The Tickleaf way

Tickleaf rests on one philosophy, three steps and a handful of studies about attention. Here is all of it — including the places where the science is still thin.

Unfinished things pull at you.

Leave something half done and you'll tend to come back to it. Across studies reaching back almost a century, people returned to interrupted tasks about two times in three (Ghibellini & Meier, 2025). Unfinished things pull.

The good news is what lets that pull go — not finishing, but deciding. When people made a specific plan for an unfinished goal, it stopped intruding on whatever they were doing, even before the goal was done (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011).

That is the whole of Tickleaf, in three steps.

  1. 1Write it downGet it out of your head, the way you'd say it.
  2. 2Give it a dayThe lightest kind of plan: a day, and a time only if it needs one.
  3. 3Tick it offA small, visible step forward — then let it go.

The philosophy

In the nineties, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC asked what technology would feel like once it was everywhere. Their answer was calm technology: tools that live at the edge of your attention and step into the middle only when you need them. “The periphery,” they wrote, “is informing without overburdening” (Weiser & Brown, 1996).

Amber Case later turned the idea into principles. The one we come back to most is the seventh: “The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem” (Case, 2015).

You can see it all over Tickleaf. Overdue tasks are marked in a soft red rather than a siren. The Mac app sits in your menu bar as a small number. Nothing badges you about things you didn't ask about. Tickleaf should feel like a notebook on the corner of your desk: there when you look, quiet when you don't.

Step 1

How it works

Type it the way you'd say it — “Dentist fri at 14:30 #health” — and quick add picks out the day, the time and the tag as you go. No project to choose, no priority to weigh. If it doesn't have a day yet, it waits at the top of your Inbox.

Why it works

Getting a thing out of your head and into a place you trust is the oldest idea in personal productivity; David Allen built Getting Things Done around “open loops” and closing them. The research adds an important detail. In the experiments that showed a plan quiets an unfinished goal, the plan was specific — a title on its own wasn't the thing being tested (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011). Writing it down is the start. Giving it a day is what makes it a plan.

Step 2

How it works

Today, tomorrow, Friday, the 14th. That's usually enough — a time is optional. When a day needs more shape, drag the task onto the calendar beside your meetings. Undated things wait in the Inbox until you're ready to decide.

Why it works

Psychologists call it an implementation intention: deciding when and where you'll act, instead of only meaning to (Gollwitzer, 1999). Across 94 independent tests, people who made that kind of plan reached their goals more often, by a medium-to-large margin (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).

One honest caveat. Those studies tied the plan to a time and a place. Nobody, as far as we can find, has tested whether a day on its own carries the same benefit. Asking for a day is our choice: the lightest version of a plan we think people will actually keep making.

Step 3

How it works

The check is the moment Tickleaf spends the most care on, because it's the one you repeat most: it fills, the tick draws itself, the title is struck through, and the task drifts off to the Archive, where your finished days are kept.

Why it works

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer collected nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people in seven companies. Of everything that could lift a workday, the most powerful was simply making progress on meaningful work — even small steps (Amabile & Kramer, 2011). People also tend to speed up as they see a goal getting closer (Kivetz et al., 2006), which is why a loop's week fills in as you go.

The caveat: the diaries came from people on creative projects at work, and the finding was about meaningful progress. Ticking things off won't make a day meaningful. It can help you notice that it was.

Gently

Some days the list wins. Tickleaf won't make a fuss about it: overdue tasks gather in one quiet group, marked in soft red, waiting for a new day whenever you're ready to give them one.

That's deliberate. Students who forgave themselves for putting off studying before one exam procrastinated less before the next — mostly because they felt less bad (Wohl et al., 2010). In experiments, people encouraged to be kind to themselves after a failure worked harder to improve, not less (Breines & Chen, 2012). And a new day, week or month is a natural clean slate that tends to bring motivation back (Dai et al., 2014).

Loops

Loops are the things you repeat: every day, every other Tuesday, the first of the month. Each one is a card whose week fills in as you go. Miss a day and the card simply carries on.

In the best-known study of how habits form, 96 people picked a daily behaviour and tracked it for twelve weeks. Missing one opportunity “did not materially affect the habit formation process” (Lally et al., 2010). How long a habit took varied enormously — from 18 to 254 days, around 66 on average (Gardner et al., 2012). So there are no streaks to break in Tickleaf, and no fixed number of days to hit.

What we leave out

Tickleaf has no projects inside projects, no four levels of priority, no Gantt charts, no chat. That's a choice, not a finding. Research on choice is mixed: a well-known study saw shoppers buy more from 6 jams than from 24, while a review of 50 experiments found the average effect of more options close to zero (Scheibehenne et al., 2010).

We keep Tickleaf small because of Case's principle — the minimum needed. There is one thing the research does support: every switch of attention leaves something behind, and a quick note about where you'll pick up helps you let go of it (Leroy & Glomb, 2018). That's why there's no chat, and no notifications about notifications.

A small extra

Before bed, open Tickleaf and give tomorrow's things a day. In a sleep lab, 57 young adults who spent five minutes writing a to-do list for the coming days fell asleep about nine minutes faster than those who listed what they'd already done (Scullin et al., 2018). It was one night, with a small group — but it costs five minutes to try.

Write it down. Give it a day. Tick it off. Gently — and again tomorrow.

Start for free

The science

The philosophyThe best tools live at the edge of attention.
At Xerox PARC, Weiser and Brown argued that calm technology moves between the centre and the periphery of attention — and that “the periphery is informing without overburdening.” An essay, not an experiment.Weiser & Brown, 1996 · Designing Calm Technology
Write it downUnfinished things pull us back.
Pooling 59 publications, a 2025 meta-analysis found people resumed interrupted tasks about two times in three. A related, older idea — that we also remember them better — did not hold up in the same review.Ghibellini & Meier, 2025 · Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Write it downA plan quiets an unfinished goal.
In a series of experiments, unfinished goals crept into people's minds while they read and slowed them on unrelated tasks. Letting them make a specific plan for the goal made those effects go away — before the goal was done.Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Give it a dayDeciding when makes it more likely to happen.
Across 94 independent tests, people who planned when and where they'd act reached their goals more often than people who only intended to — a medium-to-large effect (d = .65).Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006 · Advances in Experimental Social Psychology
Tick it offProgress is the best day-maker.
In nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people in seven companies, the event most tied to a good day at work was simply making progress on meaningful work.Amabile & Kramer, 2011 · The Progress Principle
GentlyForgiving yourself helps you start again.
First-year students who forgave themselves for putting off studying for one exam procrastinated less before the next one, because they felt less bad about it.Wohl, Pychyl & Bennett, 2010 · Personality and Individual Differences
LoopsMissing a day doesn't undo a habit.
Following 96 people building a daily habit, the researchers found that missing one opportunity did not materially affect how the habit formed — and that how long it took ranged from 18 to 254 days.Lally et al., 2010 · European Journal of Social Psychology
Tomorrow, tonightA to-do list at bedtime, then sleep.
In a sleep lab, 57 young adults who spent five minutes writing tomorrow's to-do list fell asleep about nine minutes faster than those who wrote about what they'd already done.Scullin et al., 2018 · Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

None of these studies tested Tickleaf. They're summarised in plain language, and where a finding is small, old or hasn't been repeated, we've said so. If we've got something wrong, write to hello@ketryon.com and we'll fix it.

References

  1. Allen, D. (2001). Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity. Viking. gettingthingsdone.com
  2. Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press. hbr.org/2011/05/the-power-of-small-wins
  3. Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143. doi.org/10.1177/0146167212445599
  4. Carroll, R. (2018). The Bullet Journal method: Track the past, order the present, design the future. Portfolio/Penguin. bulletjournal.com
  5. Case, A. (2015). Calm technology: Principles and patterns for non-intrusive design. O'Reilly Media. calmtech.com
  6. Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901
  7. Gardner, B., Lally, P., & Wardle, J. (2012). Making health habitual: The psychology of 'habit-formation' and general practice. British Journal of General Practice, 62(605), 664–666. doi.org/10.3399/bjgp12X659466
  8. Ghibellini, R., & Meier, B. (2025). Interruption, recall and resumption: A meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, Article 962. doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05000-w
  9. Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493
  10. Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
  11. Kivetz, R., Urminsky, O., & Zheng, Y. (2006). The goal-gradient hypothesis resurrected: Purchase acceleration, illusionary goal progress, and customer retention. Journal of Marketing Research, 43(1), 39–58. doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.43.1.39
  12. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
  13. Leroy, S., & Glomb, T. M. (2018). Tasks interrupted: How anticipating time pressure on resumption of an interrupted task causes attention residue and low performance on interrupting tasks and how a “ready-to-resume” plan mitigates the effects. Organization Science, 29(3), 380–397. doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1184
  14. Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667–683. doi.org/10.1037/a0024192
  15. Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., & Todd, P. M. (2010). Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409–425. doi.org/10.1086/651235
  16. Scullin, M. K., Krueger, M. L., Ballard, H. K., Pruett, N., & Bliwise, D. L. (2018). The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: A polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(1), 139–146. doi.org/10.1037/xge0000374
  17. Weiser, M., & Brown, J. S. (1996). Designing calm technology. PowerGrid Journal, 1(1). calmtech.com/papers/designing-calm-technology
  18. Wohl, M. J. A., Pychyl, T. A., & Bennett, S. H. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803–808. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.029