In progress2025

TextTheDo

Text your to-do list into existence.

A task manager with an iMessage-style interface: text it what you need to do in plain language and spaCy-powered NLP turns each message into a prioritized, categorized task that syncs to your calendar. It reaches ~90% accuracy on task recognition and is an active work in progress.

remind me to email the TA about the midterm before friday

intentreminder
taskemail the TA about the midterm
dueFriday · 5:00 PM
priorityhigh (deadline detected)

Email the TA about the midterm

synced → Google · Apple Calendar

No form, no fields — the text is the input. spaCy does the organizing.

The problem

Every to-do app asks you to stop and fill out a form — a title, a due date, a category, a priority. That friction is the whole problem. The exact moment you have to organize a task is the moment you decide not to bother, and the task never gets captured.

How it works

TextTheDo replaces the form with a conversation. You text tasks the way you’d text a friend — “remind me to email the TA before Friday” — and spaCy parses the message for intent, entities, and timing, then generates a prioritized, categorized to-do automatically.

Tasks sync in real time with Google and Apple Calendar, so what you capture in a text shows up where you already look.

Engineering decisions

I reached for spaCy rather than a large language model on purpose: task parsing needs to be fast, predictable, and cheap to run, and a focused NLP pipeline is easier to reason about and correct than a general model. The messaging metaphor is the product — every design choice serves the goal of removing the step between “thought” and “captured.”

Status & what’s hard

This one is honestly still in progress. The open problems are the interesting ones: pushing task-recognition accuracy high enough to trust without a confirmation tap, and reconciling how Google and Apple model calendars differently. I’m actively refining the NLP models and adding integrations.