Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about the gap between knowing we should use checklists and actually being able to. We've talked plenty about why standard operating procedures matter, whether you've got ADHD, you're maintaining a car, or anything with a proper process you can't keep in your head. The problem, he says, is finding an app for recurring checklists and SOPs that isn't built for enterprise. Everything that exists seems aimed at companies with compliance departments. What he wants is something for regular people, ideally with template sharing, a public library of common checklists, and the ability to edit from both Android and desktop. So the question is — does anything actually fit that spec? Or are we all just hacking to-do list apps into something they were never meant to be?
I've been down this exact rabbit hole. The short answer is no, nothing perfectly fits the spec. The longer answer is more interesting — and it says something about how the software industry thinks about process.
The software industry thinks about process the way I think about cardio. Acknowledges it exists, immediately looks for a way around it.
That's exactly why the consumer checklist app doesn't exist in the form Daniel's describing. Enterprise tools like Process Street, SweetProcess, and Manifestly have been around for years — they do exactly this, recurring checklists with conditional logic, template libraries, team assignment, the works. But they're priced per seat, they assume you're managing employees, and the interface screams "somebody in HR is making you do this.
The interface screaming at you is a feature in enterprise software. It's how middle management knows it's working.
And the consumer to-do list world — TickTick, Todoist, Microsoft To Do, Apple Reminders — they all have recurring tasks, but none of them treat the checklist as a first-class object. You can hack a recurring task that contains subtasks, but you can't reset a checklist, you can't enforce sequence, you can't track completion history in a meaningful way. It's a task with some indented children, not a process.
"A task with some indented children" is also how I'd describe myself on a productive day.
Let me walk through what actually exists, because there are a few things that get surprisingly close, and one or two that might work if you're willing to squint. Then we can talk about why the template library idea is the real missing piece.
Start with the closest fit. What's the app that made you think "this is almost it" before the inevitable disappointment?
There's an app called Checklist — just "Checklist" — that's been around since twenty nineteen. It's focused entirely on reusable checklists, not tasks. You create a template, you start an instance of it, you check things off, and when you're done it's ready to be started again. It's not a to-do app with checklist features bolted on. The checklist is the entire data model.
That sounds like exactly what was asked for. What's the catch?
It's iOS only. No Android, no web interface. And it hasn't been updated in about two years. The developer seems to have moved on. So it's a beautiful proof of concept that the idea works — people who use it genuinely love it — but it's essentially abandonware on a single platform.
The app graveyard is littered with beautiful proofs of concept. It's like finding the perfect house and discovering the foundation is made of hope.
There's another one called Manifestly, which I mentioned as an enterprise tool, but they actually have a free tier for personal use — up to five users, unlimited checklists. It's web-based so it works on anything with a browser, and it does recurring schedules properly. You can set a checklist to run daily, weekly, monthly, whatever, and it creates a new instance each time.
What's the "but"?
The interface is pure enterprise. It looks like something you'd use to onboard new hires at a mid-sized insurance company. And the free tier limits you in ways that feel arbitrary — you can't export your data, you can't use the API, the template sharing is within teams only, not a public library. It works technically but it doesn't feel like it's for you.
"It works technically but doesn't feel like it's for you" is the enterprise software industry's mission statement.
That's the thing — the functionality Daniel's describing exists. It's been built. It's just been built for a completely different user and use case, and nobody has bothered to repackage it for regular people.
Which is strange, because regular people have processes. Moving house, preparing for tax season, closing up a vacation property for winter, onboarding a new pet sitter. These are all multi-step recurring or semi-recurring procedures that people either keep in their heads badly or scribble on paper and lose.
Or reinvent every single time. That's the part that gets me. How many times has someone packed for a camping trip and forgotten the same thing they forgot last time? There's a cognitive cost to re-deriving your process every time you do something infrequent.
That's the ADHD angle specifically. The working memory tax of "what were the steps again" is real, and it's higher for some people than others. A checklist externalizes that. But if the tool for externalizing it is itself a cognitive burden to set up and maintain, you've just moved the problem around.
So let me talk about the apps that get you maybe seventy percent of the way there, because I think the practical answer is "here's what works today, with compromises." The first one I'd actually recommend is TickTick.
Which you've mentioned before in a different context.
I have, but for this use case specifically, TickTick has a feature they call "Checklist" within a task, and you can set the parent task to recur. When the task recurs, the checklist resets. That's the key mechanic — the reset. Most to-do apps, when a recurring task with subtasks comes back, the subtasks are either still checked off from last time or they behave unpredictably. TickTick actually resets them.
It's a recurring task that contains a fresh checklist each time. That's not nothing.
It's not nothing, and it works on Android, iOS, web, and desktop apps — they've got native clients everywhere. You can also add sections within the checklist, you can drag to reorder, you can add notes to individual items. It's more capable than most people realize.
What's missing?
No template sharing. No public library. You're building everything from scratch. And the checklist resets when the task recurs, but there's no concept of "I'm halfway through this checklist and I need to pause" — it's either active or done. There's no partial completion tracking across instances, so you can't see "the last three times I did this, I consistently missed step four.
Which is the kind of data that would actually help you improve your process over time. That's the enterprise feature that would be useful for personal life.
In an ideal world, you'd have completion analytics. Not because you need a dashboard for your Saturday morning cleaning routine, but because patterns emerge — "I always skip the filter change" is useful information.
"I always skip the filter change" is the personal analytics equivalent of a doctor gently telling you your cholesterol is high. You knew, but now you know.
The next option is Todoist, which has the largest user base of any serious task manager. They introduced a feature where you can save a task as a template — so you build your checklist once, save it as a template, and then you can create new instances of it manually. But it doesn't auto-recur. You have to remember to create the new instance yourself.
That's worse than a hack. That's asking the user to be the recurrence engine.
For someone with ADHD, that's exactly the kind of friction that makes the system fail. The whole point of a recurring checklist is that you shouldn't have to remember to start it. It should appear when it's supposed to appear.
The app equivalent of "I'll remember to do that" — the five most dangerous words in personal productivity.
There's another interesting one called Notion. Not a task manager by design, but people build recurring checklist systems in it using databases and templates. You can create a database of procedures, each with its own checklist items, and then use buttons or automations to generate new instances on a schedule.
I can hear the "but" from here. It's loud.
It's extremely loud. Notion is a building material, not a house. You can construct a recurring checklist system in it, but you're essentially becoming a software developer for your own life. The setup time is measured in hours, not minutes. And the mobile experience is — let's be charitable — not optimized for quick checklist completion.
"Not optimized for quick checklist completion" is a polite way of saying opening Notion on your phone feels like waiting for a desktop computer to boot in two thousand three.
If the checklist for "leaving the house" takes longer to load than the act of leaving the house, you're not going to use it. The latency-to-task ratio has to be favorable.
Latency-to-task ratio. You've just coined a metric that every productivity app should be judged by, and most would fail.
I'm going to write that down. But let me get to something that's actually close to what Daniel described, because there's an app called Checkli that I think deserves more attention than it gets.
That's a name that sounds like a startup that pivoted three times before settling on checklists.
It's been focused on checklists from the start. It's web-based, so it works on desktop and mobile browser. You can create checklists, save them, and share them via a public link. They actually have a library of user-created templates — not huge, but it exists and it's searchable. You can find checklists for everything from "deep clean your bathroom" to "pre-flight drone checklist.
Public template library. That's one of the specific asks. Does it do recurrence?
That's where it falls short. You can reset a checklist manually, but there's no scheduling, no automatic recurrence. It's designed for "I need to do this thing now" rather than "this thing needs to happen every three months." The sharing model is also more about publishing a static checklist than maintaining a living template that others can fork and adapt.
It's a checklist creation and sharing tool, not a recurring process manager. Right idea, wrong temporal dimension.
And that temporal dimension — the recurrence — is actually the hardest technical problem here. It's not just "remind me every Tuesday." It's "create a new instance of this process every Tuesday, with all steps unchecked, and if I didn't finish last Tuesday's instance, don't just silently discard it — surface that I have an incomplete cycle.
The incomplete cycle problem. That's the one that gets you. Most recurring task systems just roll forward and pretend the past didn't happen. Which is fine for "take out the trash." It's not fine for "monthly financial close" where step seven was "reconcile the accounts" and you skipped it.
That's where the enterprise tools actually shine. Process Street tracks every instance separately. You can see that the March close was completed in full, the April close is ninety percent done with one step overdue, and the May close hasn't been started. That's the right model. Nobody has ported that model to a consumer app.
Because the consumer app market doesn't believe consumers want process. They believe consumers want tasks. A task is "buy milk." A process is "weekly meal planning: check pantry, review calendar for busy nights, plan meals, generate shopping list, check budget." That's a different thing, and the app stores don't have a category for it.
There's actually a structural reason for that. App store categories and search keywords drive discovery. If you build a "recurring checklist app," where do you list it? And then you're competing with Todoist and TickTick and every other task manager. Your app looks weird because it doesn't do what people expect a productivity app to do — manage individual tasks. You have to educate the market, and that's expensive.
Educating the market is what venture capital is for, and venture capital wants enterprise SaaS multiples, not five dollars a month from people who want to remember to change their furnace filters.
That's the economic reality in one sentence. But let me mention a few more options, because there are some oddballs worth knowing about. There's an Android app called Regularly that's specifically designed for recurring chores with flexible schedules — it's not really a checklist app, more of a chore tracker, but it handles "do this every three weeks" better than most. And there's an open-source project called Grocy that's technically for household inventory management but has a chore tracking module with recurrence that some people use for exactly this purpose.
That's interesting. Does it have the template sharing Daniel mentioned?
Not directly, but because it's open source, people share their configurations on forums and Reddit. It's not a polished public library, but it's a community doing the sharing organically. The downside is that Grocy is self-hosted — you need to run it on a server or a Raspberry Pi. That's a level of technical commitment that filters out about ninety-eight percent of potential users.
"Just run it on your home server" is the open-source equivalent of "just be a different person with different skills and different amounts of free time.
Even Grocy is more about inventory and chores than general-purpose SOPs. You could use it for "winterize the cabin" but it would feel like you're misusing a tool designed for tracking how many eggs you have.
Let me summarize the landscape as I'm hearing it. You've got enterprise tools that do everything but feel like enterprise tools and cost enterprise money. You've got consumer task managers that can be bent into checklist shapes but break when you need proper recurrence and instance tracking. You've got a couple of dedicated checklist apps that nail the checklist part but don't do scheduling. And you've got open-source options that require a computer science degree to set up. Is that fair?
That's the state of the market in June two thousand twenty-six. And I think it's worth asking why, because the demand is clearly there. Every time someone writes a blog post about "how I built a recurring checklist system in Notion," it gets shared everywhere. People want this.
The demand is there but it's latent. People don't wake up thinking "I need a recurring process management tool." They wake up thinking "I forgot to do the thing again and I'm frustrated." The connection between that frustration and the category of software that would solve it isn't obvious to most people.
The user doesn't know they want an SOP app. They know they want to stop forgetting steps. They search for "checklist app" or "recurring to-do list" and find things that are close but not right, and they either make do or give up.
There's also a design challenge here that I think is underappreciated. A good recurring checklist app has to solve the template-versus-instance distinction in a way that's intuitive. You create a template — that's the master version of the process. Then instances are created from it. If you update the template, do existing instances update? If not, do you have stale instances running around? If yes, do you risk breaking an in-progress checklist?
This is the exact problem that software versioning solves, and it's not trivial. Process Street handles it by locking instances — once you start a checklist, it's a snapshot of the template at that moment. If the template changes later, it only affects future instances. That's the right behavior, but explaining it in a consumer app's onboarding flow is a genuine UX challenge.
"Your checklists are snapshots, not living documents." That's a tooltip that makes sense to people who already understand the problem. For everyone else, it's word salad.
That's probably why nobody has cracked this. The audience that intuitively understands why this matters is small. The audience that would benefit from it is enormous. Bridging that gap requires design work that nobody's been willing to fund.
Let's talk about the template sharing idea specifically, because I think that's the most interesting part of the prompt. A public library of community checklists and SOPs. That's not just a feature — it's a network effect play. The more people use it, the more valuable it gets.
It solves the cold start problem. If you download an app and it's empty, you have to build your own processes from scratch before the app does anything useful. That's a high activation barrier. If you open it and there's already a library of templates — "moving house checklist," "new puppy preparation," "tax document gathering," "wedding planning timeline" — you get immediate value and you learn how the app works by seeing real examples.
It also creates a quality problem. Who vets these templates? If I search "car maintenance" and find seventeen different checklists of wildly varying quality, I'm back to doing the cognitive work of evaluating which one is right. That's almost as bad as building it myself.
This is the Wikipedia problem. You need a curation mechanism. Upvotes, ratings, verified badges, editorial review — something. And all of that requires a community manager or an algorithm, both of which require money.
Or you do what recipe apps do. A recipe app doesn't verify that every user-submitted lasagna recipe is good. It lets ratings and comments do the work, and it surfaces the popular ones. Over time, the cream rises. The first six months are chaos, but it converges.
Recipe apps are actually a great analogy for what a consumer SOP app could be. In a recipe app, the recipe is the template, the cooking session is the instance, and you can scale, comment, and share. The difference is that recipes don't typically recur on a schedule — though meal planning apps do exactly that. "This week's meal plan" is a recurring checklist of recipes with a shopping list generated from it. That whole ecosystem exists and people pay for it.
The interaction model has been built. It's just been built for food. There's no reason the same model couldn't work for "quarterly home maintenance" or "annual financial review" or "starting a new job onboarding for yourself.
There's an app called Paprika that does exactly this for recipes — template management, scheduling, shopping list generation, cloud sync across devices. If someone took Paprika's architecture and replaced "recipes" with "procedures," they'd have about eighty percent of what Daniel's describing.
Paprika for processes. Someone write that down. I want royalties.
I'll give you a nickel per download. But let me get to something practical, because I think there's an answer to the question even if it's not the perfect answer. If I had to recommend something today, for someone on Android who wants desktop editing and recurring checklists with template potential, I'd say TickTick is the closest thing that actually works reliably.
What's the setup you'd recommend? Not just "use TickTick" — how do you actually make it work for this use case?
You create a folder called "SOPs" or "Procedures." Inside it, each procedure is a task set to recur on the appropriate schedule. The task description contains any context or reference information — links to manuals, photos of where things are stored, whatever. The checklist is the subtask list. When the task recurs, all subtasks reset. You can add sections within the checklist for different phases of the process. And because TickTick has a widget on Android, you can put the day's active checklists right on your home screen.
That's actually a coherent system. What about the template sharing?
That's the piece you can't get natively. But TickTick lets you share tasks via link. So if someone builds a good checklist, they can share it, and you can import it into your own TickTick and set the recurrence yourself. It's not a public library — it's manual sharing between people who already know each other. But it works.
The community aspect would have to be built outside the app. A subreddit, a Discord, a shared folder of links.
And that's actually happening organically. There are TickTick communities where people share templates. There are Notion template galleries with thousands of free SOPs. The sharing is happening — it's just fragmented across platforms and formats.
Which is itself an argument for a dedicated app. The fragmentation is evidence of demand. If people are jury-rigging template sharing on Reddit, the need is real.
There's one more app I want to mention that I think is interesting, and it's called Talla. It was originally an AI-powered knowledge base for customer support teams, but they've pivoted toward what they call "process automation for individuals." It's still early, but the concept is that you describe a process in plain language and it generates a recurring checklist with conditional steps.
Plain language to checklist. That's an AI play.
It is, and it's the kind of thing that wouldn't have been possible before the current generation of language models. You type "every spring I need to get the garden ready: test the soil, sharpen the tools, plan the layout, buy seeds, start seedlings indoors" and it structures that into a recurring checklist with sub-steps, estimated durations, and dependencies. It's not perfect, but the direction is fascinating.
The direction being "the computer figures out the process so you don't have to." Which is actually the inverse of the original problem. The original problem was "I know the process, I just need a place to put it." This is "I don't even need to fully know the process, the AI will scaffold it for me.
That's potentially more valuable for the casual user. The person who doesn't have a formal SOP for "getting the house ready for guests" but would benefit from one. The AI can generate a reasonable starting point, you customize it, and then it recurs on your schedule.
Though now we're trusting AI with "reasonable starting points" for things that might matter. "AI-generated car maintenance checklist" is a phrase that should make any mechanic nervous.
But the same could be said for any user-generated template. The vetting problem doesn't go away because AI generated it instead of a stranger on the internet. In some ways, AI might be more reliable because it's drawing on a broad base of documented best practices rather than one person's idiosyncratic method.
"Idiosyncratic method" is a generous description of some of the checklists I've seen online. I once found a "deep clean bathroom" checklist that included "re-caulk the tub" as step three. Between "scrub the toilet" and "wipe the mirror." The sequencing was unhinged.
Re-caulking the tub is not a routine cleaning task. That's a renovation project that someone mistakenly filed under "Saturday chores.
That's exactly the kind of thing a rating system would catch. "This checklist has a four point two average but seventeen comments saying step three is insane." That's useful metadata.
Let me circle back to something I said earlier, because I think there's a broader point here about how we think about personal software. The enterprise world has recognized for decades that processes need to be documented, versioned, and scheduled. The personal world has not. We're all expected to keep our life processes in our heads, and when we fail, we blame ourselves rather than the absence of tools.
That's the self-improvement industry in a nutshell. "You need a better system" — and the system is always a notebook, a mindset, a morning routine. Never an app that actually manages process state across time.
It's not that notebooks and mindsets are bad. It's that they don't scale across the number of processes a modern adult is expected to manage. You've got financial processes, home maintenance processes, health processes, family logistics processes, career development processes. Each one has steps, timing, dependencies. Your brain is not a database with a scheduling engine.
My brain is barely a text file with line breaks.
The question is whether the market will eventually produce the thing Daniel's describing. I think it will, but I think it'll come from an unexpected direction. It might not be a dedicated checklist app. It might be a feature that grows inside an existing platform. Apple Reminders could add proper template and recurrence support. Google Keep could evolve in that direction. Notion could build a dedicated recurring checklist module instead of requiring users to construct it themselves.
The platform-play prediction. Big company notices the gap and fills it with an update.
It's happened before. Apple Notes was a bare-bones app for years, and then one day it got tables, document scanning, and collaboration features. Reminders got smart lists and subtasks. The pieces are all there — they just haven't been assembled into a recurring checklist product yet.
Or a small indie developer builds exactly the right thing, charges a fair price, and cultivates a community. That's also happened before. The recipe app Paprika you mentioned is an indie success story. So is Overcast in podcast players. So is Ivory for Mastodon.
The challenge for an indie developer is that this is a deceptively complex product. You need sync across platforms, which means server infrastructure. You need a template library, which means content moderation. You need recurrence logic that handles edge cases — what happens when a monthly checklist falls on a day that doesn't exist in February? What happens when you're on vacation and a checklist is due? These are solvable problems, but they're not trivial.
The February problem alone has broken more software than most people realize. Recurrence is a calendar problem, and calendar math is famously horrible.
It really is. And that's why most apps that do recurrence well — like TickTick — have been at it for years. It's not something you get right in version one point zero.
The practical advice for someone who wants this today is: TickTick with a deliberate folder structure, manual template sharing via links, and lower your expectations about completion analytics. Is that the bottom line?
That's the bottom line for "works on Android and desktop, handles recurrence properly, resets checklists on each cycle." If you're willing to accept web-only and no recurrence, Checkli gives you the template library experience. If you're willing to self-host and tinker, Grocy gives you some of the process management. If you're iOS-only, the abandoned Checklist app is a beautiful ghost of what could have been.
If you're willing to spend money and tolerate enterprise interfaces, Process Street or Manifestly will do everything you want and more, while constantly reminding you that you are not their intended customer.
The free tier of Manifestly is actually worth trying if you can get past the interface. Five users is more than enough for personal use, and the feature set is complete. You just have to accept that you're using a tool designed for compliance officers to manage safety inspections.
"Designed for compliance officers" is a phrase that should come with a warning label. It's the software equivalent of "this product contains chemicals known to the state of California.
Here's what I keep coming back to. The fact that Daniel asked this question — and the fact that every time this topic comes up online, people pile on with their workarounds and frustrations — tells me there's a real product waiting to be built. The person who builds "Paprika for procedures" with proper recurrence, cross-platform sync, and a community template library, and charges maybe four dollars a month for it, would have a sustainable business and a devoted user base.
Four dollars a month, cross-platform, template library, proper recurrence. Someone listening to this is going to build it. And when they do, we want a lifetime subscription and a credit in the app.
I want my face on the splash screen. This face was made for splash screens.
Your face on a splash screen would increase app uninstall rates by thirty percent.
I've been saying this.
You've been saying it. The data does not support it.
The data hasn't been collected properly.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In eighteen twelve, a British naturalist collecting nudibranchs off the coast of Belize accidentally discovered that the mucus of a particular bright-orange sea slug could dissolve the rubber seals on his specimen jars. He wrote to the Royal Society proposing it as a naval adhesive solvent. The letter was lost in the mail and never delivered. The jars dissolved somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.
The jars dissolved somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. That's a sentence that starts a horror movie for marine biologists.
I have so many questions about the mail system in eighteen twelve. But I'm not going to ask any of them.
To wrap this up — the recurring checklist app for personal use is a genuine gap in the software landscape. The pieces exist but they're scattered across enterprise tools, task managers, and niche utilities. If you need something today, TickTick is the most practical answer. If you want to see what the future could look like, watch what happens when someone finally puts those pieces together in a package that treats personal processes with the same seriousness that enterprise software treats business processes.
If you're the person who builds it, our DMs are open. We have feature requests. We have opinions about the February problem. We have a donkey who wants to be on your splash screen.
I'm ready for my close-up.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.com or search for us on Spotify. If you've got a weird prompt of your own, send it in.
Until next time.
