The RightNow app is kind of born out of GTD (David Allen), SCRUM (Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland), and the Time Blocking or Deep Work principles of Cal Newport.

I have been using Scrum in my professional life for over 10 years (gosh I am ageing) and in that time I have been playing around with many productivity systems. None of them work for me wholesale but they all have things that really work, so I combine them.

So the core idea of this app was to almost do a mini Sprint where we have a backlog of tasks and plan the tasks for the day based on the capacity that we have for the day.

The capacity is the real strength of this idea because you should be able to adapt your day based on what you actually have time for. The app should tell you when you don't have time to do everything and you can just kick a task back to the backlog to do the next day.

This should help with a feeling of accomplishment as well - you didn't fail to get everything done, there was simply not enough time to do it.

This idea of course means that the app needs to know how long a task will take to do and I have some ideas. Basically gamification of backlog grooming or refinement as it is now called.

We will get into that in a future post. :-D