Show HN: Baller ToDo – a no-list todo app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Baller ToDo – a no-list todo app

ballertodo.com

161 pointseducated_idiot100 comments

An app to visualize and organize your tasks in an Impact/ Urgency matrix. The app currently uses local storage only, no accounts yet.

Would love some feedback :)

Local storage only and no accounts is a feature to me

A really cool feature would be to be able to "save" and share charts by setting the url parameters:

e.g. https://ballertodo.com?n=first;second;third&i=0.5,0.3,0.7&u=...

Then you can just bookmark the link or share w/ someone

There is a limit to url length

Correct, safely you can make the url 2,000 chars [0].

The base will be 29 chars (https://ballertodo.com?n=u=i=)

Then each additional todo would be 6 chars (impact and urgency score to 2 decimal places e.g. .65, 1., .7) + the length of the name

So assuming the average to-do name is 14 chars, you can safely fit 98 to-dos in the url ((2000 - 30) / (14 + 6))

If the name is 40 chars, you can fit ~41

I think that will fit 90+% of use cases.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maxim...

Eventually, depending on how it goes, the URL will contain a key to some DB entry, so multi-device persistence can work. Adding all this to the URL is doable too, I might just start with that, thanks for the idea ;)

If at all you could make it stateless, you should. For one, you don't need a db. Also, there were some people in the thread that liked the local storage feature. Finally, as a user, I can feel safe using your service because I know at any time, if you site disappears, I have the url and I can trivially parse the url into json and do whatever I want with it. You could even build the parser or have an export to json button.

If you want to add more stuff like images, longer descriptions, some links, etc, then yeah you'll likely need a backend

Yeah, I haven't given it that much thought. It only started as a weekend project. I would like to keep it as local as I can. Possibly, there will be 2 uses: a non-db, non-url, local version AND an account based thing.

I’ve done this for a website, but when you’re pasting a really long link and texting to a friend, it can get a little frustrating, since it eats the entire chat window.

Good point, maybe leverage a link shortener built into the app?

Yup, but you’d still need a database since you need to store that lookup somewhere from long URL to short url.

What about using an IPFS key and using js-ipfs to look it up?

If I'm not mistaken. I think IPFS keys might also be too long. Since a shortcode is only 6 chars long.

Here's the website[1] I built with base64 encoding to share weblinks. I've been trying to think of a non-db approach, but haven't found one yet for link shortening.

[1] http://share.getamna.com

> Local storage only and no accounts is a feature to me Agree! But the privacy policy is missing. Who tells me that the stuff is not uploaded tomorrow and sold to advertisers?

A takeout as csv or json would also be needed. That could also be the basis for multi-device, which some people undoubtedly will need.

Ideally of course open source it. I am always hesitating to feed closed-source services with my data.

Fair enough. Yeah, I don't intend to make money off this, so will open source soon.

Haha, IKR! Too many accounts :D

Great job! You could mention it is an inspiration from the Eisenhower Matrix. This aims to solve the urgency trap.

First time I see a tool made for it. I will give it a try!

Thanks! Definitely, should mention that somewhere

Is there a metric for the ease of completing a task? This could be relevant in two ways.

First, task impact per unit of effort is technically a better measure of how worthwhile it is to complete the task than absolute task impact is.

Second, I recall some writing in the personal-finance genre which said that people often make more progress getting out of debt by paying their debts in order from small to large, ignoring the interest rate. This is more expensive than paying debts in order of high to low interest rate, but it may give you more of a feeling of progress when one of your debts disappears, even though that debt wasn't, in reality, causing much of a problem. By the time you get to more difficult debts, you're on a roll.

This suggests that there is probably a place for configuring the priority scheme; absolute impact, impact per unit effort, and absolute effort are all reasonable choices.

Yep, IIUC what you are talking about is similar to the question others have raised about an "Effort" dimension. To keep the daily or slightly more long term planning simple, I opted to not consider those dimensions. You raise a good point and I need to give it some thought. It has to be "complete" enough that you can prioritize properly, but easy enough that you can use it all the time. The finance example is a good one, but I think you could boil all the costs down to a single term for that case. (essentially it's just money lost). Just like the user makes a choice there, the expectation here is that the user will formulate an impact-effort code in their mind and add a task.

How about offering, say, three effort options, reflected in the size of the circle in the matrix?

Who is this for? I feel like PMs will just put everything in the top right corner.

Good question. This isn't for PMs. This actually should not be used for large/ group projects. As you rightly said, a PM will put everything in top-right. This was intended for self-prioritization.

The imaginary PM stereotype everyone likes to bash would do that, real teammates you work with that respect your time will work with you to plot things in a way that better reflects the team/organization’s shared priorities :) Don’t sell this short because of an imaginary threat (rampant PM abuse)!

Fair enough, that's a good point. My spouse is a PM and when I asked them to use this, they actually ended up using all quads except for Bottom Right (Low Impact, High Urgency). So your points stands, a competent team will correctly prioritise.

What people do you have? Every owner will put it in top right corner. The reason is organizational neglect and lack of due process. Just happened again some weeks ago, and due to org, was sadly necessary.

Haha, take the other people out of the equation. This is more about self-prioritization. How your team/ org works/ prioritises depends on a variety of factors and I do not think any single framework will serve all those. This is not even attempting to solve that need.

It's a neat idea, though I too started over-engineering planning for myself. Over time a simple text-list works well for me. Quadrants is more a communication and collaboration tool. Looks like nice work though.

Besides, if someone asks, they always get response.

Yeah, planning is a double edged sword. And I don't believe one tool works for everyone or all needs. Our brains and thought processes are too varied to all fit in opinionated frameworks.

Yeah, I posted here for the feedback/ response. Trying to improve my understanding of UX/UI and no better way than to get users to tell you :D

Maybe some sort of form to input details about task to automatically assign the two variables?

I think that complicates the UI a tiny bit. Right now, the user can drag any task to place the task anywhere. I don't think numeric fields make for pleasant UI. I could be wrong though. Will keep this point in mind, if more folks complain, will work it in :)

If your PMs would do such a thing, they don't understand the role of a PM.

if that's your impression of PM's you're either not being fair to the PM's you work with or you need to work with better PM's.

Na, PMs who do that should all be beaten senselessly with a baseball bat, metaphorically of course? ;-)

Don't put the tooltip on the task so close to the draggable circle. On mobile my finger basically blocks the entire tooltip and it's not readable.

> The app currently uses local storage only

This means I can actually use it. My data stays with me? Nice!

Finally some new ideas in this space. Love it!

Lists are honestly a pretty awful way to organize to-dos. Our brains don't work linearly at all.

Its not new. Its called a covey chart and is used in "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" from 1989, a highly popular self help book. (not sure if it was used in any prior work)

I know it as Eisenhower Method, which is even older: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower...

It's new in a sense of 'something that is not yet another rigid list of tasks'

It's Eisenhower Matrix through and through, but I found draggable task dot quite refreshing.

Thanks! Yep, lists aren't great, unless they all fall in the same domain (like grocery shopping, travel packing, etc.). Bring in context change and they tend to become less useful, really quickly.

As others have pointed out, this is nothing new. I am just presenting an easy to use app+viz

I’m not sure what you mean by context change. Is that where you have two (or more) items that are of different sorts (from different contexts or domains), where this difference between them makes it difficult to compare them and thus rank them in a list?

Yes, essentially. A list is one-dimensional, so you can only rank a task by it's order. There are actually multiple dimensions that our brain considers when making decisions, but I only chose these 2. There could be more (as others have pointed out), but that makes the planning annoying and visualization cluttered.

Doesn't this need another dimension for "Effort"?

Usually urgency should be derived from how long something will take and when it is needed by.

Perhaps tags/colours/categories - reading/diy/marketing etc.

Ahh nice, that's a good idea. You are absolutely right in that it needs "Effort". I intended this to be a personal prioritization tool, NOT something that should be used by teams. So you sort of have your own model of effort <-> impact and it gets marginalized (at least that's how it works for me) I explained that a bit in the "learn more" section on the web app, but maybe I should add more info.

As you said, effort is already represented by urgency. A task with a deadline should be moved closer to quadrant 1 over time.

It would be interesting to, based on an effort grade, have it automatically move to the urgent side faster or slower.

Yes!

I made a 3D ToDo 'list' that does just this. See:

https://todo3d.app

hahaha what a perfect comment. of course, someone built a 3d version of a todo app. omg that's hilarious and awesome at the same time.

i've been wondering about adding that axis to my EM for a long time and this is how i find it.

I like this. I like that you looked at how everyone else did something (i.e. ordering by time) and asked "why?". Why not plot it in a more meaningful space? I have one idea -- what if node color was a function of time, and the x-axis was changed to effort? You start the node at one color, and progressively change it to another color using linear interpolation. When creating a TODO item:

  1. Specify title.
  2. Specify dueDate.
  3. Capture startDate = now().

Then

  currentColor = lerp(now(), startDate, dueDate, initColorVector, finalColorVector)

This would add a third dimension of information. I'd be able to see impact/effort as well as urgency visually. Another idea is to specify the shape (square, circle, triangle) to add some categorization capability. I'm not sure how much is too much. But the visual cortex is a beast.

As an engineer, I love your idea. The original use case for this tool is daily self-prioritization and I wanted to keep it really, really simple. Planning in general is overwhelming and I wanted to take that pain away, coz I found myself spending longer in planning than actually doing. By only considering the impact/urgency of a task, you take away the effort/time cost and only focus on the task at hand, irrespective of how much time it takes. As an example, if you have a task that is extremely high impact and high urgency, will you drop it in favor of another task that is quicker but lower in impact/urgency? Since you are defining your own task, the expectation is that your mental model takes care of impact/ effort and (somehow) fuses that information into one value.

I will keep your feedback in mind and think of a nice way. Thanks for the kind words

Very cool! Some simple feature ideas:

It'd be interesting to be able to use size or color to indicate additional dimension(s). I like to measure “return” in terms of impact/urgency and “investment” in terms of cost/complexity, and then maximize “ROI” instead of just maximizing “return”.

The ability to sequence things seems to be the biggest thing you lose with the no-list representation, but I think that's easy to fix: let the user add “edges” between “nodes” to indicate dependencies.

Color/ size seem to be the common consensus, and I will work that in. Edges clutter things too much

As an aside, just this morning I learned that "baller" is an expression almost a century old. At least.

I was listening to one of my 1950's beatnik poetry albums, and the reader used the adjective "baller" twice, in the same way that we do today.

Related: The word "fly" goes back at least to horse-and-buggy times.

So often the words have interesting origins https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-slang-word-b...

Haha, I would not be surprised if Beatnik gave birth to the word 'baller'.

Love the idea. I think it's great. That said, I don't think I'm great at judging impact.

Awesome! My initial thought was to use this for value-based requirements/story prioritization. There the axes would be business value and effort.

Any chance you'll allow customizing the axes and enable sharing of diagrams? (Maybe all info could be stored as part of the URL?)

Sure. I think the axis names is easy enough. I need to start working on the sharing/ saving of accounts coz a bunch of folks have requested that now

Thanks! Sharing is definitely no. 1 priority and would be a great feature.

It is a clever idea, but needs some UX love. Drag/drop to move around, but I have to click to open a dialog to mark it as done... There should be a way to drag it to a 'done' bucket. The list is broken into the four quadrants, but I cannot drag/drop in the list to set a specific priority, which would be critical when a tasks is dependent on another. In general, algorithmically prioritizing the list based on position within a quadrant is questionable - matrices like this communicate broader strokes of prioritization, not a opinionated list order.

Still, the idea has merit. It just needs some work to move forward.

Yep, those are awesome suggestions. I'm gonna work with some friends who know UX to improve that.

Very nice execution of a very simple and powerful idea.

It's one of those things I learned about a long time back (in Stephen Covey's book) and though I often use it in prioritizing tasks never saw this in an app before. Well done!

Cheers! I did not know this from Covey's book, but TIL :)

Any way you can keep the dot representation of tasks but allow the user to define the X and Y axes (or maybe more quadrants)? For example, I might want to create a matrix of assignee vs. area.

Doable but no such plans yet

I like this, something that may save a bunch of people's suggestions without making it more complex is allowing renaming of the axes.

Something I couldn't work out is why one task is highlighted, is that a total score? An option here might be to calculate the Pareto front. Essentially highlighting those which should be picked from (if a task is less urgent and less impactful than another, it's not in the list).

The highlighted task is the "most" important task in terms of impact and urgency.

Neat! Would you please switch the chart so important/urgent is top left? Or at least provide an option for that. Covey is how many people are exposed to this concept, and he organizes the chart that way. Also, top left is typically the first place the eye goes, and it should naturally rest on the day’s most important tasks.

Interesting! Yeah that's an easy fix.

Show HN is so random sometimes. I posted the same idea last year and got zero responses or comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20591010

Oh man, I hear you, most of this stuff is really random. your app was pretty neat though

I only tried your app on phone but it looks like you can't tap and add or drag things around. You always need to edit the numbers. Maybe the UX/UI could use some love?

Yeah. Click and drag is tricky in 3D, but I should add it to the 2D and list views though. I stopped working on it due to lack of any interest. I use it myself though.

in my past I used to do something very similar, but it would use small text boxes on a grid using a mind map software, the exact same thing but legible at a glance, I was never one for colour ranking, preferred to see the title of the note at least

To those who pointed out that I should mention Eisenhower or Covey, they have been given due credit here: https://ballertodo.com/what

Thanks for informing me about Covey :)

I recently came across the idea of "Prioritizing for Impact".

You have made a very intuitive visual representation of this idea.

Could it be named something more descriptive? Why Baller Todo? eg Impactful Todo, To Do The Most Impact

Thanks! I like cool names, plus I wanted to make planning/ prioritization fun and not daunting.

neat! i have my own version of this i use to run my life. it doesn't show it as a grid, but it lists them out in those four quadrants.

also, i use "importance" over "impact". why did you choose impact over importance? high impact doesn't necessarily mean high importance.

While the dictionary definition is not the same, I think they are "similar" enough. Also, it's up to the user to define impact/importance, depending on their state of mind/ prioritization need. It's not a rigid framework.

This is a different approach to managing tasks. I would prefer to have an account and access my tasks across devices.

This is so cool!

one feedback is that you may want to link to the eisenhower matrix for people that don’t know how to interpret the results

Thanks! Yeah, I should mention that somewhere :)

Nice.

What are the buttons on the right supposed to do ? I click but nothing happens (I expected a create new task dialog).

Argh, that means I did a bad job at the UI. The "things" on the right are not supposed to be buttons, but cards that get updated when you add tasks. There is only one button, the last one which says "completed" which clears out your completed tasks.

Can I ask you what I could do to make them NOT look like buttons or what made you think they were buttons? :)

> Can I ask you what I could do to make them NOT look like buttons or what made you think they were buttons? :)

I'd disable the hand cursor CSS when hovering. I am on desktop and that's why I expected something to happens when clicking.

Oh boy, you are right. I missed that! Will fix. Thanks for bringing it up.

Having them be invisible until someone adds a task could be a good start.

Yes, it makes the screen eerily blank and uninviting. Maybe I can grey them out or something

FYI You click on the empty graph to create tasks in the 2D grid.

You've got a logic bug. When dragging something from Quadrant 2,3,4 to Quadrant 1 it doesn't go positive until you let go.

It's designed to update only when you let go, o/w it's unnecessary compute and repainting. If that's annoying, I can enable during the drag too.

I think it's an important one for UX. People pay attention to what they see and if the number doesn't change or changes wrongly, they hesitate to drop it in that sector.

Fair enough, that's an easy fix. Will update. Thanks for the advice

Dude, that is awesome!!! How can I convince a smart guy like you to work with me on a project?

Serious question!

Haha thanks for the offer but I will have to decline. I am kinda in my own space right now, just tinkering with some ideas.

Fair enough. Wishing you a lot of success!!

Like what's your rationale for putting this Covey chart on Product Hunt? Justifying your domain purchase cost?

Lol domain is $5. I don't really care about a coffee :). I am new to web development and ui/ux, picked it up during Covid for kicks. Have been a computer vision/ robotics guy since forever now. Just wanted some relevant feedback on literally the first web app I have ever built.

TIL this is called a Covey chart. Thanks for that. I couldn't find a solution like this which allows for moving/ re-arranging tasks and presenting them in an easy to use way, so I made it.

Sorry if I hurt your feelings, can't make everyone happy I guess :)

Is it not a Eisenhower To-Do list?

It's all the same. From what I read today, Eisenhower used and popularized it and then Covey improved upon it and used it in his book. Same stuff, just different packaging, this one too :D

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