Why tidl works the way it does

The same handful of ideas keep turning up, from different directions: thinking goes better outside your head than inside it, a list only helps if it says what to do next, attention is the scarce thing rather than hours, and the tools you rely on should belong to you. tidl is built around those ideas. It is also built to leave out the parts that get in their way.

Write it down, in your own words

We think better with notes, sketches and rooms than with memory alone. The habit that makes this work is simple: short notes in your own words, linked to what you already have, as in the Smart Notes method. tidl keeps notes as plain markdown files you own rather than rows in someone else’s database. Tags in those files become tasks, [[wikilinks]] join one note to the next, and the file finder (Ctrl/⌘ K) stands in for the link you would otherwise make by hand.

Notes also move in both directions. A quick memo can be lifted out of its surroundings and shared on its own, so a thought you jotted down for yourself can reach someone else without being retyped or reformatted. And in the other direction, scattered notes can be gathered into a single markdown document and dropped into your personal knowledge base, so fragments become part of something you can build on.

One list for everything that needs you

Some commitments have a time attached: a flight, a call, a deadline. Others carry only a soft sense of priority: reply to the vendor, finish the write-up, renew the passport at some point this month. Most tools split these into a calendar for the first kind and a to-do list for the second, and leave you to reconcile the two in your head every morning.

tidl keeps one list instead. Focus holds events, tasks and the things you are waiting on from others, ranked by a single measure: how urgent each one feels right now. An event that is about to start rises above your tasks. A task with a date climbs as the date approaches. An undated task with a gentle priority sits lower, but in the same list. Something you are waiting on stays out of the way until its date, then shows up so you remember to follow up. The hard and soft commitments sit side by side, and the order reflects what is true right now.

Urgency is not the same for everything, and it is not the same for everyone, so tidl does not hard-code it. Each kind of item has a priority curve that maps a plain fact to perceived urgency: for tasks, how high you rated them; for calendar items and awaits, how much time remains. You can reshape these curves by dragging their points. An event can stay quiet until a day before it starts, then climb steeply as it nears. A task with a deadline can start rising a week ahead, or only at the last minute, depending on how you really work. If you don’t like the result, reset to the default. The ranking is yours to tune, not a fixed opinion built into the software.

Work is never finished

You will never get to the end of your list, because new things arrive faster than you can clear them. Deciding what to leave alone is part of the work, not a failure of it. A tool that treats an empty list as the goal sets you up to feel behind every day.

tidl is built the other way around. It does not ask you to finish anything. Focus looks only as far ahead as you tell it to (today, three days or a week), and what falls outside that window stays quiet without being forgotten. You can suppress an item to keep it out of the way for good, without pretending it was never real. The list keeps the next thing at the top, so it answers “now what?” instead of “what about everything?” You can give your full attention to what matters now, and the rest of the list does not pile up on top of you.

Software you control

Your calendar, notes and contacts hold more about you than almost anything else you own, and most people keep them with a handful of vendors. They make this convenient and free, and design it so that leaving is hard and your data feeds someone else’s business. In a world where almost everything is watched and attention is steered by large platforms, that arrangement matters more every year.

tidl is meant to hand control back to you. It runs on your own machine, as one small program with your data in plain files and a single database you can open, copy and back up. It speaks standard CalDAV and CardDAV, so the apps on your phone keep working and you are never locked in. The code is open and meant to be easy to read and change. Privacy here is not a setting you have to trust someone to respect. It follows from where the data lives, and that is you.

tidl is a tool, not a method. It tries to do these few things well and then stay out of your way. The Details page shows how the pieces fit together.