Tasklist.uk didn't begin with a business idea or a plan to build software.
It started with a simple question from my boss.
"What do you use to organise your work?"
I didn't have an answer. Or rather, I did. My answer was: my head.
Living in my head wasn't working
For years my system was simply remembering everything. That works when you're juggling five or six tasks. It stops working somewhere between ten and a hundred.
Between work, running events, side projects, the gym, friends, family and everything else life throws at me, I was relying on memory to keep everything together.
Nothing ever went catastrophically wrong. But forgotten tasks never disappear. They just come back later - usually when they're more urgent than they needed to be. The mental effort of keeping everything spinning was exhausting.
When my boss asked what I used, I realised I didn't actually have a system. I just had stress.
I tried everything else first
Like most people, I tried the obvious options.
I genuinely liked Trello. Moving cards across a Kanban board just made sense to me. But after the board itself, I always felt like something was missing. There wasn't a proper place to plan my day, I couldn't easily see how productive I'd been over time, and nothing encouraged me to focus on the one task that mattered most.
Then there was Notion. It can do almost anything... provided you're willing to spend an evening building databases, views, formulas and automations before you've even written your first task.
I wasn't looking for another template. I wanted something that already matched the way I naturally work.
So I built my own
Eventually I stopped searching and opened my code editor instead.
What started as a small side project quickly became a two month obsession. Evenings after work and weekends disappeared into building the task manager I'd always wished existed.
I built the features I actually wanted: a Kanban board, Eat the Frog priorities, AI task breakdowns, analytics, a calendar view, a wellbeing tracker, and an XP system that genuinely makes finishing work feel rewarding.
Then I noticed something else
While using other task managers I kept seeing the same pattern. Calendar view? Premium. Analytics? Premium. Time tracking? Premium. Custom views? Premium.
I completely understand why companies charge. Software isn't free to build and there are lots of overheads for large corperations. But it always felt strange that understanding your own productivity had become a premium feature.
Why Tasklist.uk is free
Tasklist.uk runs on a single VPS that costs about £4 a month. That's genuinely the entire hosting bill.
There's no team, no investors and no pressure to lock useful features behind subscriptions. So I don't.
Sign in with Google and you get everything. No paid tiers. No feature restrictions. Just the app.
It's still growing
Tasklist.uk isn't finished, and I don't think it ever will be. Most new features come from me using it every day and thinking, "That would make this easier." Then I build it.
The documentation covers everything that's currently available, and you can try it yourself at app.tasklist.uk.
Looking back...
It's funny how a simple question from a colleague turned into months of learning, late nights and a project I now use every single day.
I didn't build Tasklist.uk because I wanted to create the next big SaaS company (although my bank account would look a whole lot better if I did). I built it because I wanted a task manager that genuinely worked for me.