Show HN: LazyMeter is the only to-do list you'll finish every day

Having used a whole bunch of different TODO systems I have found there is only one that actually works.

1. Have a huge whiteboard on your wall so you can't not look at it

2. Write down all your tasks for the day

3. Estimate how many pomodoros each task will take

4. Cross off every task as it's done

This seems to work mostly because it's impossible to hide the TODO. It's not an app you close, it's not a website that gets buried in tabs, it's not a notebook you flip to a different page.

It's just simply always there. Judging you. Encouraging you.

Plus it's really really satisfying when you get to cross off an item and even moreso when you get to see the whole whiteboard crossed off at the end of the day.

LazyMeter is automating this, minus the pomodoros. It builds your daily to-do list automatically from reminders. And the focus is on the satisfaction of getting things done - not only crossing things off, but also watching the results add up. We put a lot of work into creating an app that's quick, simple and rewarding to make this a system accessible to anyone within minutes. We think it's about time we move away from post-it notes and whiteboards for tasks.

Still easy to hire or ignore.

I might give it a try, it genuinely sounds awesome.

My problem is just that if my todo isn't Right Up In My Face (tm) I forget about it.

That is to say, I need triggers. If your app can provide those (like sending me a notification every time it notices I'm moving around the room to get tea or whatever) that would be bloody epic.

Very good feedback. More access points are on the way, but perhaps there's even more we can do here.

I've been fantasizing for months (if not years) about a wall-sized display that I could sync with my digital todo list. I don't care if it's monochrome, if it takes 5 seconds to refresh, or has pixels you can see from across the room. It just needs to be big and legible. Anyone have any clever ideas for building such a display?

I have a big (four feet long) scrolling LED ticker that I got at an industrial surplus place for maybe $75. It's controlled over a serial port and it can display two lines of text. Currently I use it as basically a decoration in my apartment - it shows some news headlines and some stock quotes. I hadn't thought about using it as a to-do list display but that might just work - although on the other hand because it can only display two lines, the necessary constant refresh or animation might get distracting.

Perhaps more usefully, projectors and reasonably big TVs are cheap these days and getting cheaper.

Yeah, a large wall-mounted e-ink screen would be awesome. I'm curious as to why we haven't seen any of these hot on the heels of kindle, etc.

A projector? I have some LED sign displays as another commentor suggests, although they are a bit big, power hungry and bright to leave on 24/7 for reminders.

How about some photochromic paint, and a scanning laser? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoUU7KEgdoc

I've thought about buying a cheap Android tablet and mounting it on my wall for the same purpose. It'll probably be 5-8" display, but it'll have touch screen.

It'd be easy enough to write my own TODO app and just have the tablet display that webpage with auto-refresh and have big text and buttons like 'complete' or 'snooze' a task.

I've also been developing my own sensor network around the apartment, so it'd be nice to display that. No more needing to look at the small master display or check webpage on computer.

A colleague at my previous job hacked a digital photo frame to display his calendar. It had about a 6 inch display as I recall. I don't remember if it had a touchscreen but it did have next/previous buttons which was good enough for the task.

At my workplace we have a large LCD TV (about 60 inches?) mounted on the wall at IT. It uses Perl/CGI to query the support database and display a list of active support tickets and who they are assigned to, in large, bold font. Great motivation.

Yeah, I've been dreaming about too for some time. It's one of my motivations to learn information design - in hope that one day I'll put a big dashboard on the wall that will update TODOs and graph data I want to track and get feedback on (like my spendings).

Even a whiteboard can be ignored. In fact, anything can be ignored if you're lazy. This tool seems to at least do something different such as watching your progress add up, but at the end of the day it's really up to you to do the task :)

It doesn't work. I have a 2m x 1m whiteboard in my room that sometimes gets littered with reminders about stuff. I've quickly learned to ignore it completely. I often end up rewriting those reminders closer together in a corner, when I need to free up some whiteboard space to do self-brainstorming or design something.

I'm a little confused by how this works. The introduction just confuses me more - http://blog.lazymeter.com/tour/introduction/

The stop sign stands for "save" and "unscheduled"? Pause is "planned" and "scheduled"? Huh?

I just need a simple daily to-do list, and http://teuxdeux.com works for me because it is really simple and clear. I like the direction LazyMeter is going in, but I don't like having to learn and remember all sorts of symbols and what they do.

We optimized for long-term time savings. The side effect is that it takes 5-10 minutes to learn. We know we need to add a video to the site - there's a 2-minute intro video in our user guide here: http://blog.lazymeter.com/getting-started/

We're using an analogy to a music player. A playing task means you have to think about it today. A paused task means it's scheduled for the future. A stopped task means it's saved for "one day". This analogy is what enables us to make task management so fast.

On my iPhone, it redirects to a mobile version login page. No option to register, or to see what your app is about.

Now I've got to get off my lazy ass and turn on my PC to even see what the hubbub is about.

Please consider giving mobile visitors an option.

P.S. You better be pretty freakin awesome to make me switch from Nozbe.

Point noted - we've added a work item to support new users on the mobile version.

You'll find us very different from Nozbe. Nozbe follows Getting Things Done, while we have developed a totally new workflow. LazyMeter isn't just a tool, it's an alternative to GTD. Our workflow is intended to be much closer to how the mind naturally processes tasks.

Added a work item to.. your own LazyMeter account? Now anyone here with a smartphone can see just how effective your service is!

to... our redmine. Actually, you make a good point. We are not project management or group collaboration. We never said we were. There's a difference between task management and project management that is very frequently misunderstood.

I like the app btw. It's fresh. I'll continue using it.

This is a good landing page (in my very, very humble opinion) but the blog post "LazyMeter: Not Another Task Manager"

http://blog.lazymeter.com/2011/07/31/lazymeter-not-another-t...

seems to do a good job of explaining the philosophy of the service.

Thanks, it's challenging to present the product in a short and sweet way, while also making details about our philosophy discoverable. Working on this.

Question: It seems (to me) that a lot of landing pages look very similar - I'm not a designed, so is there a template out there that could be used, or are all of these built individually, from scratch?

The design is wonderful. Let me suggest one simple change that would make this more compelling for me..

Make the to-do list items in the list (graphic to the right) atomic and immediately actionable, following GTD priciples. Why? As a GTD/Vitamin-R/Pomodoro/Wunderkinder addict, the graphic communicates to me a to-do list set up for failure. Instead, I'd like to see something more like:

1. Send proposal for website redesign to Company X 2. Project Y: Devise a clearer method for moderators to invite members to private chat 3. Project Z: Contact 10 choreography bloggers to see if they're interested in cross-promotion

A to-do list like this would communicate to me that this service is developed by people who've studied GTD principles carefully and have something new to offer here. Take a look at the Vitamin R help docs - it reads more like a self-help book than a software manual, which I really appreciated. It won my trust by showing me that this guy had done the research, and really devised a productivity strategy that works.

On that note, it would be helpful to have a clearer message of how this is different than other to-do lists. I'm not quite sure yet...

Anywho, definitely glad to see another attempt at better productivity, and good luck to you! I look forward to learning more about LazyMeter. (:

Offtopic: does anyone know any easy to use task scheduler software?

It's like a to-do list/task manager software, but allows you to create "relations" between each task, the whole dependency is a Directed Acyclic Graph, then the app automatically do a topology sort and tell me where to start, tell me the most important task node, and find the optimal route. A Gantt chart is a plus

Both desktop/web app would be OK. TIA

This is eerily similar to the system I built and personally use. I never got around to polishing it off enough to release to the public. It is also based on a pen and paper to-do list, and taking things one day at a time.

In fact, your tagline is almost identical to mine. Instead of "Your To-Do List, One Day At A Time" mine is "Helping You Get Things Done, One Day At A Time."

It's not a surprise, and clearly your execution was better. Your landing page is great, as is the tour. The design does a great job of being simple and staying out of the way. I had a similar problem as you of most to-do list applications being really intrusive.

I also like the Productivity Stats, which is something I had not seen many other systems do. My program has very similar functionality. I also coded in the ability to estimate how long a time will take and track your actual time spent on it, giving one more data point to analyze.

Kudos to you for a great product and for launching! I'm definitely going to play with it for awhile, if nothing else than to get some inspiration to finish off my app. ;)

Thanks for the careful review - we'd love your feedback since you've obviously thought a lot about the topic. So glad you like the landing page - our conversion rate is over 33%.

I have used todoist for a while and really like it, and just started using http://tomorrow.do/ and love how simple it is. However with both of them I've had issues of downtime and/or the app crashing... so it makes me wonder if trusting someone else with my task lists really even makes sense.

You certainly point out a good opportunity for someone to win the space on uptime. We're built on appengine so we've been really stable so far, even when 10,000+ lifehacker readers hit us last week.

This looks like a good step in the right direction, but I prefer TaskWarrior for Linux (http://www.taskwarrior.org). It's the only to-do application on the desktop or on the web that I've found to really get the job done.

I've found it to be much more effective as a console application than many of the GUI to-do applications I've seen. Adding a new task is as simple as 'task add "Do foobar"', and marking one as done is as simple as 'task X done' (where X is the task ID number). I'm even using it on Windows machines at work with Cygwin. It also has the benefit of being easy to share my tasks with colleagues - 'task > tasks.txt'.

I really like this idea, but it's the sort of thing I'd want to put in the corner of my screen while I work. As it is, it seems to require a browser window to be at least 1010 pixels wide to show all the content, which means that, however irrational this might be, I'm not going to use it because it's too overwhelming to have open all the time.

Also - a nitpick - the progress meter overlapping the vertical stripe at the left of the task list is driving a piece of my brain crazy. I expect it's a deliberate part of the design, but it looks incongruous to me (this is not /nearly/ as important to me as my first point - just thought I'd mention it too).

I like the idea of LazyMeter but for me personally, you can't beat the simplicity of http://workflowy.com

I love workflowy too, but it didn't work for me for tasks. We wanted to build something to process tasks and not just manage them.

People hate registering an account. Considering using Facebook connect or not requiring login to use the basic functionality.

During the first SaaS I put together I was convinced that forcing the user to register was providing some value. But ultimately it lead to a huge bounce rate. I probably could have had more registrations if I didn't have the main product behind a login and forced registration later on in the process.

Agreed. We had planned to allow use of the product before registration, but had (and still have) higher priority features. You're right that we should at least add Facebook connect ASAP. But we have had a pretty crazy conversion rate around 1/3 (to date, I'm not sure if hacker news traffic will convert at the same rate since it's less qualified).

The tool should be the homepage. It should just start asking me to fill in TODOs when i got to lazymeter.com. None of this registration stuff. Just super cookie me and then say "click here to link to facebook to save your list".

Absolutely agree. Why would I sign up without having first seen how it could benefit my life?

Looks cool, but you might want to move your signup bar up over the twitter line, which would put all the important stuff above the fold on an iPad.

I'm not sure that I see anything new or (edit:) more useful here, which is obviously critical in the landscape of to-do apps. What am I missing?

Like most people, I struggle to stick with one method and revert to pen and paper more often than not. One app I've had some success with is http://teuxdeux.com

LazyMeter is specifically built for people that keep returning to pen and paper after trying the various task managers. We are faster than pen and paper, and more rewarding. The problem with to-do lists is they're overwhelming. No matter how much you do, there's more to be done. We've built an experience around feeling better at the end of the day. We show you how much you do, and we provide a method to complete your to-do list every day. The secret is in the pause button, which pushes a task to tomorrow. LazyMeter is also simple: we don't ask for fields like priority, context or deadline.

So the progress bar is the main point of difference?

We have a full list of what makes us different here: http://blog.lazymeter.com/2011/07/31/lazymeter-not-another-t...

Other key differentiators are the pause button, so you clear your to-do list each day, and the ability to add multiple reminders, so you can check something off for today and continue it on another day (most tasks aren't simply to-do versus done).

The landing site tells me nothing about what makes LazyMeter better than the million other todo lists out there. It makes a huge claim that's really hard to believe, and doesn't back it up with anything.

I haven't actually tested the app—but you've really got to take a second look at your marketing site. It's a huge turn-off for me. A big let down.

It's awesome. Will you ever have a native OSX client? I'd be way more inclined to use it with one.

Dude, Laura love it tonight when you showed it to her at http://www.hackersandfounders.com/ tonight. Kudos. :)

Great to hear! Thanks for the note.

Looks cool.

One thing i noticed: I would maybe put a "Sign up" button at the top with Home, Tour, etc. My first though was to look for it there because i didn't see it down below.

All I get when going there on my mobile is a login form.

We redirect mobile devices to our mobile web version, which doesn't have marketing info or even registration. We'll work on this.

The tagline is really good.

Thanks, it took us a long time to get to it. We quit our jobs at Microsoft over a year ago. We knew task management needed to be fixed, but we also knew we had to develop something profoundly different than the many other options available. The key was helping people focus on one day at a time, and feel better at the end of the day.