This is the basic idea, but I would like to hear from you: What would you expect from a to-do app?
Oh BTW maybe give my wife's voice to it.
Adding a custom voice to instruct you on what to do is a great idea. Thank you for that.
For me there are three major emotions that get in the way of task completion: excitement, boredom and anxiety.
Excitement is usually for some other task. I'm working on my tax return and I think about upgrading my washer/drying. Suddenly I'm researching all the different types, the best deal on one, the history of the washer/dryer. It might be a task on my to do list somewhere, but I was driven to do it by the excitement.
Anxiety is a tricky one. If I'm writing something like an email anxiety often gets the better of me. What if this isn't the right way to do it? What if it comes off as rude. This ties in to perfectionism too.
Boredom is usually overtaken by one of the other emotions, but sometimes it appears on its own. I've got to input these numbers into some old, janky piece of software. It's probably not that hard or long of a task, but it feels so pointless. I'm just wasting so much time doing this task when I could be doing something more efficient and more meaningful.
If you can solve these emotional issues then pretty much any todo list app (or just a notebook) will be fine.
* Eat, sleep and exercise. Have you ever snapped at someone you love because you were really really tired? You have less ability to control your emotions if you aren't on top of these things. When task planning it's easy to think only about the task at hand, but scheduling time to rest, go for a walk or have a snack can be helpful.
* Putting some 'distance' between myself and the task, however small or artificial. Often, I start writing an important email in a text editor instead of an email client. It just feels less 'real' and that reduces my anxiety and resistance. I wonder if doing a practice version of a task could help?
* Adding some kind of physical motion to a task. For example, if I'm sitting at my desk and I need to fill in a form, it always seems easier if I've come from just tidying up rather than another stationary task. Making tasks more physical seems to help.
* Naming the reason why I'm not doing a task can sometimes help but other times not. Saying "I'm feeling overwhelmed with this task" is 50/50 on whether it'll help or make me feel even worse.
* Usually when I'm feeling really stuck I know exactly what I need to do. I know that I haven't opened that email in my inbox. I could easily spend a week thinking about it hundreds of times but never actually doing it. I don't think a reminder or a nudge would help me, because I'm already constantly reminding myself. The times I find reminders and nudges helpful are when I can complete the task right then and there with little resistance. For example: If I put a drink in the freezer to cool it down quickly, I always set a timer. When the time off the task of removing the drink has no stress or anxiety, so I always do it. If I don't set the timer I am very likely to forget the drink. I have tried setting reminders and timers for tasks that I procrastinate on but it never really works. If a task is overwhelming you now and you delay it by 1 hour or 1 day, it's probably still going to overwhelm you later.
If you can manage your attention/motivation well enough to make detailed to do lists, why can't that be applied to the urgent task at hand, to completion.
If you do the ADHD questionnaire one of the major indicators is how many projects are 99% complete.
A TODO list just catalogues these 99% complete problems until they become cognitively crushing to think about resulting in a need to escape/avoid the list, resulting in eventual burnout.
> time until a deadline
This is stress based motivation, and stress tolerance is a depletable resource that once depleted results in devastation.
I am suspicious of anything mental health that doesn't market itself as evidence based. Do you have any evidential basis behind the TODO app? Are any of your ideas evidence informed?
Why not read through several ADHD help/workbooks or read through treatment protocols and try to app-ify them?
So you want something that lets people see the big picture and the parts.
The other bit is lack of dopamine. This is where Habitica and similar apps come in. It has to be fun and content has to be basically infinite.
And then schedules to deal with hyperfocus. Have blocks of time throughout the day for work, family, projects, reading. Then it should pull tasks from the associated lists into these. A little more planning and it can even estimate when you'll finish reading that book or do that module. Or whether you need to request more time for that deadline or drop something.
On top of that, I'd like to do a personal retro module. Did I have a good day? Were lots of tasks rescheduled? Have a little journal.
Can you expand on this?
* Put my shit away.
That's it. The number one issue I see with ADHD, and this only really applies to extreme ADHD, is a complete inability to remember to either put things away or to remember to take your things with you. Consider it casual unintentional abandonment of everything you own one item at a time.
I also think the same - a to-do app will not help. Specially if you plan to add deadline information, difficulty and value scores. These will turn into distractions themselves which will require thinking and making decisions about.
I think it's more that people who have ADHD have been gaslighted by people who insist they were just lazy. If it can be fixed with a todo app, it's "not a real illness".
There's low carb apps and there's diabetes apps. Both do essentially the same thing and yet they're almost never in the same market. Low carb is marketed as weight loss.
The other problem is that every app targeting mental health will gaslight you and call it CBT. It started with Noom. Many of them don't just feel clinical, they feel outright manipulative. Nobody wants to do a ton of surveys, but if you want something to prove successful, the only methodology they have is a ton of surveys.