"Raise one finger if you use a to-do list in your daily life.."
I have all my fingers (and probably my toes) raised, because "use" doesn't quite cover it. I rely, a bit obsessively, on my lists for productivity. if I am unable to arrange my tasks in a to-do list, it genuinely puts me in a state of physical discomfort, and most of the time, I stall. maybe I'm a completionist (recovering tho), but I need the list to mentally arrange and plan.
I organise my life in lists, and I have been doing this for as long as I can remember. before there were digital to-dos, I had a physical daily planner I used to plan the next day. and the planning used to be the fave part of my days. that is genuinely how my brain holds things.
for most of my adult life, after I hopped from one to-do app to the other, I settled for microsoft to-do, because, well, it worked. and while it still works perfectly for me, my entire friction is with writing down the tasks.
the first time I noticed it was a few months ago when my phone was obtained by Lagos boys. overnight, my laptop became my entire life. if I thought of something while I was out, I had to wait until I got back to my laptop to write it down. by then, I'd forgotten half of it. even when I got a replacement phone, I had issues setting up my to-do on the phone (the phone's fault, btw), so I still had to rely one hundred percent on my laptop.
and the process might seem tiny, in fact, it is tiny, but I do it MANY times a day, and the small interruption of leaving what I am doing, opening the app, and coming back is quite disruptive.
my most used apps are my messaging apps. so, I use my self-chat on whatsapp or telegram to store my tasks before I can open my to-do app. I was typing mindlessly on my phone on one of the days my laptop was unavailable, trying to write down some tasks I had for the following week. then I thought "what if I could just send a message on this app I use sooo much, and my Microsoft To-Do would hear me? what if the message became the task?" I wanted to just send a "call mummy by 3pm" or an "ask ibrahim about the environment variables tomorrow" on whatsapp, and it would reflect on my to-do app.
and I decided to build it.
I called it flow.
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