Shunya Yoshimura

Posted on Apr 2

Why I Built Yet Another Task Management App When 100 Already Exist

#productivity #showdev #sideprojects #webdev

This article was originally published in Japanese on note.

In my previous post, I wrote about how tasks are better left unseen. This is the follow-up.

Long story short: I wanted to turn that philosophy into something real, so I got involved in building a task management app. It's called kakiko.

"Seriously? There are a million task management apps out there." Yeah, I know. I think so too. Todoist, Notion, TickTick, Things, Asana… the list goes on. It's not just a red ocean — it's a sea of blood.

But here's why I built it anyway.

The small annoyances with existing apps had been piling up

I've bounced between a ridiculous number of task management apps over the years. They all have enough features. But no matter which one I used, I'd stop opening it within a few weeks.

I spent a long time trying to figure out why, and eventually I realized: the problem was dates.

Most apps let you set multiple dates for a single task — a due date, a reminder, a start date, a scheduled date. Sounds convenient, right? But it's quietly exhausting.

"Do this by this day," "do this on this day," and "remember this on this day" are all different concepts. And you have to make that judgment call for every single task. You're just trying to jot down one thing, and suddenly there are three decisions to make.

The other thing that bugged me was how apps handle unfinished tasks.

You know that screen where overdue tasks glow red and line up like a wall of shame? Every time I saw that, opening the app itself started to feel like a chore. That "slight heaviness every time you open the list" I described in my last post — this is exactly what I meant.

Most existing apps treat unfinished tasks as a problem. But in reality, an unfinished task usually just means "I couldn't get to it right now." Having that thrown in your face in red text every day isn't management — it's pressure.

Eliminating the annoyances led to a philosophy

I didn't start with some grand vision.

I just wanted to build something I'd actually use, in a way that didn't annoy me. That's it.

I don't want to set multiple dates → Simplify the date model to one per task
I don't want to see unfinished tasks → Build "Sleep" — auto-hide tasks untouched for a set period
I hate when my hands freeze while entering a task → Make everything keyboard-driven
I hate losing track of what I was doing → Build "Focus Mode" — always show the active task

As I knocked off these annoyances one by one, I noticed something.

They were all solving the same problem.

Put into one sentence, it's this:

Tasks keep growing, but human attention and decision-making capacity are finite.

Most existing apps are designed on the assumption that you should see everything. So the more tasks you have, the more complex the screen gets, and the more decisions you need to make.

What I wanted was the opposite: an app built on the premise that "if you don't need to think about it right now, you should be able to drop it from your mind."

A design philosophy: "You don't have to keep it in your head"

If I had to sum up kakiko's design in one line, it would be this:

You don't have to keep your tasks in your head.

It's not quite "delegate" or "hand off." All your data lives on your own device. There's no cloud dependency. It's not about entrusting things to something external — it's about being able to drop things from your conscious mind, within your own system.

With this as the core, every feature points in the same direction:

Sleep → You don't have to see it
Automation → You don't have to decide
Routines → You don't have to think
Focus Mode → You don't have to remember your goal (the UI remembers for you)
Keyboard-driven → You don't have to break your flow
Local storage → You can let go with peace of mind

It's not a "boost your productivity" app. It's not a "manage everything rigorously" app. It's an app that protects your attention. That's what kakiko really is.

A little more about Focus Mode

Let me talk about the feature I personally like the most.

When you hit the start button on a task, a mini-window appears at the edge of your screen showing the task name and a running timer. That's it.

But the effect is surprisingly powerful.

Say you're working on "write the proposal." You start looking something up, and 30 minutes later you realize you've been aimlessly browsing the web. Sound familiar? It happens to me constantly.

The root cause is that your brain has to hold onto "what am I doing this for?" in working memory. Human working memory is fragile — a tiny interruption is enough to wipe it clean.

Focus Mode offloads that "sense of purpose" to the UI. Just having "Write the proposal — 00:42:15" sitting at the edge of your screen is enough. When you drift, you notice and think, "Oh right, I need to get back."

It's subtle, but I think this is what a task management app should actually be doing.

The real differentiator isn't features — it's assumptions

Honestly, each of kakiko's individual features has some equivalent elsewhere. Sleep-like features exist. Reminder-like features exist. You can find them if you look.

But the underlying assumption is different.

Most apps assume: "You should see everything → Then decide what to act on."
kakiko assumes: "You only need to see what matters right now → Everything else stays out of sight."

This is a difference that feature comparison tables can't capture.

That's why I built one more task management app when 100 already exist. Because none of those 100 were built on this assumption.

What I've learned from diving into a saturated market as an indie developer

A bit of a developer-to-developer tangent here.

When I tell people "I'm building a task management app," the response is almost always the same:

"Wait, aren't there already a ton of those?"

Fair enough. If someone else said that to me, I'd think the same thing.

But having actually done it, here's what I've learned: what's saturated is features, not philosophy.

Most task management apps are just adding or removing features on top of the same assumptions. "See everything." "Manage by deadlines." "Remember via notifications." When you try to differentiate within that worldview, you end up with AI auto-sorting, Gantt charts, and ever-increasing complexity.

But the moment you ask "Do we actually need to see everything?" — the competition nearly vanishes.

If you're going indie into a red ocean, you can't win on features. You'll never out-resource the big players. But you can change the assumptions. Differentiate not by what you build, but by what you believe.

I think this is an important perspective in the age of building products with AI. With AI, anyone can build features. But the philosophy behind why those features exist — that's something only you can figure out.