Who Would Want Another Task App?

Who would want another task app?

That's the question I asked myself. Honestly. Not as false modesty - as a real concern.

Todoist. Notion. Things. TickTick. Linear. Asana. The list goes on. Every angle covered, every user type catered for, most of them backed by teams and funding and years of iteration.

Who would want another one?

I'd tried most of them. Evernote, back when everyone was using Evernote. Spreadsheets - proper ones, built for purpose, with columns that made sense for how I worked. Monday.com. Asana. Google Tasks bolted onto Calendar. The Microsoft one that comes bundled with M365 and sits there, grey and joyless, waiting for you to give up on it.

I gave up on all of them. Not because they were bad products. Because none of them fit the way I actually think about work.

The spreadsheet lasted longest. I built it for myself - the columns I needed, the status system that matched how I worked, no one else's opinion about what a task should look like. For a while it was genuinely the best option I had. Then it got bloated. Sheets don't capture tasks from meetings. They don't extract actions from emails. They don't help you plan your day or tell you whether what you're looking at is actually achievable. They hold information. They don't do anything with it.

The apps had a different problem. The mental model was always someone else's. You'd spend the first hour learning the system, then spend the next month trying to make your work fit inside it. Capture was an afterthought. Planning was manual. The connection between what you needed to do and when you could actually do it - that gap stayed open, and you had to close it yourself, every day, in your head.

Fifteen years of this. Fifteen years as a contractor, moving between organisations, carrying the overhead of staying on top of things with tools that almost worked but didn't quite.

The gap wasn't in the market. It was in me - a problem I'd been living with long enough to understand properly.

That's a different foundation to build from. Not "I think people might want this." Not a market map or a user interview. A problem felt daily, across fifteen years, that no existing tool had closed.

You don't need to beat Todoist. You need to find the people who have the same gap you had - and build the thing that closes it.

That's it. That's the whole logic.

If you don't try, you'll never know.

Steve Drew is the founder of ka-do - a calm task and planning tool for busy professionals.