The case for an all-in-one productivity app

The advice is close to unanimous. Pick one job. Do it better than anyone else does. Expand later, if ever.

It is good advice. Most of the software you like follows it. We went the other way on purpose, and I want to lay out the argument rather than just assert it, because I think it is the kind of decision that either explains everything downstream or looks like sprawl.

What a specialized tool cannot see#

Take a Tuesday. On it there is:

• a task with a deadline on it;
• a note somewhere with the actual thinking behind that task;
• a recurring expense that only makes sense if you know which project the task belongs to;
• a habit you are trying to keep that keeps losing to the deadline;
• and, somewhere in the middle of all of it, another person with their own version of the same Tuesday.

Five excellent apps will hold those five things, each one faithfully. What none of them can hold is the Tuesday.

I want to be fair about why. A task manager that reasoned about your grocery budget would be a worse task manager, and its users would be right to say so. The seams exist because specializing works.

But my problem was never that I had too many tasks. That one is solved, several times over, by people who are very good at it. My problem was that I could not see how any of it fit together, and the fitting-together was the part I kept failing at.

So the scope followed from that.

What one Tuesday needed

The work

boards and cards, checklists, a weekly planner.

The thinking

notes, and whiteboards, because some thinking is spatial and refuses to become a list.

The routines

habits and focus sessions.

The money

expenses with real multi-currency handling and splits, because money is not a separate life that happens in a separate app.

Dinner

recipes and a week of meals, because dinner is admin whether or not anybody files it as admin.

The part that gives it away#

There is a family suite in here. Chores, allowances, a ledger per child, savings goals, points, houses with a running house cup, a shared shopping list, and a wall display for a tablet in the hall.

No serious productivity tool ships that. It reads as a different product wearing the same clothes, and I expect reviewers to say so.

It is here because the Tuesday argument does not politely stop at the edge of one person. Household admin is the same species of problem as the sprint board: the chore chart, the allowance, who owes whom after the grocery run. For a lot of people it is most of the admin they actually do. It usually gets handled with a worse tool, or no tool, or a recurring argument.

That last one turned out to be a chain rather than a fact:

1. The week's meals decide the shopping list.
2. The shopping run decides the spend.
3. The spend lands in a ledger somebody has to be able to argue with on Saturday.

We did not design it as one thing. We built the three pieces separately, months apart, and then found they only made sense joined up, which is the most on-the-nose evidence for this whole argument that I could have asked for and did not.

Deciding to hold both is what shaped the engineering. Sharing and permissions landed in the second phase instead of the tenth, because a family workspace is useless without them. An expense had to know how to split itself. The data model had to survive a nine-year-old and an accountant looking at adjacent screens without either of them seeing something they should not.

What it costs#

A lot, and I would rather say so than let you find out.

Every module is surface area for the next bug. A permission model that has to stay coherent across a board, a note, an expense split and a chore is harder than one that only covers boards. Onboarding has more to explain. Anyone comparing us feature-for-feature against a specialist will find places where we are thinner, and they will be right.

The bet is that the seams cost people more than the depth does. That a plainer notes editor inside something that can see your Tuesday beats an excellent one that cannot.

I cannot settle that by writing about it. What I can do is show what the bet forced us to build, and the next chapters do:

• a real database living in your browser, so the whole thing works on a plane;
• a hard split between the data you own locally and the data a server has to arbitrate (two planes);
• and, much later, an assistant that could read across every module because there was finally one place to read from.

Those choices only make sense once you know what we were trying to hold together in the first place.

About the name#

Marginalia. The notes people write in the margin of a book, running alongside the text in the space the author left blank.

I liked that the margin is where a reader works out what the page means to them, in their own hand, next to the thing itself.