Why I built MyPA

The list always wins

For most of my working life I have kept a list. It has lived in a notebook, in Outlook, in three apps I no longer use, and for one regrettable year on a wall of sticky notes. The format changed. The feeling never did.

By any given Monday it held forty-odd things. Some were five-minute replies. Some were a fortnight of work wearing the disguise of a single line. Some were genuinely urgent. Some had been quietly sitting there since March, still important, still not done.

The list was never the problem. The list was honest. The problem was what it asked of me. Every time I looked at it, I had to decide from scratch what to do next — and make that decision on the worst possible information: a title, maybe a due date, and whatever I could remember about how big the thing actually was.

Do that ten times a day and the decision starts making itself. You pick what is loud. You pick what is small enough to finish. You pick the thing with a name attached to it, because someone will ask.

A list tells you what. It never tells you when.

That sounds like a small gap. It is where an entire working week goes wrong.

Nothing on a list has a claim on any actual moment of your day. Your calendar, meanwhile, is full — largely of other people's priorities. So your own work goes into whatever is left, and "whatever is left" is not a plan. It is a hope.

This is why the same things slip, over and over, and why they are so often the things that mattered most. Urgent work defends itself: it has a deadline, and usually somebody chasing. Important work that is due in three weeks has neither. It never gets to be today's problem until, abruptly, it is.

The work that suffers is never the loud work. It is the strategy paper, the thinking time, the piece of long-term work that would genuinely change something — the work with nobody chasing it and no natural moment to start.

Not all hours are equal

The second thing a list cannot see is that your day is not a uniform block of interchangeable time.

Twenty minutes before a meeting is not the same as twenty minutes first thing on a quiet Tuesday. You can clear a few short replies in the first. Opening a serious piece of work there is close to pointless — by the time you have found the thread and remembered where you were, you have to stop, and you will pay the reload cost all over again this afternoon.

Energy is not uniform either. Most of us have a couple of hours where hard thinking is genuinely possible, and a longer stretch where it really is not. Spending your sharpest hour on expenses, and then meeting the difficult document at half past four, is a very ordinary way to lose a week. Nobody plans it. It just happens, because nothing was doing the planning.

So a plan worth having needs to know more than what is outstanding. It needs to know the shape of the day it is planning into: where the meetings are, how long the gaps are, when you are at your best, and how long it takes you to get anywhere useful once you have started.

The control that was missing: intensity

Every task tool gives you a priority and a due date. Some give you an estimate of how long the work will take. Almost none of them give you the one that I kept reaching for and not finding.

Take two tasks. Both marked high priority, both due Friday, both an hour of work. One is completing a form. The other is writing the section of a proposal that decides whether we win it. On a list they are identical. In a working day they could not be less alike.

That difference is intensity — how much of you the work actually takes. It is not importance and it is not duration. It is the difference between work you can do in a gap and work that needs a proper run at it with your head clear.

Once a planner knows the intensity of a piece of work, a great deal follows on its own. Demanding work goes where you have both the time and the capacity for it. Light work fills the fragments that would otherwise be wasted. The hour before a meeting stops being a graveyard for serious work, and starts being useful for the sort of work it can actually hold.

So intensity is a first-class control in MyPA, sitting alongside importance and duration. It is the setting I most wanted from everything else I had used, and never had.

Most of it arrives by email

There is one more thing that has to be true, or none of the rest matters.

Capture has to be almost free. A planning system that depends on you diligently retyping your commitments into it will be accurate for about a week. And for most people I know, the majority of new work does not arrive as a neat task — it arrives as email. Buried in a thread. Third paragraph down. Phrased as a question.

Which is why the inbox cannot be a separate problem to be solved later. It is the front door. If getting something out of a message and into a plan takes more than a moment, it will not happen, and the plan quietly becomes fiction.

That is what Smart Sweep is for: to get through the volume, sort out what is genuinely noise, and turn the messages that actually need you into tasks — with a duration, an importance and an intensity — so they can go through the same planning as everything else. Not filed. Not flagged. Scheduled.

Why it lives in Outlook

I did not want to build another app to move into. I have watched too many people, myself included, adopt a beautiful new productivity tool, run it faithfully for a fortnight, and then drift back to the inbox where the actual work was all along.

If your mail and your calendar are in Outlook, then the planning belongs in Outlook. The plan should appear in the calendar you already check on your phone. Nobody should have to visit a second place to find out what they are meant to be doing.

From writing about it to building it

For a few years I wrote about all of this — first through the pandemic, when everybody's working day came apart at once, and since then for anyone splitting their week between home and the office. A newsletter, and then a book about managing time, tasks and email.

But writing about a system leaves the hard part to the reader. You can describe how to weigh up importance against energy against the shape of the afternoon, and people will nod, and agree, and then not do it — because doing it properly, every day, by hand, is genuinely too much work. That is exactly the sort of job you should hand to software.

So MyPA is that system, automated, in the place where the work already is. It takes what you have to do, works out when you are realistically going to do it, puts it in your calendar, and rearranges it when the day changes — which it will.

It will not do the work for you. It does mean you stop spending the day deciding what to do next, and stop discovering in November that the thing you cared about in March is still sitting there.