Visions of Noto: Truly useful To-dos
Helping you say "no" to less valuable work so you have time for what you really want
With so many people and companies building To-do apps, you may be surprised at how little these help with productivity and actually getting things done!
I could try to explain on my own words, but this article explains things a lot more cleary: Traditional to-do lists encourage you to say “yes” to all tasks or, worse, incentivize the creation of unnecessary work: It’s so easy to add “go shopping” or “fix door handle that has been broken for 4 years”!
But, of course, your list keeps growing and things never get done. Why?
Noto is not going to give you instantaneous and infinite discipline and, most definitely, it won’t erase procrastination from your life. But it will give you some assistance:
Insight over how much you can actually get done every day
Clarity of how long things really take
Tools to prioritize your work and actively decide what you want to get done today
Visibility over when you will have time for something, given your current agenda and workload
To summarize, Noto will help you say “no” to less important work so you have time for what you really want to achieve.
These are beatiful intentions but I’m sure you are curious to know how this will work in reality. It’s not so complicated, we just need two things:
Noto connects to your calendar (Google or Outlook for now) and displays your day agenda-style
You can define some extra details for to-dos: How much time you need for it, if you want to do it after some date, or if you need to do it before some date.
Noto will use that information to find free time in your agenda and help you choose work that fits in. It will also help you see what does not fit in, and estimate when you will have time for it! Too far away? Well, you might need to remove some things :)
In the mockup below you can see how this could look like in practice: You have a 30 minute slot between two work meetings. Tap on it to see a list of suggested tasks and choose what you need to do there. It’s easy to plan your day (or week) like this, instead of losing 5 minutes deciding what you want to do.
Stealing from the article I mentioned above,
Being more productive isn’t always about doing more, it’s about being more conscious about what you work on and putting your energy into the two or three things that will really make a difference.
Sounds good? Subscribe or follow me on Twitter to know when this is ready to test ❤