Most apps for getting things done are built for a problem you may not have. Deciding what to do, remembering it, ranking it, putting it in the right day. If you have ADHD, that part is often fine. You know what the task is. You know when it was meant to happen. You are sitting still anyway.
So the useful question is not whether an app is well made. Plenty of them are. It is whether anything it does lands in the gap between intending and beginning, which is the only gap that has ever been the problem. These five questions find that out quickly.
We make one of the apps this test is for, which is a good reason to read our answers sceptically rather than take them. All five questions are checkable yourself, on any app, in ten minutes. That is the point of writing them down.
1. What does it do five minutes after you didn't start?
This is the question the other four are variations of. A reminder fires at two o'clock. You see it. You do not move. It is now five past two, and the only thing that matters is whether the app is still in the room.
A passing answer: something is still there. The reminder has stayed on the Lock Screen, or it comes back once, or it has turned into something you can act on rather than something you have already read.
A failing answer: nothing. The notification fired, it slid away or you cleared it, and the task is back inside the app where you would have to go and find it.
If the answer is nothing, the app is a planner. Planners are good, and deciding and remembering are real jobs. Just do not ask one to do this one.
How to check: set a reminder for two minutes from now. Ignore it on purpose. Wait five minutes, then look at your Lock Screen without unlocking the phone. Whatever is there is the app's real answer.
2. Can you begin from wherever the reminder appeared?
Say something is still there. Tap it, and count what stands between that tap and actually doing the task.
A passing answer: the tap begins the thing. A timer is running, or a first step is in front of you, or the task is simply open.
A failing answer: the tap opens a list, and your task is somewhere in it, underneath three others you now have opinions about.
A notification that opens a list has handed the problem straight back to you at the moment you had the least to spend on it. The list is a second decision, and a decision is what you were stuck on in the first place.
How to check: tap the reminder and count taps until you are doing the task rather than looking at it. One is good. Four is a list with extra steps.
3. Does it ever ask how the task feels, or only when it's due?
Open the screen where you add a task, and just read the fields. Date. Time. Repeat. Priority. Project. Tag. Subtask. Note.
Every one of those is logistics, and none of them is the reason the thing has sat there for six days.
A passing answer: there is somewhere to say that the task feels heavy, or that you are dreading it, and the app does something different depending on what you say.
A failing answer: the only fields are when, where, and how important.
Putting a feeling into words measurably lowers its intensity. Lieberman and colleagues showed it with brain imaging in 2007, and it costs one tap to ask. An app that never asks is leaving the cheapest well-evidenced thing available at the start line on the floor.
How to check: add a task and read the fields. That is the whole test.
4. What is the smallest thing it will let you count as started?
Find the shortest session the app will acknowledge. Not the shortest one you can picture yourself doing. The shortest one it will record.
A passing answer: a minute counts. Or opening the thing counts. Or there is no minimum, because the app is not counting.
A failing answer: the shortest timer is twenty-five minutes, or nothing registers until the task is marked done.
This matters most on the days it matters most. On a good day you can give a task an hour. On the day you actually need the help, you have about a minute of willingness in you, and an app whose smallest unit is twenty-five minutes has nothing to offer on that day. It is built for the version of you that was already fine.
How to check: start something, stop after a minute, and see whether the app thinks anything happened.
5. What does it do on the day you come back after two bad weeks?
Run this one first. Everything a tool believes about you shows up in what it does on your worst day.
A failing answer: a zero. A broken counter. A guilt notification. A "we missed you." A fresh onboarding flow that treats you as a new user because you have not opened it since the eleventh.
A passing answer: the day looks like any other day. Your tasks are where you left them. Nothing was counted against you while you were gone.
An app that keeps score has to decide what to do when the score is bad, and every available option is some flavour of telling you so. That is a design choice made long before you had a bad fortnight, and it was made without you in mind.
How to check: this is the hard one to run on demand, because it wants two bad weeks. Two proxies work well enough. Search the App Store reviews for the word "back" and read what people say happened. Then open a task you abandoned last week and look at how it is dressed: sitting there plainly, or in red with a number attached?
Run the whole thing in ten minutes
Pick the app you most recently stopped using, and one small real task you were not going to do today anyway.
- Add the task for two minutes from now, reading the fields as you go. That answers question three.
- Ignore the reminder when it arrives.
- Five minutes later, look at the Lock Screen. That answers question one.
- Tap whatever is there, counting taps until you are actually doing the thing. That answers question two.
- Start it, stop after a minute, and check whether anything was recorded. That answers question four.
- Open something you abandoned last week and look at how it is presented. That is your proxy for question five.
Six steps, one task you had written off, and at the end you know whether the app on your phone was ever built for the part you are stuck on.
The same test, applied to us
We wrote it, so here is us taking it, in order.
- Five minutes after you didn't start, Beginary is still there. A nudge stays rather than firing once, and a Focus Moment holds the block open after the time has already slipped past, so beginning at 2:40 still counts as beginning.
- You can begin where the reminder is. Just Start runs from the Lock Screen or your wrist without opening anything first.
- It asks how the task feels before it asks anything else. The mood check is the opening question, and Fine, Wired, Heavy or Stuck each route you somewhere different.
- Sixty seconds counts as having started. That is the smallest unit, and it is deliberate.
- Coming back after two weeks looks like any other day. There are no streaks and there never will be, so there is no counter to break. A task you left behind reads "Still here".
We cannot put another person in the room with you, and body doubling is real, so if that is the thing that has been working, we are not a replacement for it. We will not repair your sense of time either, because nothing will. If your calendar is a mess, Beginary will not sort it out, since it is not a planner and we are not going to turn it into one. And question five has a limit we cannot design our way around: we can make the day you return feel like any other day, but we cannot make you open the app on it.
One more limit, on us and on everything else you are about to test. An app is a surface. The most it can do is put the start in front of you at the moment it usually disappears. None of these five questions can tell you whether a tool will make you want the thing, because no tool does that. Anything that implies otherwise is answering a question you did not ask.
If you want the longer argument these came out of, it is in why productivity apps don't work for ADHD. If you want to know which of the three things is blocking one specific task right now, that is a different and shorter check.
