I Was Tired of Typing Todo Tasks — So I Built TheUndo

I didn’t build TheUndo because I needed another way to organize my tasks. I built it because I was tired of typing them.

Every time something popped into my head, adding it to a to-do app felt like more work than the thought itself. Type the task. Pick the project. Choose the date. Set the priority. By the time I was done, I’d lost my place in whatever I was actually doing.

I wanted to write something like:

Pay rent Friday #Home high

and move on. The app should figure out the rest.

A five-second thought shouldn’t become a thirty-second task

When I remember something mid-task — a bill, a call I need to make, something to pick up on the way home — the thought itself takes a second or two. Then I open the to-do app and that thought turns into a little form: a title field, a date picker, a project menu, a priority selector.

Thirty seconds isn’t a catastrophe on its own. The problem is that I’m almost always in the middle of something else. I don’t want capturing a task to become its own task — something I stop and do properly. I want it to feel like jotting something down on a sticky note: quick, effortless, and then back to what I was doing.

thought → capture → back to what I was doing

That loop, kept as short as possible, is the whole thing I was after.

I wanted to type less

Here’s the interaction I was trying to get away from. One task, four separate steps:

And here’s what I wanted to type instead:

Pay rent Friday #Home high

In TheUndo, that one line is enough. The quick add reads what you type and fills in the parts it recognises:

• Friday becomes the due date — the next Friday coming up.
• #Home becomes the project. If you don’t have a Home project yet, it creates one.
• high at the end sets the priority.
• Pay rent is left alone as the task itself.

You can add a time (Pay rent Friday 9am), a repeat (Water the plants every Monday), or leave any of it out. If a word doesn’t look like a date, a #project or a priority, it just stays in the title.

The app should do the boring part

None of this is AI. There’s no model trying to work out what you meant. It’s a set of rules running on your phone: it looks for a date, a #tag and a priority word, lifts them out, and leaves the rest as the title. The same input always gives the same result, and it works with no connection.

I like it that way. I don’t want the app guessing at my intent or quietly rewriting my tasks. I just want it to handle the mechanical part — “this word is a date, put it in the date field” — so recording one thought doesn’t mean tapping through four menus.

I provide the thought. The app does the boring part.

That idea started shaping the rest of TheUndo

Once quick capture worked, the same instinct kept turning up everywhere else. If the goal is less friction, a lot of the usual to-do-app scaffolding starts to look optional.

There’s no account — you open the app and start typing. It works offline, because your tasks live on the device rather than on a server. There’s one list by default instead of a screen of settings to configure first. The point was never to remove features for its own sake; it was to stop asking you to set things up before you can use it.

If you want the longer version, I’ve written more about what a deliberately simple to-do app looks like and about keeping your tasks on your device and working offline.

What I’m building toward

The goal I keep coming back to is a narrow one: make TheUndo a place where getting something out of your head takes as little effort as possible. Not a system to maintain. Not a workflow to design. Just somewhere a thought can land so you can keep going.

TheUndo isn’t out yet — the iPhone and Android builds are in review. If that sounds like the kind of to-do app you’ve been looking for, you can join the waitlist and I’ll let you know when it’s available.