My Little List & Here Now

The starting point was a familiar frustration: I would open a to-do app to organise a few things and end up organising the app itself. My Little List keeps the paper-note idea close. Write something down, keep it in view and flick it away when you are finished.

Straight paper cards, hard shadows and expressive colour give that small action a sense of fun. Retro, Pop and Mono themes let the same simple interface feel different without asking the user to learn a new system.

The physical metaphor carries through to interaction: hold to lift, move to reorder, flick to remove. An Undo gives a removed card a way back, and keyboard-accessible controls offer alternatives to the gestures. The playfulness needs to remain practical.

Here Now gives the same ethos a weekly rhythm. You choose the activities you want to make time for and the days on which you intend to do them. Today, Your week and Progress each answer a simple question: what is here now, what have I planned, and how has the week gone?

Daily check-offs build a picture of what you have engaged with. Completed and planned counts make that picture concrete, including a distinction between the full week's plan and what was planned through today. Future commitments should not read as things you have already missed.

The tone I wanted was matter-of-fact and without judgement. A record of the week can acknowledge effort and help you reflect without making an unfinished activity a verdict on the day.

Minimalism here is about how much the interface asks of you. My Little List uses colour, paper-like surfaces and movement to make a modest utility feel funky, fresh and enjoyable.

Here Now carries that confidence into a neo-brutalist direction: emphatic type, visible borders, strong contrast and blocks of colour. The visual weight gives a small set of activities a clear place on the screen, while the navigation stays close to the day, the week and its progress.

The two apps share a point of view, but each has its own job. A list catches the loose things in your head. A weekly plan holds the commitments you want to return to.

The feeling I was designing towards was satisfaction: being able to look at the day or week and recognise that I had followed through on what I chose. Having a visible agreement can make it easier to know when enough is enough and let the time in between belong to something else.

Rest does not need to be earned through a perfect checklist. The ambition is to reduce the mental noise around unfinished intentions and give people a little more room to relax. That is the premise behind these apps; whether they create that experience for others still needs to be tested.