Most to-do apps know two states. Work has at least four.

Open your to-do list and count the items you cannot do anything about right now. The one waiting on a reply. The one that needs a delivery to arrive first. The one you agreed to look at next week.

In most apps, all of those look exactly like the things you could start this minute. A checkbox has two positions, so the list has two kinds of task: done and not done. Everything else is left for you to remember.

The list lies a little

A long list of unticked boxes says “you are behind”. Often that is not true. Half of it is waiting on someone else, and a few items are not due for days. But the list cannot tell you that, so every time you read it you sort it again in your head.

People work around this. They add a “Waiting” label in Todoist, write WAITING in capitals at the start of a task, or keep a separate list for things that are stuck. These tricks work, but you have to maintain them by hand, and nothing happens when the wait is over.

What Sprint Zero does instead

Each task in Sprint Zero can be in one of four open states.

• To do. Ready whenever you are.
• Working. You have started. The task shows how long ago.
• Blocked. You are waiting on something. You can write down what, and until when.
• Snoozed. Not now. Pick when it should come back.

Blocked and snoozed tasks are greyed out and sit at the bottom of their section. Snoozed tasks do not count as open at all. What is left at the top is the part of the list you can act on.

The wait ends without you

This is the part we care about most. If you block a task until Thursday at 16:00, Sprint Zero does the remembering. At that time the task moves back to the top of its section and is marked as working, with a small “Unblocked today” note. Your Mac sends a notification with the reason you wrote down.

Snooze works the same way, with presets such as this evening, tomorrow morning and next week. You can change the presets to match your own week.

How this compares

To be fair to other apps, some of this exists elsewhere in part.

• Things lets you give a to-do a start date, which hides it until that day. That is close to snooze. It has no working or blocked state.
• Todoist has labels, filters and board columns, so you can build a “Waiting” stage yourself. It will not release a task from it at a set time.
• Notion databases can have any status you like, including Blocked. You design the database and the views first.
• Apple Reminders keeps things simple: a reminder is complete or it is not.

None of these are wrong. They are general tools, and Sprint Zero has an opinion. Our opinion is that “waiting” is so common in real work that it should take one click, not a system you build.

When you do not need this

If your list is mostly errands and shopping, two states are plenty, and Reminders is already on your phone. The four states earn their place when your work depends on other people and other dates. That is when a list that knows what is stuck starts saving you thought every day.