Task list

I just saw a recommendation for an online task-management-helper tool called “Magic ToDo” that looks kinda interesting.

The idea is that you enter a task and click a button, and it breaks the task into steps. You can then have it break down any of those steps into substeps, and so on.

On the plus side, I tried it on a few tasks, and it seemed to work OK on most of them. (But see an example of it going wrong in comments on this post.) And the tool is free, and it’s “designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult.”

On the minus side, it uses generative AI to do the task breakdown, so of course it sometimes gets things significantly wrong. (And it has one of those everything-here-could-be-wrong disclaimers that I was complaining about the other day.)

So … I don’t know whether any of y’all would find it useful, but I thought it was worth linking to.

https://goblin.tools

The first task that I entered was “Bake a cake.”

It gave me what I (a non-baker) think was a reasonably good overview of the steps to follow. The first one was:

>Gather all necessary ingredients and materials

So I asked it to break that into substeps. Those, too, were more or less reasonable. The first one said:

>>Check pantry for ingredients

I asked it to break that into substeps. The first one was:

>>>Check pantry for flour

I asked it to break that into substeps too. Here were the steps for how to check the pantry for flour:

>>>>Check pantry for flour

>>>>Gather all necessary ingredients and materials

>>>>Bake a cake

I didn’t try any other multi-level step breakdowns, so I don’t know whether it produces similarly incoherent results if you go too many levels down in other tasks.

(Original Facebook post.)