SMF·ANYDO
Can a prompt replace Any.do?
Tasks & to-dos — personal tasks, routines and daily planning
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Any.do's genuinely distinctive feature is the daily review: every morning it puts your overdue and due-today tasks in front of you one at a time and makes you decide — today, tomorrow, later, or gone. That is a small piece of code and a large behavioural difference, and with recurring rules and a keyboard capture box around it you have a real task manager in one sitting. The apps and the sync are what you give up, and for a task list that is a lot.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a personal task manager organised around a mandatory daily planning ritual.
Capture: a global keyboard shortcut opens a single input that parses natural language into a structured task — "call the dentist tomorrow 3pm p1 #health" becomes a task with a due date and time, priority and tag. Parse dates, times, priorities and tags; leave everything else as the title. Show what was parsed before saving, so an unparsed phrase is visible rather than silently swallowed.
Model: tasks with a title, notes, due date, optional due time, start date, priority, tags, subtasks, and a project. Projects are flat, not nested — the hierarchy people build in task apps is usually procrastination.
Recurrence, done properly with tests: daily, every N days, weekdays, weekly on chosen days, monthly on a day number, monthly on the nth weekday, yearly. Two completion modes per rule: next occurrence from the scheduled date, or next occurrence from the completion date. Getting the second one wrong is what makes recurring chores drift, so test both explicitly, including an occurrence that falls on a day that does not exist in a given month.
The daily review, which is the point of this build. Once per day, at a time the user sets, the app opens a full-screen review. It presents every overdue task and every task due today, one at a time, with four choices and nothing else: do it today, push to tomorrow, push to a specific date, or delete. There is no skip and no back-out until the queue is empty — that constraint is the feature. At the end, show the resulting day plan as a single list, ordered, with a total estimated time if durations were set.
Views: today, upcoming (grouped by day), inbox for anything undated, and completed. A search across everything with saved filters.
Focus mode: one task at a time with a timer and a desktop notification at the end.
Storage: SQLite with a documented JSON export and import, and automatic local backups before any bulk operation.
Out of scope: mobile apps, sync of any kind, calendar integration, shared or assigned tasks, and any AI feature.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the phone app and its widgets, where tasks are actually captured
- B.2 sync between a laptop and a phone
- B.3 calendar integration that shows tasks and meetings together
- B.4 shared lists with a partner or family
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: cross-device reliability and workflow polish
Because a task you cannot add in the four seconds before you forget it never gets added. The mobile capture surface is the product, and a web app on a laptop is not a replacement.
Questions
Can I import my Any.do tasks?
Any.do exports lists and tasks as CSV, and titles, due dates and lists import cleanly. Recurrence rules come across as text rather than structured rules, so anything repeating has to be re-entered — usually a handful of items.
Does the forced review actually help?
It does the one thing a task list otherwise cannot: it makes overdue items expensive. A list where an overdue task can be ignored accumulates dead weight until you declare bankruptcy on it. Requiring a decision on each one is uncomfortable by design, which is why the prompt refuses to add a skip button.
What does it cost to run?
Nothing. A local SQLite file, no server, no account. The trade is that it exists on exactly one machine.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Capturing on a phone. Most tasks occur to you away from a desk, and a task manager you can only reach from your laptop loses them. This is the single strongest argument against self-hosting anything in this category.
Related tools
Receipt