❓ Problem

The to-do list is the most successful productivity tool ever invented, and also the least productive. Todoist alone has 50M+ users, and the to-do list app category is worth around $1.12 billion and growing ~10% a year. We clearly love writing things down.

We are less keen on doing them. When iDoneThis studied its users, 41% of to-do items were never completed, and only 15% of the things people actually got done had started life on the list. The list is less a plan and more a polite record of good intentions.

The reason is not laziness. It is everything else. Microsoft found the average worker is interrupted every two minutes, 275 times a day, while wading through [117 emails and 153 Teams messages daily](https://news.microsoft.com/de-ch/2025/06/17/new-microsoft-study-reveals-the-rise-of-the-infinite-workday-40-of-employees-check-email-before-6-a-m-evening-meetings-up-16/?). Asana puts 60% of the working week on "work about work": chasing updates, hunting for information, switching apps.

And here is the twist. A huge share of what sits on the average founder's list ("research competitors", "follow up with yesterday's leads", "draft the investor update") is exactly the kind of work AI agents can now do. Yet every to-do app on the market still stops at reminding you. Todoist's own AI push, Todoist Assist, is mostly about getting tasks onto the list faster, from forwarded emails to voice "rambles". Brilliant. More tasks.

✅ Solution

ToDone, a mobile and web to-do list where adding a task kicks off the work.

• Connect your world once. Slack, email, calendar, docs and drive. This is the context that turns "follow up with yesterday's leads" from a vague instruction into five specific people, five specific conversations and five specific next steps.
• Write your list like you always have. Type it, paste it, or say it out loud in the morning. ToDone sorts each task into three buckets: agent can do it, agent can prep it, or this one is all yours ("call mum" stays firmly human).
• Agents work the list while you work the day. "Research competitors" comes back as a sourced comparison table. "Follow up with leads" comes back as personalised drafts sitting in your outbox. "Prep for Thursday's board meeting" comes back as a first-draft deck pulled from last month's numbers.
• You review, not redo. Each task lands in a review queue with the output, the sources it used and a one-tap approve, edit or "try again" with feedback. Anything that sends, spends or commits (emails, purchases, calendar invites) waits for your explicit approval.
• It learns how you work. Every edit and rejection teaches the agents your tone, your preferred formats and which tasks you actually trust them with, so the hit rate climbs every week.

The wedge is deliberately narrow: founders and freelancers whose lists are stuffed with research, writing and admin. The platform underneath, a task layer with context and execution plugged in, expands naturally into teams, where "assign to agent" becomes as normal as "assign to Sarah".

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• The to-do list app category is valued at roughly $1.12 billion in 2025, heading to $1.79 billion by 2030. That is the "organise your work" market. ToDone is pitching for a bigger budget: the "do your work" one.
• 64 million Americans freelanced in 2023, and nearly 30 million of them provided knowledge services like marketing, consulting and programming. Exactly the people whose lists are full of agent-friendly tasks.
• The value anchor is strong. US freelancers average around $47.71 an hour. Save someone three hours a week and that is roughly $570 a month of time back, against a subscription in the tens of dollars.