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Tuesday: A To-Do List for the Life You Choose
Get Tuesday for Android or iPhone.
NOTE: I’m in the middle of re-branding the app. In this article I call it Tuesday but on the stores its simply called ‘To-Do App’
In my previous post about MRC × C, I wrote about something I discovered after FIREing: having complete freedom over your time is fantastic, but it also creates a problem that I hadn’t really anticipated. When nobody needs you to be anywhere, nobody is giving you deadlines and nobody particularly cares whether you accomplish anything today, it’s remarkably easy to accomplish nothing at all.
You can do anything you want, which is brilliant until you wake up on a Tuesday morning with absolutely nothing to do.
The MRC part of my framework — Mastery, Relationships and Contribution — is my attempt to think about what I actually want to build into my life. What do I want to become good at? Which relationships do I want to invest in? What can I make, give or do that is useful beyond myself? Deciding that these things are important is the easy bit; the difficult bit is the × C: Commitment.
I can decide that I want to become good at Japanese, stay healthy and maintain good relationships with the people I care about, but none of that means I’m going to feel like studying Japanese, doing pushups or calling somebody on any particular Tuesday afternoon. The rewards come from doing the work, and quite often the work isn’t what I particularly feel like doing at the time.
For the last three years, I’ve been solving this problem with a to-do app I made for myself. I’ve decided to call it Tuesday, and one of the slightly strange things about it is that it currently contains more tasks than I could reasonably complete in a single day.
That’s intentional. What I wanted from Tuesday was something slightly contradictory: structure without authority. I wanted something that would remind me of the things I’d already decided were worth doing, without becoming another system telling me what I had to do.
From Directions to Actions
At the highest level, there are various directions I want my life to travel in: I want to be good at Japanese, stay healthy, keep in touch with my friends and family, and continue making things. I think of these more as directions than conventional goals, because there’s no point at which I’ll tick a box next to “Be Healthy” and declare that I’ve completed health, and hopefully there will never be a point at which I finish learning Japanese either.
The problem with directions like these is that they’re far too vague to be useful on a day-to-day basis, so I break them down into small, concrete actions. If I want to get better at Japanese, I might have tasks to study flashcards for thirty minutes, watch some Japanese media or have a conversation with AI in Japanese. If I want to stay healthy, I might have twenty pushups, twenty situps and a couple of minutes of stretching, while maintaining relationships might mean having a reminder to call Dad or contact a particular friend.
None of these individual actions is going to transform my life: twenty pushups won’t suddenly make me fit, one conversation in Japanese won’t make me fluent and one phone call won’t create a lifelong friendship. But done repeatedly, they move me in directions I’ve already decided matter.
That’s the point. MRC gives me the directions and Tuesday turns those directions into things I can actually do, but Tuesday deliberately stops short of telling me that I have to do them. That’s where the × C comes in.
I don’t want my to-do list to be my boss
One of the most important things about Tuesday is that the tasks are deliberately independent of each other. I don’t want a carefully choreographed morning routine where I wake up at 6am, exercise at 6:15, study Japanese at 7, eat breakfast at 8 and then discover that because I woke up at 9:30 I’ve somehow failed at my entire life before I’ve even got out of bed.
I wanted freedom for a reason, so I can do the tasks in Tuesday whenever I want, in whatever order I want. I can do my pushups in the morning and Japanese at midnight, or look through the list and choose whatever appeals to me at that particular moment. I can also choose not to do something at all, and that’s important, because the app is there to give me structure without taking away the freedom I worked hard to create.
That’s also why I deliberately have more tasks in Tuesday than I could reasonably complete in a day. A conventional to-do list tends to represent things that need to be completed, so if there are fifteen items on the list and you only complete ten, the remaining five stare accusingly at you. That’s not how I think about Tuesday.
My to-do list is a menu, not a list of obligations
Tuesday is a menu.
Whenever I feel even the slightest hint of boredom, or that familiar I have absolutely nothing to do feeling, I open Tuesday and flick through the list. Maybe I feel like studying Japanese, maybe I’ll exercise, maybe there’s somebody I haven’t spoken to recently, maybe I’ll work on one of my apps, or maybe I’ll play a video game. There is almost always something on there that feels appealing enough to start, and there is no restriction on which one I choose.
This means that, thanks to Tuesday, I don’t really have the Tuesday morning problem anymore. I might not know what I want to do when I wake up, but I’ve accumulated a list of things that a previous version of me decided were worth doing, so I don’t have to sit there and invent a meaningful use of the next hour from scratch. I can just choose something.
The fact that I won’t complete everything is therefore not a failure of the system; it’s part of the design. I don’t need Tuesday to tell me what I must do today, because that’s exactly the kind of obligation I wanted to get away from. I need it to remind me of the things I’ve already decided are worth doing and give me somewhere to start when I don’t know what I feel like doing next.
Start ridiculously easily
I’ve also learned that it helps to have a few extremely easy tasks. One of my daily tasks is literally to check Tuesday, while another is to sync the app, which involves pressing a couple of buttons to make sure my data is backed up online. These are hardly impressive accomplishments, but that’s intentional too.
I know that I can open the app at any point during the day and immediately knock a couple of things off the list, and sometimes that little bit of momentum is enough to make another task feel appealing. Not everything has to be difficult to count, and in fact, not everything has to be particularly important.
Some things are just worth remembering
I use Tuesday as a regular reminder system as well. My dad has solar panels, for example, and every three weeks I have a task reminding me to ask him for the meter reading. This isn’t something required by the electricity company; we record it ourselves so that we can notice if the panels stop generating properly.
That reminder exists because we learned the hard way why it matters: one year there was a problem with the system and we didn’t realise until we’d lost an entire summer’s worth of electricity generation. That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s important enough to remember but infrequent enough to forget.
At the other end of the importance scale, every four days I have a reminder to check the Epic Games Store for whatever game they’re giving away. Most of them sit untouched in my account and there’s a good chance I’ll never play them, but occasionally something fantastic appears; one time I got GTA V.
Tuesday isn’t supposed to contain only worthy acts of self-improvement. It’s a list of things I’ve decided I don’t want to forget to do, whether that’s checking that the solar panels are still generating electricity, getting some exercise or claiming a free video game that I may never actually play.
That’s enough.
Measuring direction, not perfection
Recurring tasks create another problem. Suppose I decide that I want to do twenty pushups every day: Monday, done; Tuesday, done; Wednesday, I don’t feel like it. What happens now?
A lot of habit systems are built around streaks: do something every day, watch the number increase, then feel terrible when you inevitably break the chain. I’ve never particularly liked that idea because missing one day doesn’t matter. If I don’t do twenty pushups today, absolutely nothing significant will happen, but if I keep deciding not today, eventually it does matter.
That’s why Tuesday keeps a history of every task. I can see which days I completed something and, more importantly, each task has three traffic lights showing how I’ve been doing recently: one for the last seven days, one for the last two weeks and one for the last month. Green means I’m doing well, yellow means average and red means I’ve been neglecting it.
The question I’m interested in isn’t really Did I do this today? It’s Have I generally been doing the thing I said matters? That seems like a much better fit for the kinds of directions I’m trying to follow, because health isn’t binary, relationships aren’t binary and learning a language isn’t binary. It makes little sense to treat them as though one missed Tuesday means I’ve failed.
If I see three green lights next to something, great; whatever I’m doing is working. If I see three red lights, that’s useful information too. Maybe I should do that task today, maybe there’s a good reason I haven’t been doing it, or perhaps I look at those red lights and realise I don’t actually care about this anymore, in which case I can delete the task. The choice is still mine.
For me, this works much better than obsessing over whether I completed something today. I’m more interested in how I’ve been doing with it lately, because a bad day doesn’t matter and even a bad week might not matter very much.
A pattern does.
Commitment doesn’t mean doing something every time; it means noticing when not today has quietly become not anymore.
Traffic lights are surprisingly powerful
I have to admit that the traffic lights are also serious gamification for me. I like seeing green, and if something I care about has three green lights beside it, there’s a small but very real sense of satisfaction because I’ve been doing the thing I said I wanted to do.
Likewise, three red lights bother me just enough. They don’t punish me, they don’t lock anything and there isn’t an angry notification telling me that I’ve destroyed my 147-day streak and should be ashamed of myself; they’re simply a visual warning that says: You said this mattered. Recently, you haven’t been doing it.
What I do with that information is entirely up to me, and that balance has turned out to be incredibly important. I get the accountability of measuring what I’m actually doing without turning the measurement itself into my boss.
Even leisure can be deliberate
One of the stranger tasks I sometimes give myself is play one hour of video games. I hardly need a to-do app to remind me that video games exist, but the task serves a different purpose.
It’s extremely easy for me to pull out my phone, open some frictionless time-waster and somehow lose an hour without ever consciously deciding that this is how I wanted to spend it. If I’ve deliberately chosen to play video games for an hour as my task, I’ll usually set a timer and choose something I genuinely want to play: something where I feel like I’m experiencing something, progressing through a game I care about or becoming better at it.
Then, after an hour, the timer goes off. I haven’t accidentally wasted an hour; I chose to spend an hour playing video games, and there’s an important difference.
This isn’t about making leisure productive, because leisure doesn’t need to justify itself. It’s about occasionally being deliberate with time that can otherwise disappear incredibly easily.
Structure without authority
Looking back, I think structure without authority is the principle that ties all of this together. Tuesday has become the lynchpin of how I manage my time since FIREing, but I’ve used this system for three years now and check it virtually every day despite deliberately creating a to-do list I can never complete. There will always be tasks left at the end of the day, and that’s fine, because they’re not orders.
Tuesday doesn’t tell me that I have to do twenty pushups today; it reminds me that I decided being healthy was important, that I chose twenty pushups as one small action that moves me in that direction, and that recently I’ve either been doing them or I haven’t. It doesn’t tell me I have to call somebody; it reminds me that maintaining that relationship was important enough to me that I asked to be reminded. It doesn’t tell me what to do when I’m bored; it gives me a menu of things I’ve previously decided are worth my time.
And then I choose.
That’s the reconciliation I’ve been looking for between freedom and commitment. I don’t want somebody else deciding what I should do with my Tuesday, but I also don’t want to wake up on Tuesday with absolutely nothing worth doing. I want the benefits that structure gives me — direction, reminders, feedback and somewhere to start — without handing authority over my time to the system providing that structure.
MRC helps me think about the directions I want my life to travel in, while Tuesday turns those directions into small things I can actually do. The history tells me whether I’m really doing them, and the traffic lights make it difficult to fool myself when I’m not. Tuesday can remind me what I said mattered and show me whether my actions bear any resemblance to that, but it can’t make the final decision for me.
The × C still comes from me. Tuesday just helps me remember what I committed to.
Give Tuesday a Try
I’ve been using Tuesday for three years now, checking it almost every day, and it’s become utterly invaluable to me. In conjunction with MRC, it’s the system that helps me follow through on the × Commitment when I’m feeling lazy, indecisive or bored, while still leaving me completely free to decide what I actually want to do.
Tuesday is available for Android and iPhone. If you’d like to give it a try, start with a few directions that matter to you and turn them into small, independent actions. Don’t worry about completing everything; in fact, don’t even make that the goal.
The goal isn’t to complete your to-do list. It’s to have a to-do list worth doing.