There is a version of you that woke up one morning with a clear intention. Maybe it was to exercise more consistently, to finally finish that course, to call your mother every Sunday, to drink more water, to spend less time on your phone. You…

In the 1950s, the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered something that would go on to shape the design of nearly every attention-capturing system built in the decades that followed. He was studying how rats learned to press levers for food pellets, and he began experimenting…

At some point, most people have done a version of the same thing. A goal is not getting traction, so they add another reminder. Maybe a second one in the afternoon to back up the morning one. Maybe a daily check-in notification on top of…

Every productivity app asks you the same question when you create a task or set a reminder. What do you want to do? Exercise. Call mom. Finish the report. Learn Spanish. The what gets captured, timestamped, and filed. The app is ready to remind you.…

Ask someone why they failed to follow through on a goal and they will almost always give you the same answer. They forgot. They got busy. Life got in the way. It is a tidy explanation, and it lets everyone off the hook — the…

The behavioral science of why we systematically avoid the work that matters most In 1989, Stephen Covey introduced the Eisenhower Matrix to a mass audience in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The framework divides tasks into four quadrants along two axes — urgency…

On the counterintuitive sequencing decision that shapes everything else The standard advice for building a consumer app is to start with the interface. Users don't experience your architecture. They experience what they see and touch. So build the thing they'll see and touch first, get…

An honest audit of Getting Things Done in the age of AI David Allen published Getting Things Done in 2001. In the quarter-century since, it has sold millions of copies, spawned an entire cottage industry of apps and accessories and community forums, and become something…

The words a reminder uses aren't just packaging. They're the mechanism. Imagine two messages arriving on your phone at the same moment, about the same task. The first says: "Reminder: Complete project proposal." The second says: "Your proposal could be the thing that changes this…

The Twilio experiment that became the product insight behind Yuko The idea started as a provocation: what if I actually tested what makes a reminder work, on myself, with enough rigor to learn something real? Not a thought experiment. An actual experiment. I built a…