When people hear that a to-do list app is what keeps me up at night, they sometimes find it amusing. The reaction is fair if you stop at the name. A to-do list, on its own terms, is a solved problem - put items in order, check them off. What keeps me up is upstream of that, in the problem the to-do list is one possible answer to.

When someone describes a problem, what they reach for is usually a category they recognise or a solution they already use. The to-do list is one of these. What gets named is not the problem itself but the shape of a solution. The shape can be simple while the problem behind it is anything but, and the surface won't tell you which is which.

Asked what they wanted, people said faster horses. They were not lying, just naming the closest thing their vocabulary could hold. What was actually wanted was a way to get places without spending the day on it. A horse was as far as their words went.

Naming a problem requires a vocabulary, and the vocabulary you have is built out of the world you already live in. When something bothers you about your day, the words available are the names of products and routines that exist around you, so you reach for them. A to-do list is what the language hands you when the actual feeling is closer to wanting to feel okay about the work you didn't get to today.

This isn't carelessness or laziness of thought. It's how language works.

Make what was asked for and you make a better to-do list. What made the user want one in the first place is mostly untouched.

Make something for the problem instead - whatever made the named solution feel necessary - and the result looks different. It may not look like a to-do list at all. The thing that originally bothered the user is what gets addressed, even though they were not calling it the problem.

An honest articulation takes longer to find than a familiar one.

The named solution is easy to spot. It comes pre-formatted, in a sentence, with a name attached. The problem takes longer to find because there isn't a word for it sitting around waiting to be picked up. There is no canonical phrase for the feeling of carrying a head full of undecided commitments through a day that is already in motion. The closest available word is "to-do list," which is why people reach for it. But the closest available word is not the same thing.

The work of finding the problem is the work of staying with the discomfort long enough for a more honest articulation to appear. Not a longer one. A clearer one.

The named solution is easier to defend. It has a name. The problem usually does not, and committing to it means making something nobody asked for in those words - because the words to ask for it did not exist yet.

All of which means I should probably stop telling people I am building a to-do list app. The to-do list is the door. What I am working on is for the problem on the other side of it - and finding the words for that problem is part of the work.