I tried nearly everything
For years I moved between productivity apps the way some people move between diets. Simple to-do apps. Todoist. Toggl for time tracking. Notion, then Obsidian, for systems I could shape exactly the way I wanted. In between, more often than I’d like to admit, I went back to a paper notebook.
Some of these are genuinely great tools, and plenty of people love them. But none of them was a tool I wanted to open. The simple ones were not enough: a list, and that was it. The flexible ones were far too much: before I could plan a Tuesday I had to design databases, pick templates, and decide what properties a task should have. The single-purpose ones were excellent at their one thing, so my day ended up split across three apps that didn’t know about each other.
The problem wasn’t features
It took me a long time to see what actually bothered me, because on paper every one of these apps had the features I needed. The real problem was an assumption they almost all share: that a day is made of tasks.
Mine isn’t. Here’s a fairly normal one:
- An hour poking at a new project idea, before I know what the tasks even are.
- Forty minutes of calls, messages, and helping someone with something.
- Ninety focused minutes on a client proposal, which is a task.
- A thought on the walk home that doesn’t belong to any project yet.
Only one of those four is a task. In most apps, the other three either get forced into one (a task called “misc,” a task called “admin,” a task called “think about the thing”) or they quietly disappear. The time isn’t tracked, the thought isn’t written down, and at the end of the week the record says I did far less than I did.
My life isn’t structured enough to plan entirely in tasks. I don’t think anyone’s is.
The idea: structure is optional
So when I started building Zympl, the rule was simple: do the basics properly, and never make them mandatory.
The basics are there. You can create tasks, give them projects, make them repeat, build habits, set goals. That foundation matters, and it has to be solid. But time and notes aren’t chained to it.
| Attach to | Track time | Write a note |
|---|---|---|
| The day itself | Yes, no task needed | Yes |
| A project | Yes, no task needed | Yes |
| A task | Yes | Yes |
| Nothing at all | — | Yes, in folders of your own |
That’s the whole ideology in one table. If an hour belongs to a task, put it on the task. If it belongs to a project but not to any particular task, put it on the project. If it just belongs to today, put it on today. Notes work the same way, plus one more option: a note can belong to nothing until you know where it goes.
Every timer still lands on the same timeline and in the same reports, so the picture of your week is complete, including the parts that were never planned.
Why this matters more now
When I started, this was a personal annoyance. It has since become something bigger. With AI doing more of the actual doing, one person can now keep several projects moving at the same time: an agent drafting something here, a review there, a call in between. You don’t work through a list anymore. You check in, steer, and switch.
Days like that are even less “a list of tasks” than they used to be. A planner that only understands tasks just can’t see most of what you did. (I wrote more about this in how to juggle multiple projects at once.)
What Zympl deliberately isn’t
Being honest about this saves everyone time:
- It isn’t a team tool. Zympl is a personal planner, built around one person’s day.
- It isn’t a build-your-own system. There are no databases to design and no properties to define. If you love building the system, Notion or Obsidian will make you happier.
- It isn’t an invoicing tool. If you bill clients by the hour, a dedicated tracker built for that will serve you better.
What it is: one quiet place with enough structure to hold a real working life, and enough freedom that your day never has to change shape to fit in.
If this sounds like you
If you’ve bounced between apps the way I did, and kept ending up back at a notebook, I’d love for you to try Zympl on one real, messy day. Track the hours that never became tasks. Write the notes that never had a home. Then tell me what clicked and what didn’t. Every screen in Zympl exists because I use it daily, and the best changes so far have come from people telling me what their days actually look like.