iDoneThis Pushes You to Complete The Tasks on Your To-Do List

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Name: iDoneThis

Quick Pitch: Motivate individuals and teams to tackle tasks on their to-do lists.

Genius Idea: iDoneThis lets you jot down what you’ve accomplished for the day and prompts you to stay on track in finishing the tasks on your to-do list.

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What started off as one student’s idea for motivating himself to lose weight has gradually turned into a new kind of productivity tool for individuals and teams alike.

iDoneThis is an iPhone app and website that helps people stay productive by asking users one simple question each evening around 8:00 pm: “What’d you get done today.”

With the iPhone app, users can respond by posting their accomplishments to a Post-It note feature, which is then stored on the app’s calendar. In this way, you can look back and reflect on your accomplishments for the day.

The website is designed more for businesses and teams. Users can sign up in groups together and receive e-mails each night highlighting the accomplishments of everyone on the team. This gives each member the chance to see who’s done what and provide feedback.

On both the website and the app, users can look back and see the “dones” accomplished for the previous week, month or year.

“It started off as a single-user experience,” Walter Chen, iDoneThis’s CEO, tells Mashable. “Rodrigo Guzman, my co-founder, was a PhD candidate at Northwestern University when he came up with idea to motivate himself to exercise more and lose weight.”

The original website was launched in January 2011 â€" more or less as a side project while Guzman was in school and Chen was working as a lawyer. The team didn’t start working full-time on the concept until last spring. After the official iPhone app was launched in March 2012, they quickly decided to create a team-oriented version of it as well.

“We found that a lot of people who were using the project were entrepreneurs,” Chen says. “They loved to use it in a team setting. You know, just a simple way to have open communication that’s not intrusive or suffocating.”

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Since then, companies like Zappos, Foursquare, reddit and American Express have all started using the service. The iPhone app is free to use; for the website service, though, it’s $3 per user.

There’s no shortage of to-do list apps on the market right now, including popular applications like Clear, Orchestra and Wunderlist. iDoneThis essentially serves as the compliment to these applications by pushing users to cross items off their to-do lists rather than giving them more and better ways to add tasks to it.

“This main philosophy here is ‘Just get done whatever you get done,’” Chen says. “A lot of creative work happens serendipitously, but it’s helpful to keep track of what you and everyone else is accomplishing.”

iDoneThis is currently based in both New York and San Francisco. Aside from Chen and Guzman, two more staff members were added to the team this past year â€" ironically, also a former lawyer and PhD student. (All four of them, Chen assures, use iDoneThis themselves.)

Would you use iDoneThis to stay on track? Let us know in the comments below.

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The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible byMicrosoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives software startups three-year access to Microsoft software development tools, marketing visibility to help promote their business and a connection to the BizSpark ecosystem, giving them access to investors, advisors and mentors. There is no cost to join, so if your startup is privately owned, less than three years old and generates less than U.S. $1M in annual revenue, sign up today.