Watching my kid forget to even look at the to-do list — and rethinking the whole thing through working memory and interest-as-priority. The starting line for treating the app (the outside) as the memory, instead of the kid's head.
"Hey — did you look at this?"
"...nope."
The to-do list I wrote in the morning comes home crumpled at the bottom of the backpack. Still not looked at.
"Write it down so you don't forget" — sure. But the next step is remembering to look at the thing, and that's the part that drops.
The reason I don't forget isn't "discipline." It's that looking at the task list is itself a scheduled task.
Every Monday morning, "ticket grooming" auto-pops in my calendar. Without that, I'd absolutely forget — same as the kid.
Adults put the remembering-step on the outside. Kids don't get to do that yet.
Instead of "look at your list," I tried "which one are you starting with?" That's closer to what NLP people call a presupposition question — the question assumes the list will be looked at.
Worked for a few days. Then they got used to it. Back to forgetting.
Adults can brute-force memory with phone alarms. My kid can't take a phone to school. Some schools ban smartwatch alarms too.
My kid runs everything in his head. No external scaffolding allowed.
Working memory has a capacity ceiling1. A child's ceiling is lower than an adult's, and kids with ADHD-leaning traits sometimes test lower again2.
Around our house, we treat this working-memory research as input for the apps we build — a way to offload some of the "keep it all in your head" load to something on the outside.
Above the ceiling, low-priority items drop first. "Looking at the to-do list" is exactly the kind of item that drops. It's the felt-obligated stuff. Information that doesn't interest you gets deprioritized3.
The complete Pokemon roster: filed away, unprompted.
Trash truck schedule on our street: somehow known.
The strongest external memory a kid has is interest.
So — could a to-do list get converted into "interest" somehow?