I’ve been working on a simple To-Do list manager, called The Stack.
In a way you could say that simplicity is the point of The Stack, but actually I think the point is “reducing anxiety”.
It’s not based on a particular methodology, though it may share that traits with Get Things Done. I’m not a GTD person, so I have no real idea!
Recording Is Key
The Stack is inspired by my own tendencies. Often, whilst I’m working on something, I have a thought: “I must remember to…”. Or something, “It occurs to me that I could…”.
Usually the thought is related to what I’m currently doing, but not always. Generally I feel the need to record the thought; this is mostly for reassurance.
I regard my memory as unreliable, and so I worry that I’ll forget whatever it is that I just thought of.
Actually, a lot of the time, I would remember it, or it would occur to me again later, but I can’t be sure.
So the primary motivation is just to make sure that I’ve noted something down, and can move on.
Big Bag ‘O Stuff
I could spend a lot of time trying to organise all these thoughts into categories and separate lists.
More than just could… would… if allowed. I have a programmer-ish brain.
My brain likes (kidding itself that it is?) imposing order on the chaos.
This is a seductive trap.
A lot of the time, the thought I had ultimately doesn’t matter as I don’t get around to it.
Sometimes this is because it was a bad thought.
Sometimes it’s that the context becomes obsolete before I do anything about it.
Mostly it’s just that something more important gets in the way.
Time spent organising these items into a complex set of categories would mostly be time wasted.
The Stack tries to help me to avoid the trap, through simplicity.
I can’t waste time putting my items into neat categories if there is just one big heap of items.
I can’t waste time figuring out what order to do things in if there’s no way to reorder the things.
That’s the theory anyway!
But What If…
Ok, the picture painted so far is a little extreme, and so I make a couple of concessions.
My first concession relates to ordering items.
If I think about an item again, or decide it’s high priority, I can pull it to the top of the stack. In effect, it’s as if I just made the item, and so it becomes the “newest”.
This could be used as a crude way of re-ordering the entire list - by pulling items in the right order - but you’d have to be insane to use it that way.
It’s largely there for reassurance, and I find that I rarely use it.
Context and Filtering
My second concession relates to categorising items.
Yes there is deliberately just one big stack of stuff, because when I’m recording an item, I don’t want to get hung up on which items go where.
Sometimes I might want to look at a subset of that stuff that relates to a particular context though, and so it’s helpful to be able to associate items with context in some simple way.
I’ve chosen to take a leaf out of social media’s book and to do this with #hashtags.
Hashtags are as low impact as I can make them. All you have to do to tag an item is include a hashtag in its text description.
The tags used in an item will appear next to its entry in the index.
Tapping on that tag will focus the index on a single tag, by temporarily hiding all the other items that don’t have the tag.
I use this to focus in on the items relating to the project I’m currently working on.
Order / Chaos
I deliberately don’t want you to feel like you have to use tags.
I especially don’t want you to feel pressure to curate a list of tags up-front.
Usually you can just invent a tag as you’re typing your item. Your brain will probably pick the same tag for the same context.
You can look at a list of all the tags if you need to. If you do get a tag name wrong, there is a way to rename a tag, which will fix up the #hashtag in the text of all items that referenced it. Hopefully though this won’t be needed too often, and won’t turn into a dangerous rabbit hole that you fall down.
I also don’t want you to worry about having a big stack of stuff.
Or about losing track of everything that’s not near the top.
That’s fine, in my book. It’s there if you need it, and there are ways to find it, by filtering or searching. You probably won’t though.
It’ll Never Work
Probably.
Who knows?
If you’d like to try it though, I’ve got a Test Flight link.
You need macOS 15.5 or iOS 18.5. I might make it require iOS/macOS 26.0 later - so that I can use some new features of SwiftUI - but not yet.
There are known issues. No doubt there are also unknown issues.
If you do fancy giving it a go, let me know how you get on.