The Koaline 1.0 Roadmap
David This is everything we’re building over the next two months, ahead of Koaline 1.0.
One item is a change in direction and gets a proper explanation. The rest is a list. Nothing here is ranked except lifetime access, which comes first, because the order will change as we go and I’d rather not promise one I can’t keep.
Koaline becomes a GTD app
This is the big one.
Koaline was built around scheduling. Put the work on a calendar, give every task a slot. That only holds if the day goes as planned. One unexpected meeting, one task that runs long, one thing from a client at four o’clock, and every slot after it is wrong. You spend twenty minutes dragging blocks around instead of working.
Do that a few times and you stop believing the plan. You open the app, see something you know is out of date, and close it.
We looked at other approaches and landed on GTD. Then we looked at what we’d already shipped, the work view and the capture flow and the end of day ritual, and realised it was a partial GTD system built by someone who hadn’t read the book.
What that means concretely:
- Next actions instead of dates
- An inbox for anything captured but not sorted
- Someday and Maybe lists that stay out of your week
- A field for what done actually looks like
- A shorter daily review, tickable where you already are
- A proper weekly review, which is the one that keeps the system honest
Nested tags, where clients/acme/website is one tag you can filter several ways, are under consideration. Not decided. It happens if we have time and if people want it.
Planning views
Planning matters less in a GTD app, so these move out of the centre. They don’t go away.
Day, week and month currently live on three separate pages, so switching timescale means leaving wherever you were. They become one view with tabs. The week view stops scrolling sideways. The command centre learns where you are, so CMD+K stops offering the same things everywhere.
Notes
The weakest part of the app. Right now a task gets one note, you can’t attach a file, and you can’t write anything down without navigating somewhere first.
- Several notes per task
- File attachments, downloadable whenever you want
- A scratchpad reachable from any screen
- Recent notes available while you’re working
- A canvas for sketching
- Notes that show up on a client or project after you write them
- A notes list that filters like every other list in the app
Time tracking
Log time for a past day and you’ll see that day’s notes and finished tasks next to the form.
We’re also fixing how entries are grouped. Time tracked against a project currently mixes with time tracked without one, which makes billable totals wrong.
Bugs
We have a list we’ve been carrying for a while and we’re working through all of it, not just the obvious ones. Editors where you can’t tell where you’re allowed to type, screens that lag, views that break at certain window widths.
Other things on the list
Smaller in scope, still happening:
- Client and project lists get rebuilt, so filtering and sorting work the way they do everywhere else in the app.
- Jira and Todoist join Linear, Notion and ClickUp. You’ll also be able to push a private Koaline task out into whatever tracker your team uses, without retyping it.
- The docs site is nearly empty. We’re filling it with a guide for each part of the app, plus short videos where watching beats reading.
- The website doesn’t say what Koaline is or who it’s for. That gets fixed.
- Billing gets built. Today there’s no checkout, no plans, and no way to manage a subscription.
- Hosting moves onto one platform. Koaline is spread across several right now, which makes it harder to keep reliable. Expect a short spell of downtime, announced beforehand.
Lifetime access
This ships before the rest of the list.
You pay once, no subscription, and you get everything on this page as it lands. It closes when subscriptions go live. If you bought it before then, billing won’t touch your account afterwards.
We haven’t settled the price. We’ll announce it before the offer opens.
Where this list came from
We use Koaline every day to run our own client work. Nearly everything above came out of that: a bug we hit, a screen that annoyed us, a step that took longer than it should have.
We’ll keep using it whether or not it finds an audience, because we need it to do our jobs.
No dates
We’re a small team building a lot in two months and things take longer than planned. If something slips I’ll say so rather than quietly ship it half finished. The list is more reliable than any schedule attached to it.
If something here doesn’t match how you work, or you think GTD is the wrong direction, tell me now rather than after we’ve built it. I read everything sent to david@koaline.app.
You can try Koaline while we’re in beta. It’s free.
Related reading:
- To-Do Lists vs Day Planning: You Need Both as a Freelancer - Where a checklist stops being enough.
- How I Plan My Freelance Week (When I Actually Do It) - The loop this rewrite is built around.
- The Hardest Part Isn’t the Work. It’s Starting. - Why next actions beat time slots for getting moving.