✦
Experiments

Project plannerEverything at once
is why nothing has started.

A project stalls before it starts for a specific reason: the list is flat. Twenty tasks with no order means every session begins with deciding what to do, deciding is expensive, and the sessions get shorter until they stop. It is not a motivation problem, it is a missing sort.

Free, no sign-up. Worked out in your browser, nothing sent anywhere, and the result imports into EvyOS.

List at least three things that have to happen.

Everything is worked out in this page and saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
List everything, unordered

Twenty lines is fine. Ordering is the tool's job, and it is the job that was not being done.

2
Mark the blockers with >

Anything that must happen before something else. These get pulled to the front regardless of size.

3
Start the first item today

Not the most appealing one. The order is the product.

This takes the list and produces an order. Anything that blocks something else goes first, because a blocker sitting in the middle of a list quietly stops everything behind it. Then the substantial work, then the finishing — which is separated out because it is always underestimated and always last.

Mark what blocks what and the ordering gets much better. Leave it and the sort still beats a flat list.

✦ The limit

An answer is not a record.

This works something out and then forgets it. It cannot tell you whether the number moved, because it has no memory of the last time you ran it and no idea what you did in between. Every calculator on the internet has that limit, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send the result across and it becomes real goals, tasks or habits with their dates — then the next answer is computed from what actually happened rather than from what you remember typing.

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✦ Questions

Project planner, answered.

Because every session starts with deciding what to do, and deciding is expensive. The sessions get shorter until they stop. It reads as a motivation problem and it is a missing sort.
Anything you marked with > goes first, along with anything that reads as a decision, a purchase or getting access. Finishing work — testing, review, launch — goes last. Everything else keeps the order you wrote it in, which is usually meaningful.
It marks a task that other things wait on. Those get pulled to the front regardless of size, because a two-minute blocker sitting in the middle of a list can hold up a fortnight of work behind it.
Because it is always underestimated. The last ten per cent of a project reliably takes about a quarter of the total time, and separating it out is what stops the deadline being set as though it did not exist.
No, and it says so — two hours a task is a crude planning figure. Its only job is to catch the case where the deadline is impossible by a wide margin, which it does well enough to be worth showing.

Keep the answer.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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