Gustav von Sydow on digital advertising, online media and tech start-ups

I’ve been annoyed by the lack of a good task-manager for quite some time now, trying just about every solution out there. OmniOutliner – too general-purpose, OmniFocus – too bloated/GTD, GooToDo – too crappy UI and poor philosophy, TadaList – too simple, RememberTheMilk – too plain messy (though I still love the name)… so, triggered by my girlfriend’s overuse of post-its, I’ve decided to go at it on my own, building my own interpretation of how one should organize one’s daily work for maximum productivity and inner peace.

And by “daily work”, I mean just that. Too many task-managers have a tendency to try and be a substitute for MS Project, Merlin or even SAP. A task manager needs to reflect the fact that tasks change in nature, timing etc. It needs to have features and a philosophy supporting that.

Probably nothing you would pitch too your average VC… though it might not be such a bad idea: “Productivity/stress is a huge problem most companies, I have a product that increases productivity by at least 25 percent, and stress by 25 percent. With the world economy turning over about 1 gagillion each year, our product could be worth at least 0.25 gagillion, plus future cashflows.” The sick thing is, that with a polished executive summare and the right team – meaning people that are old and managed a complicated main frame start-up in the eighties and then went off to work for IBM, or that were early employees of a successful start-up (founders of a successful start-up seldom need financing for an idea with zero traction) – you could probably pull it off.

My app will be “opinionated software”, which is fancy talk for that I know best But if you do have any suggestions, give it to me! And yeah, I’ll building it in Rails and (if I have time) a desktop-client in AIR. Always nice to have an excuse to polish up on those coding skills.