A software engineer with about 44 years of experience has built 3 & Done, a task system designed to take the drudgery out of managing work so he can focus on the work itself. The app accepts voice and text input, stores audio locally so users can replay their own notes, and emails each morning with the three most important tasks for the day, along with the reasons, based on deadlines, urgency and how long a task has been sitting.
The idea grew out of a long history of task management frustration. Over a career spanning startups, the dot-com era, a non-profit, YouTube and Meta, the author tried roughly 25 systems, from Moleskine notebooks and Getting Things Done to Evernote, Todoist, Asana and Google Keep. Each one eventually piled up and demanded more upkeep than it saved, leading him to email himself short lists of tasks instead. That habit became the core thesis of the app: a few tasks, delivered daily, are easier to finish.
The app recommends three tasks per day, matching what he describes as best practice for attention, but the user always decides how many to take on. It never shames users and tries not to nag, and manual ordering overrides the automatic ranking. The web app is live, with native apps for both platforms in development. On Android, gestures can launch voice input quickly.
The author is open about using AI in development, mainly Anthropic models, which he chose for quality, privacy and a no-training-on-customer-data policy. He also relies on feature-specific prompts and evaluation sets built from patterns in his own tasks and those of testers.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing