Task Managers Are Graveyards. One Task a Day Might Be the Cure.

01 /The Concept

The creator of Goals was tired of productivity apps and task managers – because all of them push you to do *more* things instead of *fewer*

Open any of them and you're confronted with a pile of tasks demanding attention. Either you become your own project manager to track them all – or you grab at everything at once and end up finishing nothing.

The answer, as Goals sees it, is simplicity. Open the app, see one task for today, do it. And that single task moves you one step closer to your actual goal.

The setup is minimal: tell the app your goal, and the AI engine builds a realistic plan to achieve it – in which you only have one task to complete each day.

For example, if the goal is running 5 kilometers, the app generates a 12-week plan:

- Weeks 1–2: brisk walking for 15 minutes daily.

- Weeks 3–4: alternating light jogging and walking for 20 minutes.

- Weeks 5–6: continuous jogging for 2 kilometers.

- Weeks 7–9: jogging 3 kilometers, increasing pace each session.

- Weeks 10–12: running 5 kilometers at a comfortable pace.

Each completed daily task gets confirmed in the app – or you can report difficulties, and the AI adjusts the plan accordingly.

The same approach works for anything: launching a side project, learning to cook, building a new habit. Describe what you want to achieve, and the app generates a step-by-step plan in which each day contains exactly one task.

And there's no cap on goals. You can run multiple at once – start meditating, plan a trip to Japan, launch a side project, learn to cook, and run 5 kilometers daily.

The AI builds a plan for each goal independently, and each day gives you one task per goal. You can pursue all of them in parallel and still make meaningful progress toward each.

Goals launched just yesterday – surfacing through a Product Hunt announcement.

02 /Why It Matters

Strangely, Goals fits a very entrepreneurial mental model – the one that says you should want to do less to get more. Because the default "normal people" assumption is that better results require more effort.

The counterexample: someone who wants to earn more money might take a second job. Rather than figuring out how to work four hours a week and get rich – the thesis of Tim Ferriss's bestseller.

More seriously: the arrival of AI has triggered a wave of next-generation personal productivity and goal-tracking applications.

With Sublime ([covered here](/review/lechi-bespokojstvo-po-metodu-bezosa)), you can share your goals, worries, and struggles – and the AI decides what you need to do to move forward. If you want to start running, Sublime doesn't bother drafting a training plan – its AI finds the nearest upcoming marathon and registers you. If it detects you're feeling anxious, it books you into the closest meditation workshop.

With Commitify ([covered here](/review/soberis-trjapka)), you share your goals and plans – and then this rather persistent AI calls you on the phone to ask what you did yesterday and what you plan to do today. You can even choose the character delivering the calls: wise mentor, drill sergeant, no-nonsense friend, or billionaire CEO.

Overlord ([covered here](/review/tvoj-samyj-glavnyj-vrag)) is also about task accountability – but takes a harder line. It blocks access to distracting apps on your phone and computer:

- If you've allowed yourself to browse Instagram only during meals, you have to send Overlord a photo of your food to unlock Instagram for 30 minutes.

- Or it unlocks YouTube or Netflix only after tracking that you've put in four hours of work in specific apps or written a certain word count in a designated file.

- If you want to unblock Twitter for five minutes during scheduled work hours, it'll allow it – but only after you do 20 push-ups, which it verifies through your fitness tracker.

03 /Opportunities

The obvious angle here is building personal productivity and goal-achievement apps that use AI in genuinely unexpected ways – not as another task list engine, but as something that actively constrains choices rather than expanding them. The constraint is the product.

Starting from your own experience works better than theorizing. What actually stops you from hitting your goals? Where do you stall, procrastinate, or lose track entirely? That's where the product opportunity lives. Build around specific friction, not abstract motivation.

The less obvious angle: the design principle Goals is using – give users *less* information, not more – applies far beyond productivity apps. AI-powered monitoring platforms typically analyze enormous volumes of data and generate equally enormous volumes of conclusions. Each insight may be individually useful, but together they form a pile that nobody actually processes.

Most product teams assume more information equals more value. The reality runs the opposite direction. The smarter design question is how to surface the minimum amount of the most important information – specifically what the user can act on today, toward the goal that actually matters. Every product is, in some sense, a goal-progress planner. Worth asking what yours looks like through that lens.