Everyone who has tried to get organised has the same graveyard: three or four apps installed, each with a perfect system built one Sunday afternoon, all untouched since April. If the problem were you, the pattern would not be this identical across such different people.
The problem is that most of these tools charge, as their entry fee, exactly the functions that are in short supply.
What the app asks of you without saying so
It asks you to remember to open it. That is the structural flaw. An app is a place you go to. If prospective memory — remembering to do something later — is the weak point, the app depends on the function that failed in order to help with the function that failed.
It asks for decisions at capture time. Project, label, priority, date, subtask. You had an idea on the bus and the form wants five choices. The cost is high, you leave it for later, and later is the same place everything else lives.
It asks for invisible maintenance. Rescheduling what expired, archiving what died, reviewing the week. Without that, the list becomes a monument to overdue tasks — and then opening the app costs guilt, which guarantees you will not open it again.
The part nobody mentions about "building the habit"
The reference study on habit formation followed people adopting new everyday behaviours and found a median of 66 days until the behaviour became automatic — with huge variation, from 18 to 254 days, depending on the person and the behaviour.
So the plan "I will build the habit of opening the app daily" bets on two months of consistency for an action that pays nothing visible along the way. That is a poor bet for anyone, and worse when distant rewards already carry little weight.
What to look for instead
What I wanted to change
The conclusion I reached is that the right tool is not the one with the best features: it is the one that lives where you already are and does the boring work itself — creating the task, holding the date, coming back to you when the time arrives.
That inversion is what I built ASB around: instead of you visiting the system, the system comes looking for you.