It’s been a while since I posted any kind of ‘showcase’, but I thought I’d share a system I’ve been working on over the past few days. To be honest, it’s not quite finished, but there’s enough there to show the idea. I’ve made a quick video walkthrough:
Some background (and possible overshare)
In a previous life, I ran multiple complex projects (multi-million £) and led global departments. I was a busy chap, and OmniFocus was my trusted companion. These days, I’m not quite as busy — though everything in life is relative.
I have certain neurodiverse traits, and I’ve found that most task managers don’t work for me when I’m not flat-out busy. They tend to fill up with unimportant tasks, which then don’t get done. That generates guilt, which leads to me avoiding the app… and then I end up missing the actually important stuff (like Tax Returns!).
Anyway, I was chatting to ‘Chatty’ (our affectionate household name for ChatGPT — and yes, she’s a she, according to my partner), and she was, as ever, empathetic. She suggested splitting tasks into two categories:
- Must-do tasks — e.g. tax returns, calling my dad on Father’s Day.
- Nice-to-do tasks — like building a new productivity app, even though there are thousands out there that probably do what I want (but where’s the fun in that?).
I gave it some thought, and with all the recent chatter about Tape on mobile and ProcFu (which I still think is an amazing tool), I decided to revive some dormant parts of my old Tape setup. I paired that with a responsive web frontend so I could access what I need wherever I am.
And here we are.
The Interface
Some example screenshots:
Mobile View
Desktop View
What you’re seeing:
- Today’s Date — self-updating, naturally.
- Must Happen — pulled from a Tape view. Shows today and tomorrow’s items (because telling me to do my tax return on the day is a bit pointless).
- Schedule — updated nightly around 1am, this is built from my various calendars. The system tries to deduplicate entries — sometimes with mixed success.
- Things Today — this is my shortlist of things I’d like to do today.
- Nexus Journal — a log of things throughout the day. Each is a Tape record. When I’m at my Mac, I use an Alfred workflow to quickly create entries, which are then lightly cleaned up with AI. You’ll notice in the video that entries sometimes change — that’s why.
Must Happen
The must-do tasks are basic Tape records:
They’re listed via a standard view:
If it’s a repeating task, when I mark it as done, a little automation kicks in. It calculates the next due date and creates a new record:
Schedule
At the moment, this doesn’t use Tape at all. I used to push calendar events into Tape, but it was unreliable (nothing to do with Tape — just the syncs across multiple providers).
Now I run an Apple Shortcut every night that posts the next day’s events to the system. It’s not fancy, but it works for now:
Things Today
This is the core of the system. Every day, I choose up to three things I’d most like to get done, after reviewing my energy levels and reflecting on the previous day. These are added as checklist items on the daily record:
Nexus Journal
Logs, thoughts, random things I want to capture quickly. Each entry links to the daily record. The system pulls them into the dashboard so I can refer to them as I go:
Daily Record
Here’s how the daily record looks inside Tape:
What’s under the bonnet?
As some of you may have guessed, I didn’t build this with ProcFu (though I love it). Instead, I’m using:
- Tape (obviously)
- Cloudflare Worker
- Cloudflare KV — for caching
- Cloudflare Zero Trust Access
- Astro (SSR mode)
- Islands architecture — with Preact modals and toasts
- Alfred — for quick data entry
As always, happy to answer any questions or share more detail if useful!
