Two 17-year-old guys from Jerusalem reinvented time management. Really.
A Todo list and a calendar like you’ve never seen it before, in Accomplish!
We are all human (Except you, Google bot… I know you’re reading this!). We all make mistakes. We all get tired. We all postpone things to tomorrow.
We all have problems accomplishing things.
Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week
Believe me, I’ve tried them all. Google Tasks, Google Keep, Any.Do, Wunderlist, Todoist, SolCalendar and many more. They’re all good. They all look beautiful, they all seem cool, nice, easy to use and perfect for you. For about a week. And then you stop making tasks, and then you stop doing tasks, and then you stop using it at all. I’m sure most of you have experienced this…
I am not a psychologist. I’m not a brain researcher or human scientist, I’m not Dan Ariely (who has his own app for time management, which I got to say I haven’t tried). But I am pretty sure about the reasons we can’t keep using a TODO list app:
- Come on… I’ll enter it later — It’s just too hard to put those tasks in. You gotta unlock your phone, open the right app, click on a button to open the new task screen, click on the right field, type in the task name, fill in the times you want to get a reminder about this task at, save the task, review it to make sure it’s all good… Nah, I’ll just remember this one small task. There’s no need to go through all of that for the little task I’m definitely going to remember (The next day: “Dammit. What was that thing I wanted to do yesterday?”)
- Come on… I’ll do it later — It’s all there, that big fat list of things we need to do. But it keeps growing, and we never want to actually accomplish the tasks inside. We just postpone it, we think we’ll have time later, we prefer to do something else, anything else, just not to get to that unsorted list of things we need to do and start going through it…
Focusing on those two problems, and focusing on accomplishing the tasks rather than keeping them, three high-school students from Jerusalem started working on a new and revolutionary idea. They called it “Accomplish”. Yonatan Reiss, Gil Be’eri and Dolev HaCohen, started working on a new app.
Accomplish is simple. In fact, it’s so simple and beautifully designed (by Be’eri) that you just want to use it even if you don’t have to. It’s one of those apps that make you feel good just by looking at its clean design and simple interface.
No more trouble entering tasks to forget to read them later. No more big lists of todo’s, which you don’t want to get close to.
This is Accomplish.
Accomplish is built out of just two screens. The first (on the left) is a todo list. Wait, wait, don’t leave the post! This is not what it looks like. You see, once you are ready to plan your time, you switch to the main screen which is sort of a calendar day view (the screenshot above). Basically, you drag a task from the tasks pane (left) to the day view (above). You pick a time without typing it, but simply dragging your event to the right time, like changing the time of a Google Calendar event. You can set the color of your tasks, plan days ahead and do much more.
But here’s the genius part. If you want to set a reminder, what do you do? You simply drag the bell upwards. The more you drag it up, the earlier you’ll get the update. And the best part about it, is that you can always see when you’ll get your reminder. If you have a task that’s supposed to start at 6, and you want to get a reminder 30 minutes before, you simply drag it up to 5:30. Simple as hell.
Oh, and did I mention it syncs with Google Calendar? You can either view your events in the day view to make sure you don’t set tasks when you have a meeting, or to use Google Calendar as a backup for your tasks and as a way to access them from your computer.
Alright. So here’s how I use Accomplish:
Every time I’ve got something on my mind, I add it to the task list. It’s quick and easy to use. “Call John”? No problem. “Finish medium post”? Sure. “Fix the bug on the client’s website because I only have one day left and I have no idea what causes this bug HELP HELP HELP!!!”? Well, in this case, I guess I should probably go to sleep…
Anyway, after I’ve done all of that, I wait until I’m ready to plan my day. I usually do it before I go to sleep, on the bus back home in the middle of the night, or (if I’m really tired) — in the morning. I open the app and start prioritizing the tasks: which ones are more critical? Which ones that I must finish today? I use the handles to re-order the tasks in the list however I want. This takes a minute, but it makes life easier later.
The next step is to start placing tasks. I go through each task, from the first (and most important) one to the last one (or until I run out of time, in which case I know that the least important tasks are going to have to wait till the next day).
If I want, I set up reminders. To be honest, my tasks are usually one right after the other so I don’t need reminders — I just open the app every time I finish doing something.
We are all human. We all make mistakes and get tired, and postpone things. And that’s OK. But if we want to be better humans, there’s an app for that. Download Accomplish now for Android or visit their beautiful website for more info.
If you’re still here, it’s probably because you don’t trust me. So here’s a bit about myself. I am Reuven Karasik. I’m 15 years old, and I go to the same school as those three musketeers went to. I’ve known them for almost 2 years and I’ve had the honor of testing one of the first betas of this app, a year and a half ago, and to see them working on it together between classes. To look behind Gil’s back when he designs and waiting to see it on my phone. I’ve been following this app because I believe in it. You should too.
