Think of sortcat as a front page for your productivity.
You spent your life creating your own productivity conventions (email as todo, daily habits to check off, checklists, special-purpose lists, ...) to optimize your work. Yet, you've ended up with multiple places to look at to piece together everything you need to do.
We built sortcat to be a single place aggregating everything that is actionable in your life, in a way that works for you – simple yet expressive.
NOT JUST A BULLET LIST.
Your todo list needs to speak to you in a language you understand. Sortcat is markdown-based and offers features that supercharge your todos.
MIMICS YOUR THINKING.
Sortcat supports tags, dates, links, sequences, checklists and backpages to let you manage your work the way you find natural.
NATURALLY INTEGRATED WITH EMAIL
Easily make specific emails into todo items. Know when to process unread email, or how much you have left till inbox zero.
SEE YOUR WORK BURNDOWN
A single number tells you how much work you have to do. Get that number down to 0 every night.
Sortcat isn’t just a tool;
It’s a set of best practices and a mindset.
THE PRODUCTIVITY MANIFESTO
We believe that there is no “silver bullet” to getting things done.
It’s not about tricking you into doing work with “growth hacks” and “gamification”. It's about having a trusted companion that doesn't get in the way and, over time, becomes indispensable.
How we get things done is an inherent part of our personalities, and so productivity tools are more like cars than they are screwdrivers. Sortcat gives you the flexibility to organize your world of action items, but we realize that it won't work for everyone.
Below are our beliefs. If they feel right to you, Sortcat might be just the tool you should use.
FREE MY BRAIN CELLS.
Capture everything so that I don't need to remember anything.
ONE PLACE.
A single interface that captures all my work is 10x more useful than an interface that captures most of it.
ONE SIZE FITS NONE.
Support different modalities of work, coupled with context needed for each. Don't force me to change how I think about my work.
MINIMIZE COGNITIVE LOAD.
Don't overwhelm me with complex interfaces and dozens of features. Show only what I need to know, but don’t obscure.
DON'T LET THE UI GET IN THE WAY.
For a tool you’ll use a hundred times a day, animations, transitions and large amounts of white space will quickly become an obstacle.
FROM THOUGHT TO TASK IN A FLASH.
Entering new work should require very low friction.
QUANTIFY.
Provide metrics and easy visual cues of my workload and progress.
WITH YOU ALL THE TIME.
Available everywhere, on any device, all the time – even offline. Especially offline.
FEATURES
Oh but there's so much more...
- Hard and Soft deadlines
Some work absolutely has to happen on a given day. Other work is your personal goal.
Tell sortcat which is which and it will help you prioritize your work. - Tags
A simple but powerful way to organize your work. - Easy re-ordering
Simply drag to change priority. - Snooze
Easy way to punt a task to tomorrow. - Task Sequences
Quick syntax for creating a series of dependent tasks. - Recurring items
Rich syntax for describing a recurrence schedule, e.g. repeat every weekday, automatically snoozing if overdue. - Collaboration
Share items; assign items to someone else; ping others on items I need from them; show others where their request is in my queue - Integration with email
Make tasks dependent on the number of unread Google emails or open drafts, the number of emails left in your inbox, or on a response to specific emails - Integration with the address book
Manage your "personal CRM" to help you maintain relationships - Instrumentation
Measure your productivity - Fast new item creation
Just a few taps on mobile - Works offline
Because you may want to be productive in the subway - Works on desktop and on mobile
as a webpage, a browser extension and an Android widget - Flashcards
Add a module that helps you remember concepts - Smart ETAs
Sortcat can look at your workload and give you a sense of when you can get to your tasks