About

What NowNow is

I call NowNow a task completion assistant. It's not a todo list, though it lets you check things off a list. It doesn't have a calendar. It only knows about Today.

It's not meant to be a universal, full-360 solution that will enable you to get everything in your backlog complete in record time.

It's meant to help you ensure that the things that are important to you aren't forgotten or allowed to fall by the wayside or be waylaid by the focus-stealing distractions of big tech.

How NowNow tries to help

• It shows you the single thing you should be working on. It does this in what I call the attention window. Because a) it's what needs your attention, and b) at regular intervals you can tune to your needs, it grabs your attention (mainly via cute animals). You can hide it completely and it will still pop in, using your own distractibility to reclaim your focus and return you to what matters.
• It supports intentional living. You can divide your day into zones to ensure all the important parts of your life get their fair share: work, play, wellbeing, family, community, etc.
• You have a single list that is easy to add to and rearrange. Tasks belong to zones (even multiple) and NowNow takes care of showing you the one that's right for right now.
• It supports different ways of working: just doing it, Pomodoro block/break style, and open-ended deep work sessions.
• With its Day Plan mode activated you can use it to support the habits you want to create.
• It notices when things aren't happening, when tasks aren't being completed, but it treats those as opportunities to recognise what is going on or switch to activities that are better aligned with your mood or what you're actually doing.

My philosophy behind NowNow

I'm neurodivergent. For me, that means executive function is unreliable outside of a crisis. I constantly lose sight of the big picture while persistently failing to do the small things (all sizes of things, really).

This is never going to change. That's just how my life is and will be, and I'm not alone in this lived experience.

You'd think by now there would be useful, usable tools that help with this, but there aren't. What tools are available are designed to work for most people. But we aren't most people. And those tools are designed to support a mid-century notion of corporate productivity. But there's more to life, more to the big picture, than getting those quarterly reports finished.

Then there's the executive function issues. Independent of the source (genetics, illness, injury, aging, exhaustion, stress), these tools always face the same Catch-22: executive function is required to consistently use a system meant to support executive function.

This is another reason why tools built for most people aren't useful or, in the long run, usable. They ask too much of us. Managing most tools becomes a new responsibility, a new burden.

The evolution of NowNow

NowNow began before I received my diagnosis. Things weren't working. Things were never working and I was always looking for solutions.

Its roots are in a simplified version of GTD ("Getting Things Done"), followed by a personal, lower effort version of bullet journalling. Then I tried automating that with a basic Python script, which grew into a partially completed web app. What a half-baked journey of almost progress. I also bounced off OmniFocus, Todoist, Things, Habitica and other apps. All of them felt like I was adding a job to my job.

Over 7 years of trying things and building things and learning about executive function (and myself), I felt like I finally had some insight into what was needed in a tool:

• Low effort and low touch. I didn't want using it to be draining or require much effort.
• Supported intentional living. I wasn't doing quarterly reports because I love quarterly reports, but because I liked living in a house and wanted to retire one day. These are important things people like me are historically not very good at.
• Helped build habits. Habit and environment have the biggest impact on effectiveness. NowNow can't influence environment, but it can help create habits.
• Supported reflection without judgement. No software can understand your current situation, but it can give you opportunities to notice what is working for you and what isn't.
• Understood that the only perfect strategy is recognising when things aren't working, having a break, and starting again.

NowNow didn't start with this list of requirements. It actually began in February 2025, during one of those moments of fear, desperation, and the impending sense of failure. I used Stickies (virtual Post-it Notes on the Mac) with a large font to place the looming deadline in the top right corner of my screen with a fluorescent pink background where it could not be obscured or hidden by any other app nor ignored by me.

But of course I could ignore it, eventually. Eventually we can ignore anything. But on that day it worked.

"Eventually ignorable". That seems to be the Achilles heel of every system that isn't designed for us. Trying to find a way to counter this tendency is how I learned about habituation and hyper-habituation, and this understanding was built into the core of NowNow. And those requirements emerged as I used early versions of NowNow and kept asking myself "Why have I stopped using it this time?".

Why there's a subscription

NowNow is free to use, but offers a subscription. The subscription gets you regular updates to the cute animals (and other things). These updates address the hyper-habituation problem: you can only be shown a cute picture of a squirrel so many times before you're no longer noticing it, no matter how cute the squirrel.

Collating and curating the updates takes time and thus the monthly subscription.

It's ironic that the experience of using NowNow getting worse is the reason you should subscribe. But that's just another one of those bittersweet twists that our situation is regularly throwing at us.

James Wondrasek
Founder, DayScale