Tabgapper
If you arrived at this page looking for the tool itself, you can find it here. This page is primarily about the tool, how it works, what it’s best used for, etc.
Premise
I’ve spent an uncountable amount of time trying to organize my life. This became especially true after I married, and even more so once I had a child. My days now are filled with motion. Part of understanding oneself involves becoming clear on one’s own limitations, both physical and mental. Over the years I continue to learn more and more about how poorly my brain works in certain domains—the most impactful of which is the tracking of tasks and information over time.
Most tools that “handle” this domain approach this issue by organizing information. You create a list of todos and modify them as they are completed. For the simplest needs and the most stable schedules, this can be sufficient. When your tasks start to expand beyond yourself, when they repeat, when they become irregular, when schedules change—all of these interruptions in normalcy frustrate information-based tools. Many of these tools treat todos or tasks as static, and regardless of how many categories or tags I apply to them, they still remain unable to accommodate the changes and flexibility that my life demands of me. The friction that irregularity in my life creates has caused me to abandon every tool I have tried.
Time moves at the same rate for all of us (probably). People talk about the need of managing their time better, and what they mean is that they need to manage themselves or their energy better. At some point, I realized I needed a system that helped manage my motion, my navigation through my responsibilities and tasks. The tasks themselves shift and move and change and grow, and as long as the system is flexible enough, it has its best chance at success.
Tabgapper is far from my first attempt at solving this challenge, though as of now, it’s my most successful attempt. I may (eventually) chronicle the journey of each of its predecessors, to share what I discovered to be successful and what failed for each of them. As with most of my life, I find myself prioritizing simplicity over all else.
How it Works
As of now, tabs are glorified lines of text. They have a bit of metadata behind them that help determine how and when they are shown to you. It’s their organization and presentation that sets this tool apart. Tabs have a value at a key called :at, which determines at which point the tab becomes visible to act upon. They have another called :after which describes an interval of time that happens before they appear again (after completion). Gaps in-between tab appearances can be precise or rounded.
For example, if I set a tab to appear three hours after it is completed, it will reappear precisely 180 minutes later. If I set a tab to reappear nine days after its completion, the program rounds the moment of its reappearance to the start of the day it lands on (this prevents a tab that you complete late in the day from appearing late on the future day as well). Specific times of day can be set for tabs to appear at, if it serves a need. Tabs can also be one-off tasks (meaning they lack the :after value), which function as “reminders”. They remain present and visible until you deal with them, at which point they vanish.
Tabs can also be delayed. Say for example, a routine tab appears and you are unable to act on it immediately. Simply select it and reschedule its appearance using the Delay menu. The only thing delaying a tab changes is the next moment it is shown to you.
Another intentional limitation within Tabgapper is that it will only ever show you up to five of your “Active” (due/ready) tabs. This is a respectful nod towards your working memory. It’s more taxing for the mind to try to process an entire to do list all at once than to take it in “chunks”. Tabgapper informs you that there are additional tabs waiting for you to complete the ones displayed. This is also intended to keep you moving. If you keep your tabs small-scale, you may find a tiny joy in plucking them off your list to unlock the next ones.
There is also a Daily View that I recently added. This view shows you the overview of the tabs in your current day, both repeating and one-time. It, along with two more views, help you to access and edit tabs that are otherwise inaccessible. If you hang out in the main view of the app (with only your Active tabs), anything that’s unneeded in your awareness at the moment will be completely out of view. How wonderful is that?
As a parent and spouse, my life revolves around the others in my household. So much of what I do repeats at some interval, and trying to mentally track and maintain all of these (or making calendar events or alarms to represent them) is extremely tedious. I made this application to address this challenge in my own life. If you have similar circumstances, I encourage you to try it out. I hope that it serves you. 🙏
Where it Works Best
This application works best when the tabs that you create represent short, repeated actions in your life. If the actions that your tabs represent are projects, complex tasks, or any endeavor that is difficult to start, you’ll likely find that those tabs tend to stagnate. They will clutter up your active view, and you will feel it.
This app can also help remind you to complete or continue establishing new routines in your own life. If you find yourself forgetting to take action upon something you want to incorporate into your life, this could help! If you find yourself unwilling or unable to incorporate the new behaviors, that’s usually a sign of a larger issue.
Limitations
Because this is a web application (without an actual live server), it is inherently incapable of doing certain things. For example, it is unable to directly create or schedule notifications or alarms on your devices in a reliable way. This is my biggest gripe with the system. The next version of the application will be native on Android, or perhaps cross platform if I use something like Flutter. This will make possible certain functionalities that I’ve wanted from the beginning.
It’s also lacking a built-in way to ensure weekly and monthly repetitions occur on a precise day after completion. For example, if I need to take the trash cans to the curb on Tuesday and I forget to complete the tab until Wednesday (despite having done the action), completing the tab pushes it a week later to next Wednesday (defeating the purpose of the tab entirely!). You can solve the situation by “delaying” the tab until next Tuesday, though that’s unnecessary friction for you, dear user. This is a known limitation that will be addressed soon.
There is currently only one color scheme available in the application. I consider this iteration of Tabgapper more of a prototype version (to be replaced by the native mobile version in the future), so I’m okay leaving it like that.
Next Steps
Through usage of this application, I’ve come to question whether it would be worthwhile to expand tabs from having just a line of text to potentially housing a sequence of steps. Having this feature would allow the user to create step-based tabs with (optional) temporal gaps between each step, graduating Tabgapper from an action coordinator to a process coordinator… This is a major change to how the application works and feels, and I’m approaching it cautiously.
I would like to incorporate some kind of “reward” screen for those who have completed their tabs for the moment. I’ve considered many ideas, and am still waiting for one to seem appropriate enough to try out. The basic idea is that clearing all your available tabs for the moment reveals a background with something pleasant to see or watch. Maybe drawing some procedural art or patterns, for example.
In any case, if you try out Tabgapper I would be grateful to hear of your experience. Let me know!
It is my intention to release the source code soon on GitHub, so the curious can verify its security.