generalist/Genera

Introduction

This document is written by me, Brandon Nolet, in the context of a software project. I’ve started one and I want to share the plans I have for it.

Todo Lists

I’m a fan of lists. I currently use the todoist platform for my todo lists. I put anything from simple things like cleaning my apartment to planning a dinner for my birthday party in lists.

As someone with a short attention span, impulsive behaviour, and a generally sporadic thought process this helps me stay on top of responsibilities. I’m slowly learning more and more to trust my lists to guide me in the direction I want to go when I set goals for myself. The more I trust my lists, I feel like, the more I get done.

These lists also help me not forget things. I think I’ve said it before but I often load my plate with a lot of different things and it takes up a lot of mental capacity to remember to do all those things. Compound that with the separation of different lives (personal, professional, romantic) and trying to remember every single thing that needs to be done becomes an olympic feat.

Getting Things Done

I got into using lists for getting things done a while ago after I read something called GTD In 15 Minutes which is a handy summary of something called Getting Things Done. I feel like I’ve mentioned this before but I think it’s important to my next points. After reading this and being told that the brain is for processing and not remembering every single thing that needs to be done all that much (loose representation) it made sense to trust in the todo-list life. I didn’t really choose it, it chose me.

Todoist

Todoist is a webapp/mobile app that stores your todo lists, among other things. From their website:

Todoist keeps track of all your tasks, projects, and goals in one beautifully simple place.

While I love the platform, I don’t like their business practices. Between the software being proprietary and their gatekeeping of features, I just can’t advocate the service/app. I don’t think that things like comments and labels on tasks should be paid features. I realize that a company has to make money, but I know that there are other ways to make it.

genera/generalist

Enter genera/generalist (working names). I plan to make my own platform that aims to either replicate or improve on the feature set that the likes of todoist, wunderlist, and others, profit off of. I intend to do so in a free software fashion as well.

I don’t intend to compete with todoist et al but rather prove that something similar could be built and profited off of in a free-er way.

This will initially be built in NodeJS, that way I can use a single(almost single) language for both the backend and the front end. The front and backends will have different names and be separable from each other.

Conclusion

In the coming days I’ll be describing the project in more detail but until then I’d like to know what kinds of questions you’d like me to answer.