A story of to-do lists and the life you want

Hi there! You probably have a to-do list open in another tab, waiting to be checked off. So do we.

Checking things off feels great. For about a minute, you feel productive.

Some weeks it feels like a rat race. We get so busy checking boxes that we forget to ask if any of it is getting us closer to the life we want.

Where did the to-do list come from? And how did it end up telling us what to do, but never why?

To find out, we have to go back at least 4,500 years.

The oldest written papyrus ever found is a work log.

An inspector named Merer used it to track his crew’s boats hauling limestone to the Great Pyramid.

For a very long time, a list was work someone else gave you, for a reason that was theirs.

A few people kept lists of their own, for reasons of their own.

In 1733, a 27-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin set out to become a better person. On one page of a little book he planned his day: work, accounts, dinner. Next to the morning he wrote, “What good shall I do this day?” Next to the evening, “What good have I done to-day?”

Then came the factories, and the stopwatch.

In 1911, the engineer Frederick Taylor wrote down the new rules. Managers did the planning. Workers got a daily task: what to do, how to do it, and how many minutes it should take. Why was none of their business.

From the 1950s on, more and more people worked with their heads. You can’t time that with a stopwatch.

So the list came back to us, in Day-Timers and Filofaxes, one neat little box at a time. It came back with the factory’s question: how much can I get done? Franklin’s question got left behind.

Then computers came along!

In 1996, the Palm Pilot gave the to-do list its own button. Soon there were thousands of apps for it. The list kept getting faster. It still couldn’t tell you why.

In 2001, David Allen’s Getting Things Done taught us to clear the runway first. The big questions could wait at 50,000 feet.

But the runway never cleared.

The writer Danny O’Brien coined the term “life hacks.” His own to-do list had 159 things on it. The oldest, “learn to drive,” had been there for 15 years.

Today, AI can write the list, sort it, and even do it. Some of us have built our own agents to get through it faster. We’ve never been faster at it, and we’re no closer to our dreams.

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes looked a hundred years ahead. By then, he guessed, making a living might be solved, and we could finally learn “to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

His hundred years are nearly up. We’re still in the rat race, working on the first part.

What do you want from life?

We don’t mean by Friday. Who do you want around the table in twenty years? Where do you want to be by then?

Who do you want to be?

That’s where Heym comes in. We want to bring Franklin’s page back.

We can’t shorten your workweek, and we can’t tell you what to want. But once you have a dream to work toward, it needs somewhere to live: a home.

Heym starts at the other end of the list, with what you want from each part of your life. Goals and projects come next, then tasks and habits. Each one can point back to the reason it’s there.

The what and the why, back on one page.

So that’s why we started Heym.

One place to plan and build the life of your dreams.

Try it out and let us know what you think. Your feedback means the world to us.