Coming from Other Apps

If you're arriving from Things, Todoist, a GTD setup, or a drawer full of paper planners, the good news is you don't start over. This page maps the concepts you already use onto their Finalist homes, and is honest about the few things Finalist refuses to do.

You don't have to abandon your system

Most productivity concepts have a Finalist equivalent, and it's usually a simpler one. Your projects, contexts, and reviews all land somewhere; they just weigh less when they get here.

The real migration is the mindset shift: from managing a database of everything you might ever do to planning the day you're actually in. Give it a week before you judge it.

From Things or Todoist

• Projects become Lists. Pin the active one to Today and its undone items ride along on your day page.
• The Today view becomes the Daily page, except here it's the whole app. You're never one tap from an "All" list that undoes the focus.
• Deadlines and overdue give way to punting. No red badges, no overdue count; unfinished tasks from recent days wait at the top of today, and you re-decide each one deliberately.
• Scheduled and Upcoming become geography: tomorrow is a swipe away, and the monthly sheet is a tap on the date.
• Priority flags become position on the page. Your top three tasks go first thing in the morning; tags cover the rest. Where a task sits is its priority.

From GTD

GTD's insight, get it out of your head and into a trusted system, survives fully intact. The apparatus around it gets lighter:

• Inbox and capture: quick entry, Capture, dictation, the share sheet. Capture is the one GTD habit Finalist doubles down on.
• Next actions: today's page is the next-action list. Putting a task on today is the act of choosing it.
• Projects: Lists, plus the Planner grid when something spans weeks.
• Contexts: tags. "Quick," "deep," "waiting" will cover most of what @phone and @office used to.
• The weekly review shrinks into a nightly minute and a Sunday glance at the week ahead (see The Daily Rhythm). Reviewing a day is fast enough that you'll actually do it, which was always the hard part.
• Someday/maybe: a list, punted out of your days entirely, exactly where it belongs.

From Apple Reminders and Calendar

Keep them. Finalist is built to work alongside Apple's apps. Your reminders and calendar events appear on the day page and stay in their home apps, editable from either side. Shared grocery lists keep working, and the family members on them never need to install Finalist.

What you're adding is the page around them: tasks, habits, the journal, and the weather, all on the same day as the commitments you already track. The Five Kinds of Things explains how the types fit together.

From a paper planner

You're the closest cousin; Finalist is the paper metaphor with sync. The day page, the flip to tomorrow, the monthly sheet, the quiet satisfaction of a finished page: all carried over on purpose.

What you gain is the part paper couldn't do: alarms that follow you, habits that repeat themselves onto each page, search across every day you've ever written, the same planner on every device, and the weather printed on the page before you've looked outside.

What Finalist deliberately doesn't do

A few omissions are the product working as intended:

• No automatic rollover. Unfinished tasks never pile onto tomorrow by themselves. That's the core of the punting idea.
• No nested project hierarchies. Lists go one level deep. If a project needs an org chart, the project might be the problem.
• No priority matrix, no required reviews. Priority is where a task sits on the page; review is the minute you spend closing a day.

Finalist is differently shaped rather than less capable. Database-style apps keep the discipline in the system, and the system sends you the bill. Here it lives in the day, where it was always going to end up anyway.

Related: Plan Without Planning · The Five Kinds of Things · Lists

Want to see how your current system feels in Finalist? Download it on the App Store.