To-do apps are built around finishing things. That works for a tax return and fails completely for the tasks that come back next week regardless, which is most of the work that fills a week.
Free while in early access. No card, and nothing to install.
When you complete a recurring task in a to-do app, it disappears and comes back tomorrow. The completion is gone. You cannot tell whether you have run the weekly backup for six weeks straight or skipped four of them, because the app threw that record away each time it reset.
For anything that repeats, the history is the useful part, and the queue is the noise. This inverts that. Nothing disappears when you tick it. The row stays and fills in.
Once a month of completions is sitting in one grid, some things become obvious that were invisible before.
There are no due dates here, no priority flags, and no subtasks. That is a design decision rather than a roadmap gap, and it is worth being blunt about because it will rule this out for some people.
Recurring work does not have a due date, it has a frequency. Bolting dates onto it produces a permanently overdue list that you learn to ignore within a fortnight, and an ignored red badge is worse than no badge. What replaces it is a monthly target per task and a percentage against it.
Everything here is scoped to a single account. There is no sharing, no assigning, and no team view, and nothing about the current design is pointed at building one.
If you need to see whether a colleague did something, this is the wrong tool. If you need to see whether you did something, and you are tired of project software built for coordinating six people being aimed at a job that involves one, it fits.
Step by step
Set up tracking for the work that comes back, without a project manager.
Go through last week. Anything you will do again next week is a candidate. Anything you will finish once stays in your to-do app.
"Clear the inbox" beats "inbox zero", because you can tell at 6pm whether you did the first one.
A weekly backup is four or five a month. That number is the target the progress bar measures against.
A task that only ever fails on one weekday is a scheduling problem you can fix in a minute, and no amount of discipline will fix it instead.
Read next
Longer pieces on the parts of this that people get wrong.
All three work. They fail differently, and the failure mode is what should decide it. A straight comparison, including where an app is the wrong answer.
6 min readAt the end of the month you have a grid full of boxes. Here is how to get something useful out of it instead of just feeling vaguely good or vaguely bad.
5 min readThe day after a long streak ends is the highest-risk day in habit tracking. Here is what to do with it, and why the usual advice makes things worse.
5 min readYou will know by the end of it whether this is the tracker that sticks. That is a shorter test than most things you have tried.