I’ve recently had the pleasure of interviewing Adrian McEwen, founder of MCQN Ltd. One of their projects is tedium, a web-based to-do list application.
Before you go “Not another to-do list!”, I encourage you to read the interview, as I found it refreshing to discover tedium’s one-of-a-kind features, as well as Adrian’s philosophy on the project.
Celine Roque: Basically, I went to the tedium site and tried a demo account. But for those unacquainted with tedium, how would you describe it in one sentence?
Adrian McEwen: tedium is an on the web application where you can track all the things you need to do, and see how good you are at doing them.
Celine: That’s very important, isn’t it? Seeing your progress. Which tedium features let you do that?
Adrian: I think it is important, but you need to be careful not to spend all your time examining the past. Hopefully tedium strikes a reasonable balance. At the top of any of your lists there’s a tiny fun hint at how much you’ve achieved - for example, “if you ran a mile for each task completed you’d have completed a marathon”. Then, each three months we build a more detailed report showing your accomplishments for those months (or for the entire year in the case of the end-of-year report).
The report gives you an assortment of graphs for how punctually you completed the tasks, which days of the week or hours of the day you got the most done, and which tags were the more important ones
Here’s the post on my personal blog where I examine what’s in the report a bit (click here for link) and is the report itself is at (click here for link).
Celine: Wow, that’s quite detailed. I like how everything is visually presented, even the tags. Before you used tedium, did you use other to-do list applications?
Adrian: I guess I’ve always kept lists of things to do, but never succeeded in keeping them going until I built tedium. I think building it is part of my ongoing quest to be more organised and more efficient - I’m getting superior, but I’m still not perfect 
Celine: What inspired you to develop tedium?
Adrian: tedium came about when I read Getting Things Done by David Allen. I wanted something that let me implement the GTD philosophy, but didn’t rigidly adhere to its conventions. And having it on the internet so that I could access it whenever I could get to the World wide web was vital to how I organize things
Celine: What else makes tedium different from other to-do list applications out there?
Adrian: I think the ability to drag and drop tasks from one list to another is unique to tedium - if you create a view with two (or more) lists for different tags, you can drag tasks from one list to the other and it will automatically add the new tag to the task.
Celine: What’s in store for tedium? What upgrades are you planning?
Adrian: there are quite a lot of possible things (all filed away in my tedium account under the “tdm” tag but the focus for the short- to medium-term is mainly going to be on tools to help you complete things.I haven’t got it all fully worked out, and it’s a fairly large new chunk of work, but the idea is that there’ll be something like an “I’m stuck” button on each screen. When you don’t seem to be able to make any progress you hit that and that’ll take you to a list of tools to help you get going again. so, for example, you’ll be able to choose one task that you’re stuck with and there’ll be a separate screen where you can more easily break it down into a number of smaller
Celine: Like breaking it down into smaller “next actions”?
Adrian: smaller “next actions” is exactly it.or you’ll be able to see the “millstone tasks” that have been hanging around in your lists for ever, and decide to either start doing something to move them forward, or just accept that (however nice an idea it might be) you aren’t going to find time for it and you can abandon it and stop it dragging you down
I think a lot of to-do lists focus on the list - showing you what you’ve got to do; letting you prioritize tasks or reorder them - but sometimes I find that it’s actually doing the work that’s the problem, not arranging the list. I’d like to develop that side of tedium - to help people complete things. that’s what’s important at the end of the day
Celine: Is that where your slogan comes in? “It’s not about making lists, it’s about crossing things
off.”
Adrian: Exactly
Celine: Is there anything else about tedium that you’d like to share with PimpYourWork readers?
Adrian: I’d just like them to give it a try to see what they think - if nothing else they’ll get to see how productive they are. Tthere’s a baseline productivity report that gets generated for the trial period, and so after two weeks you can see how things are going.
Celine: Thank you very much for your time, Adrian Thanks for sharing tedium with us.
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