental burden and spending so much time maintaining their tasks, and they gradually give up using the tool. Ultimately, organization is counterproductive.
That brings us to Todolicious, which was designed to keep this from happening. The worst thing possible is for someone to give up on the tool because they tire of the system. This is why Todolicious offers no task buckets at all. The system can never get more complicated if the tools don't exist to make it more complicated. Adding a new To Do is never more involved than just typing it in; no extra overhead to determine which buckets it belongs to. Feature requests like those for task buckets are received and noted, but it's my belief that these tools will not actually make the majority of customers more productive.
Are there some people who depend on these buckets? Absolutely. Those people probably won't find much value in Todolicious. However, it's my belief that many people find more value out of a system that restricts complexity. And many of the reviews customers have left on the App Store agree.
