Every so often someone writes in to tell us that the folders should be called folders.
They're buckets, and it isn't a branding tic. It's the one word in the entire app we argued about the longest.
A folder is a storage object. That's its whole job and it's been its job since filing cabinets — you put something in a folder because you want it kept, organized, retrievable later, safely out of the way. Nobody has ever opened a folder hoping to find it empty. An empty folder is slightly sad. A full one means you've been busy.
Buckets are the opposite kind of object. You fill a bucket in order to carry it somewhere and dump it out. The full state is temporary and mildly annoying and the entire reason the bucket exists is to get back to empty. Nobody looks at a full bucket with pride.
Tasks are bucket-shaped. Every single one of them is a thing you wrote down specifically so it could stop existing. A task you've kept, organized, and filed beautifully for eight months is not organized, it's just old, and the folder metaphor is quietly telling you that keeping it there is fine.
The words we use for things end up doing a lot of the thinking for us, quietly, without asking. Call a pile of unfinished work a folder and it becomes an archive you maintain. Call it a bucket and it's obvious what you're supposed to do with it.
So: Work is a bucket. Home is a bucket. That side project you're pretending is still active is a bucket, and it currently has eleven things in it, and now you're thinking about that, which is sort of the point.
We built a list that measures your day, plans against it, and tells you when you're actually finished. Calling the containers folders would have undercut the whole argument on the very first screen.
They're buckets. Empty them.