Daily Planner

In this blog entry, I explain that we should categorize DayTickler according to the structure it promotes.

DayTickler is a productivity tools that can be classified, in a general way, as a personal tasks manager. Unfortunately, I do not think it’s a good classification. DayTickler is a mix that paired a daily calendar with a to-do list. I think rather that it should be classified as a daily planner because it is the structure that it promotes and puts forward.

This might surprise you, but committing and achieving tasks is all about structure. In my life, if there is one key lesson I have learned, and on which I have already written, which has near-universal applicability:

“We do not get better without structure”

As a matter of fact, without structure, we do not change our behavior, and we do not become successful. Unfortunately, incorporating the right structure into your daily routine is challenging. This is why you should rely on a productivity tool such as DayTickler.

I am among those who believe that a mobile app such as DayTickler must be opinionated. By design, it should lock and guide the user to do things according to his way. Put another way, there’s clearly one right way of using the application which is nice and easy, and any other way of using it makes your life difficult. It provides a recipe that not only simplifies the user experience but ensures to achieve results. Recipe limits the options so that users are not thrown off course by externalities. When users follow a recipe they are relying on structure to simplify the complexity and improve the odds of success.

The most important structural element of DayTickler is the daily schedule.

Separating the “Today” schedule from the master “To-do” list of everything that need to be done is a clear incentive for action. If the user schedule its daily commitments, he (or she) is much more likely to achieve them. It is as if the act of scheduling that increase the moral obligation. The “Today” schedule lets the user focus on what must be done today, while the “To-Do” list gives the user a place to dump every little task he (or she) think that someday must get done.

Success is all about structure

The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth, while naming is the origin of the myriad things.— Lao-Tzu

We live in a complex world and one of our first challenge is to structure it so that it seems simple. Obviously, we will not be left to ourselves facing this major challenge. Early on, our parents will provide us with the foundations. Among other things, they will teach us a language and the meaning of words. We often forget that the simplest way to reduce complexity is to name things appropriately. A Chinese proverb says that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.

Slingboards Lab is not the first company that I founded. In 1991, after completing my master’s degree in management of technology from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, I founded a software company to market a drawing program for value engineering. Unfortunately, my company did not had the expected success. This is explained by the fact that my product, whose name was Fastdraw, found himself competing against the Visio drawing software. I had customers, but not enough for this to be very profitable. After a few years, I closed the business. Oddly enough, 24 years later, I still have an old client using my product. They still consider Fastdraw as a better option than Visio. Lately, they contacted me because they wanted me to program a modern version. I politely refused while freely providing them with the original source code.

A few days ago, I took a look and I was amazed by the structure of the sources. This program was a 16-bits Windows 3.1x app written in C ++ using the Borland C++ v4.0 IDE and OWL library. Each object has its own CPP and H files. The naming convention makes it easy to identify visual objects such as windows and dialogs.

For those too young, in early 90’s the filenames were limited to 8 characters (a MS-DOS constraint), here is why we find names like TOOLBARW instead of TOOLBARWIN.

As you can see, already at the beginning of my career, I was from the school of those who believes that words have meaning and names have power. By setting up an appropriate structure such as the combination of words with a convention, you can reduce complexity and make your code easily understood even 24 years later. Success is all about structure.