For managers whose own work comes last
One important task a day, and a record of whether you did it.
You name up to three objectives. Each morning trydeepwork suggests a task that moves one of them, and you commit to it. At the end of the week you can see which days you followed through and where your hours went.
No credit card · $5.99/mo after the trial
Your calendar is full.
Your inbox is answered.
Your team is unblocked.
The thing you were hired to do is still not done.
Meetings, messages and requests from other people come with someone waiting on them. The work you decided was important usually doesn’t, so it gets pushed to next week, then the week after. trydeepwork gives that work a slot every day and keeps count of whether it got done.
How it works
- 1
Name up to three objectives
The things you’d want finished six months from now. Tasks linked to one of them count as important. Everything else counts as a responsibility: still worth doing, but not one of the three. If you want a fourth objective, one of the three moves to Later.
- 2
Commit to one task each morning
The home screen suggests one. Anything you scheduled for today comes first; otherwise it ranks your week’s tasks by what’s due and what you’ve already started. Take the suggestion or pick something else.
- 3
Work on it in a timed session
Sessions run anywhere from a few minutes to a whole morning. The task sits on screen with a clock, and the time is logged against it. That log is what the week page reads from, so “met” means you actually worked on the task you committed to.
Every week gets written down
The week page counts the days you met your commitment, the hours you worked, and how those hours split between your objectives and everything else. Here’s what it showed for one demo week:
- 4 of 5 met
- Thursday’s commitment was the reporting-lines draft. The morning went to calibration prep instead, and the page says so.
- 10.7h vs 4.7h
- Time on the three objectives, against time on everything else. Both numbers come from the session log, not from a guess on Friday.
- What moved
- Finished and unfinished tasks, grouped by the objective they belong to.
Questions
- How is this different from a to-do list?
- You still keep a task list here. What trydeepwork adds is the daily commitment and a weekly check of whether you met it, based on the sessions you logged.
- Why not just block time on my calendar?
- A calendar block says you meant to do something. It can’t tell you whether you did, or whether the hour went to the thing you blocked it for. The session log can.
- What happens when I miss a day?
- The week page shows it, like Thursday above. A week counts toward your streak when you meet your cadence, which is three days by default and can be changed.
- Where does it run?
- In the browser, and as a terminal console for macOS, Windows and Linux.
- What does it cost?
- 21 days free with no card. After that, $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Details are on the pricing page.
Try it for a week.
Set up your objectives in a few minutes, commit to a task tomorrow morning, and look at the week page on Friday.