The sixth chapter of Atomic Habits by James Clear talks about how you can change your environment to help trigger new habits. For example, put a guitar in the middle of the living room if you want to make a habit of practising it regularly.

Obviously, an iPhone app can’t help much with those kinds of external, real world environmental changes (at least, not without enormously over the top, augmented reality-based software updates, I guess – I’ll just pause writing here to add a note to Recurrer to ‘think about enormously over the top, augmented reality-based software updates’). But the Recurrer app does change your task-completion environment. And it does it automatically.

The tasks that are most important and urgent to you bubble to the top of the list. If (as suggested last time in the breakdown of Chapter Five) you’ve set up processes to make it a habit to open Recurrer regularly, you’ll notice that the in-app environment of your to-do list will be different from when you last checked it, always prompting you to do the task you most need to do right now. That’s an environmental change of sorts. And it’s one that will help you start new habits and complete important tasks.

Look, I’ll be honest, it’s not a great fit for Chapter Six of Atomic Habits. But it’ll have to do. At least until I get around to that augmented reality update.