

Show HN: LazyMeter is the only to-do list you'll finish every day - aaronf
http://www.lazymeter.com
LazyMeter is the first task manager built on the premise that how you feel is more important than how much you do. It is faster than pen-and-paper, and more rewarding.<p>By helping you focus on one day at a time, LazyMeter ensures you know what to do and – more importantly – when you’re done. A visual meter shows your progress throughout the day, and the drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to prioritize and reschedule while you work. The simple design offers subtle feedback so users are more motivated and less likely to procrastinate.<p>LazyMeter is the only to-do list you’ll finish every day. In addition to allowing you to check off a task, it also gives you a pause button, which pushes a task to tomorrow. The goal is to process your day, either checking off or pausing your tasks. When today’s list is empty, your work is done, and you’re free to enjoy the rest of the day without worrying that you’ve forgotten something.<p>Like pen and paper, all you need to add a task is a title. Tell LazyMeter when you want to think about something again, and it will ensure you remember. A task can have multiple reminders, so you can check it off when today’s work is done, and continue it later.
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Swizec
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.

~~~
BrianHV
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?

~~~
jim_h
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.

~~~
tesseract
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.

------
rradu
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.

~~~
aaronf
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.

------
blackboxxx
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.

~~~
aaronf
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.

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

~~~
aaronf
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.

------
reemrevnivek
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...](http://blog.lazymeter.com/2011/07/31/lazymeter-not-another-task-
manager/)

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

~~~
aaronf
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.

~~~
bvi
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?

------
est
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

------
matthiaswh
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. ;)

~~~
aaronf
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%.

------
duck
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.

~~~
aaronf
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.

------
Auguste
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'.

------
jrmg
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).

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

~~~
aaronf
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.

------
Sindrome
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.

~~~
aaronf
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).

~~~
rrwhite
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".

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

------
watmough
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.

------
prawn
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>

~~~
aaronf
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.

~~~
prawn
So the progress bar is the main point of difference?

~~~
aaronf
We have a full list of what makes us different here:
[http://blog.lazymeter.com/2011/07/31/lazymeter-not-
another-t...](http://blog.lazymeter.com/2011/07/31/lazymeter-not-another-task-
manager/)

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).

------
SeoxyS
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.

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

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

~~~
aaronf
Great to hear! Thanks for the note.

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mtogo
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.

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

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

------
bluena
The tagline is really good.

~~~
aaronf
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.

