✦
Experiments

To-do list roastPaste your list.
Prepare yourself.

A to-do list of forty items is not a plan, it is a museum. Somewhere in it are three things you will do today, six that are actually projects, four you have been carrying since spring, and a dozen that you have read so many times they have stopped registering as words.

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

Paste at least three lines. Do not curate them — the bottom of the list is where the findings are.

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
Paste all of it

Not the tidy part. The bottom of the list is where the findings are.

2
Read the counts, not the jokes

The numbers at the end are the actual output. The rest is to make you look at them.

3
Delete something

Not do it — delete it. A list nothing ever leaves except by completion is a list that only grows.

The reason it keeps growing is that nothing on it ever gets deleted for being wrong — only for being done. So the wrong ones accumulate, the list gets longer, the useful signal drops, and eventually you stop reading it and start keeping the real list in your head.

This reads yours and says what is in it. It is blunt about the list. The list deserves it.

✦ 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.

Start free →Everything else
✦ Questions

To-do list roast, answered.

Because nothing ever leaves it except by being completed. Wrong items, stale items and items that were always going to be declined all accumulate, so the list grows monotonically and the signal in it drops until you stop reading it and keep the real list in your head.
It looks for the verbs that mean a decision has not been made — sort out, look into, deal with, think about — plus lines that are a state rather than an act, and lines long enough to be projects. It is crude and it says so, but it is looking at the right things.
It is rude about your list. Every finding is a property of how the lines are written, which means every finding is fixable in ten minutes — and people with good lists are not more virtuous, their lists just tell them what to do.
Delete five things without doing them. It is the one action nobody takes and the only one that addresses the actual cause, and the relief is disproportionate to the effort.
No. It is parsed in the page and never sent to a server. If you choose to send the salvageable items to EvyOS, they travel in the part of a URL browsers never transmit.

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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