UnDo

Every to-do list I have used has the same defect: it is a flat list, so everything on it looks equally deserving. The list grows, priority becomes a feeling, and the day gets spent on whatever is loudest.

Eisenhower's matrix fixes this by refusing the flat list. Two axes — urgent or not, important or not — and four quadrants that each imply a different verb: do it, schedule it, delegate it, delete it. The framework is old and well known. The reason almost nobody runs it is that classifying tasks is friction, and every tool that supports the matrix makes it optional.

So UnDo makes it mandatory. There is no way to add a task without placing it. The quadrant is not a label you might apply later; it is the act of capture.

How it works

• Capture forces a decision. Adding a task asks two questions before it accepts the text. Two clicks, and the task lands in a quadrant.
• The board is the interface. Four quadrants, always visible, one click from any tab. Not a list that happens to be colour-coded.
• Each quadrant suggests its verb. Urgent and important gets done now. Important and not urgent gets a date. Urgent and not important gets handed off. Neither gets deleted — and the tool is comfortable telling you so.
• Drag to reclassify. Priority moves. A task sliding from schedule into do now is exactly the signal you want to see coming.
• Local storage. Tasks live in the browser. No account, no server, no sync, nothing leaves the machine.

What I learned building it

The interesting finding was not about productivity software. It was that the bottom-right quadrant — not urgent, not important — filled up faster than any other, and that people (me included) resist emptying it. A flat list lets you keep those tasks in a respectable-looking queue forever. A matrix puts them in a box labelled delete and makes you look at it.

Most of the value of the tool turned out to be that single act of exposure. The rest is plumbing.

Built as a personal tool. If you want the current build or the source, email me.