I kept letting little things slip. So I built Nifty.

It’s four o’clock. Someone on Slack asks, “Did you get a chance to look at that?” You did not. You’d forgotten “that” existed.

That was me, most weeks. I’ve got a job with too many meetings, kids, a seat on a primary school’s board of governors, and I’m studying for an MBA. I’m easily distracted at the best of times. Nothing big ever went wrong. It was the little things: a reply I meant to send, a file someone asked for, a date buried in a school email I read once and never saw again. Each one was small, but together they meant I wasn’t as dependable as I wanted to be. I hated letting people down.

I tried everything. My inbox was my to-do list, until the thing I needed was in Slack, a GitHub notification or a meeting I didn’t write down. I tried Things, Todoist and a reMarkable. The reMarkable is lovely to write on, but it never reminds you of anything.

Then there are the shared tools. Work has one for tasks, university has Microsoft Teams, and the school’s governor papers live somewhere in SharePoint. Each one holds a slice of my week, finding anything takes an age, and someone else has always been in and moved things around.

Nobody should have Teams in their life, and yet here we all are.

So I built what I wanted. Nifty is fast, so things actually go in: a note in a meeting, a screenshot of that Slack message, a school email dropped in. When I open someone’s page, I see what they’re doing for me, what we talked about last time and how they take their coffee.

It’s mine. I still have to use the shared tools, but whatever I need from them ends up in Nifty, where nobody turns up and rearranges it. It stays tidy and calm, set up the way I like it. It lives on my computer or my own server, and we never see your notes.

I use it all day, and most of what’s in it started as something that annoyed me. My mechanical keyboard has never been so loud.

I don’t miss things now. If you’re juggling as much as I was, give it a go.

AdamThe person behind Nifty