What RightNow Is, and What It Isn't
In my head this has always been a GTD inspired app. Then a few feature requests came in that I didn’t want to build, and working out why I didn’t want them changed how I think about the whole thing.
The requests were reasonable. Roll unfinished tasks onto tomorrow automatically. Sort the list by priority and grey out everything that isn’t urgent. Both are normal to-do app behaviour, and both take the day out of your hands. Saying no to them twice made me realise RightNow is more of a time blocking app than a to-do app.
It is both, to be clear. You need a list to feed the blocking, and that list is the GTD half. But time blocking is the main point.
I should be straight about where that leaves the app today. Proper time blocking usually means a timeline: your day laid out hour by hour with things sitting in it. RightNow doesn’t have that yet. I might build it. What it has for now is the arithmetic underneath it, which is knowing what your tasks are and whether they fit in today. Better still, whether you can do one right now.
So this post is me being clearer about it, mostly for my own benefit. What the app is trying to be, and what it isn’t.
Where it came from
Four ideas, none of them mine. If you’ve not met them, they’re worth ten minutes of your time regardless of whether you ever install my app.
Getting Things Done (David Allen). Your head is bad at storing things and good at panicking about them. So you get every commitment out of it and into one place you trust, decide the actual next physical action for each, and review the lot regularly. The point is that you stop running the list in your head at 3am. I’ve tried to practise it properly several times and always fall off at the weekly review, but the capture habit stuck.
Deep Work (Cal Newport). Concentrating hard on one difficult thing is a trainable skill, and it’s getting rarer at the same time as it’s getting more valuable. Meanwhile the shallow stuff, email and pings and small admin, expands to fill whatever room you leave it. Defend the time in advance or you won’t get it.
Time blocking (the practice, and Newport’s planner). Give every hour a job before the day starts. It sounds rigid, and it’s the quickest way to discover that your eleven planned tasks need fourteen hours. A to-do list can hold anything. A day can’t. Writing the blocks down forces the arithmetic, because you run out of page.
Bullet Journal (Ryder Carroll). Rapid logging: short entries, each marked with a bullet that tells you at a glance what kind of thing it is. And migration: when you copy an unfinished task forward by hand, you notice you’ve moved it four times, and you start asking why.
None of these people have anything to do with this app. I borrowed the good bits and left the rest.
RightNow takes the arithmetic from time blocking and the inbox from GTD. The bullets became our checkboxes, coloured by priority so you can read a row without reading it. And the reason any of it exists is the Deep Work argument: decide what the day is for in advance, or it gets decided for you.
What RightNow is trying to be
A time-blocking app with somewhere to park everything else.
That’s the whole pitch. The two halves do different jobs:
The inbox is where things go when you think of them. No dates, no pressure. It can get as long as it likes, because it isn’t a plan, it’s a holding pen.
Today is the plan, and it has a size. You set how long your working day is, you pull tasks over from the inbox, and each one takes a bite out of the bar. When the bar is full, the day is full, and the app says so. You can overrule it, but you’ll be doing it knowingly rather than by accident at 4pm.
Everything else in the app exists to make that work. The swipe games ask how long tasks take because a capacity bar built on guesses is decoration. The yesterday chip and the morning check-in exist so slipped tasks are visible without taking hours out of today unless you say so. Your calendar events show up on Today alongside the tasks, and you can tick the ones that should count against the bar, because a two hour meeting is two hours whether or not you call it a task.
If a feature doesn’t help you decide what fits in a day, it probably shouldn’t be here.
What it isn’t trying to be
It isn’t a reminder service, and it isn’t a deadline tracker. This is the one I’d most like people to take away, and it’s in the name. RightNow is about what you can do now, today, with the hours you have left. It is not about what needs doing on the 14th at half two. If something has to happen at a specific time, that’s what a calendar is for, and your calendar is better at it than I will ever be. RightNow can even push the task into your calendar for you. Tasks here do have due dates and can nudge you, because sometimes that’s useful, but if you’re reaching for this app to remember your dentist appointment, it’s the wrong tool.
It won’t roll your unfinished tasks into tomorrow for you. Most apps do. It means your Today list slowly stops being what you chose and starts being what you failed to do. Unfinished tasks go back to the inbox and get flagged in the morning, and you decide.
It won’t nag you. Three daily nudges and whatever reminders you set on your own tasks. No streak-guilt notifications, no “we miss you”, no marketing pushes. The permission prompt tells you exactly what will be sent, and that’s all that will ever be sent.
It won’t take ordering away from you. A tester suggested auto-sorting the list and greying out everything except the “now” tasks until they’re done. Reasonable idea, and I said no. You can sort by priority whenever you want, but the app locking your list is a step too far towards it running your day rather than you.
It isn’t a team tool. No shared boards, no assigning things to other people. This is for one person’s day.
It isn’t going to grow an AI. If I ever do anything in that direction it will be letting your AI talk to your tasks, not me bolting a chatbot on and charging you for the tokens.
It isn’t a tagging system. Tags do one job: filtering the inbox when you’re deciding what to pull in. There used to be twenty-six of them in a category tree. There are now eight, and you can delete those.
It isn’t a productivity scoreboard. I deleted an achievement called Marathon Session that rewarded four hours on a single task, because a capacity app has no business congratulating you for blowing through your own limits. Then I audited the rest and deleted three more that could never be earned.
The short version
RightNow answers one question: what can I actually get done today? It answers it by making you plan against real hours instead of an infinite list.
The inbox is there so nothing gets lost. The bar is there so nothing gets overcommitted. Your calendar handles when things have to happen. That’s it, and I’d rather it stayed that small.