I stopped using todo lists. Then I built one.

For a while, I just gave up.

I'd tried Trello. Used it heavily — heavily enough that I can't get back into my old account without paying for the privilege, which tells you something. I tried Wunderlist. It felt fine in the trial. Clean, simple, fast. So I did what you're supposed to do: I committed to it. I imported my actual todo list.

Over a hundred items.

And it broke. Not technically — the app worked fine. But I broke. I opened it, saw this wall of things I needed to do, and felt immediately worse than I had before I opened it. I couldn't see the wood for the trees. So I closed it. And then I just... stopped.

For a while I kept things in my head and in scattered notes, which is its own kind of chaos, but at least it wasn't staring me in the face all at once.

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The problem, I eventually worked out, wasn't the apps themselves. It was a fundamental assumption baked into most of them: that having everything visible is the same as being in control.

It isn't. For me at least, having everything visible is the opposite of being in control. It's overwhelming. It's a list that tells you how much you haven't done rather than helping you figure out what to do next.

So when I started building Clarity Mate, I had one core principle: capture everything, but only show what matters.

That sounds simple. It's actually a different way of thinking about what a productivity tool is for.

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There are three things I wanted Clarity Mate to do differently.

Hide the noise. Everything you add is there, safely recorded, not lost. But you don't have to look at it. The app surfaces what's most important right now. The rest is there when you need it, invisible when you don't. You shouldn't have to mentally filter a list of 100 things every time you want to know what to work on next.

Break things down as far as you need to. Most tools have a shallow hierarchy — a project, maybe some tasks, done. But real work doesn't work like that. A goal might have ten sub-goals. Each of those might have stages. Each stage might have tasks. Each task might have sub-tasks. Clarity Mate is infinitely hierarchical. Some of my own projects are six levels deep. And crucially, it doesn't show you the whole tree at once — you see what's relevant at the level you're working at.

Show progress over time, not just current state. This one matters more than it sounds. Most apps tell you where you are. They don't tell you how far you've come. Knowing you have 80 things left to do feels very different when you can also see that you've completed 40 things this month. The number doesn't change, but how you feel about it does.

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I built Clarity Mate for people like me — people who tried the popular tools and found them wanting. Not people who haven't found the right app yet, but people who stopped looking because nothing seemed to fit how they actually think.

If you opened a todo list recently and immediately felt worse, this might be worth a try.

Until next time, stay clear.
— Adam