Why I made my own productivity tool

As a freelance developer, my todo list is my boss, that's the only thing keeping me accountable. So naturally I use them heavily and there is certainly no shortage of different awesome task manager apps out there.

But I never used only one app for all my tasks and projects.

My issues with available tools :

Google Keep is awesome for to-do lists. For any planning or projects I have Trello and if I need to plan my week then Teuxdeux is the way to go for its weekly kanban.

Honestly I love them all. They are perfect for the task they do. But I always felt that all of them are actually doing the same thing for me, which help me with the things I have to do.

There are new all-in-one tools like Notion which is great and I actually thought that this is it! Now I can do everything in one place but quickly realized that might not be the case.
Because its strength became my weakness. It offers infinite flexibility which makes me want to try different layouts and setups that I never stick with, thus not letting me develop a habit.
On the other hand, when I open a doc a few months later I have no idea where is what because of course my setup was different few months ago.

So it became clear to me what I actually needed does not exist which is a simple tool that can handle my daily tasks, projects and my todo lists. It should also have a solid structure with a clean and simple design. This is why I started working on Tidily.

Here's what I needed :

1. A today view which will show me everything I need to do today.
2. A weekly kanban for my weekly planning, just like Teuxdeux but not just for 5 days, for the whole week or more and the weekly kanban should work on mobile which is not possible in Teuxdeux.
3. I needed a month view for all my tasks and it should include all the tasks from all my projects as well.
4. I needed project boards like Trello, because without it all my project planning would be impossible.
5. All the lists from a board can be opened as an individual to-do list, so there is no need for a separate option to add a to-do list.
6. A backlog for all the task I missed, this will keep me accountable.
7. An inbox for quick thoughts because I wanted to avoid creating unnecessary lists, which I did heavily in Google Keep and made a mess.
8. Lastly, I needed a strong categorization that will force me to organize without any effort because I don't really take my time to keep things organized if it's up to me. (I'm lazy — I know)

Tidily's weekly kanban view

I skipped any fancy bells and whistles to keep it simple and personal. The only thing I wanted is to combine the basic uses of the apps I used so religiously and added a dark mode on top of it cause I work all night 🦉.

If you are interested then you can try it out at..
https://tidily.io