a4List
a4list is a simple web app that allows you to plan daily tasks, then print them on A4.
Each task is something you would do daily or many times per week and has 14 checkboxes, one for each day across two weeks.
This gives you a "checkbox chain" where you can see the progress you have made over the last two weeks.
You can also place numbers into the checkboxes to track things like training minutes or sleep durations.
I have been experimenting with paper-based task management, and this is one of those experiments.
The ISO A-series paper standard has an interesting property. When you fold a sheet in half, you get the same aspect ratio and move down one A-series size. Folding A4 once produces A5; folding it again produces A6.
This design takes advantage of that property to create four A6-sized panels, each with its own list.
This keeps the lists visually compact while allowing the sheet to fold into a pocket-sized format.
For some kinds of activities, planning on paper feels more focused than using planning apps, which can pull you into a world of dialogs and distractions.
There is also the issue that once you close digital apps, you simply forget about them.
With paper-based systems, you can place your list in a physical location where it remains visible as a visual cue.
This web app is built on Cloudflare Workers, which seems to be quite a good fit for such a simple app.
There is a plain-text editor that makes it much easier to quickly type out your plan.
The visual editor is a nice way to get an overview of the final printout and fine-tune anything.
One challenge when printing a web page on iOS is that the iOS print process automatically adds headers that disrupt the folding design.
Server side Cloudflare Browser Rendering was used to produce an accurate PDF without the headers added by iOS. This seems to print more accurately. But for best results use Chrome Desktop.
There is also a forking feature that lets sheets be shared using either a read-only or writable URL. Sheets accessed through read-only URLs can be duplicated and changed. I often need to add or remove a few tasks, so I want to be able to update a sheet quickly.
This sharing ability could also allow teachers to create default templates that their students or clients can access through a read URL, then duplicate and customize to their needs. The QR code printed on the sheet further reduces the dependency on apps, logins, remembering where things are stored etc.
If you find a sheet after a few months and need to print a new copy, you can just scan the QR code and instantly have another copy ready to go. No remembering where files are stored, what your login details are, or what the website was called.
