Joe: I agree, my suggestions were just more tweaks around the edges (and frustrations at the end of a day!)

I hope that the Next Big Thing will be ultra simple and do something I don’t even realise I need done. It would feel inevitable: I’d look at it and say, “of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” I would tell you what it is, but I didn’t think of it

I’m of the opinion that it’s getting tougher to distinguish an app from the crowd, and seem “new” (not to be confused with useful). As an industry, we are kicking out new apps at the rate of dozens a week. For consumers this amounts to lots of choice, and lots of confusion. I’m not sure where it goes from here. The barrier of entry is pretty low, and getting lower.

So when there are thousands of apps that do near similar things, what happens? Can it go on like that forever? Who wins?

I “need” Facebook now, because that’s how I easily coordinate events with my friends and family, it keeps track of birthdays for me, it’s a fun way to communicate and share with friends when we are at separate work places during the day.

But I wouldn’t call Facebook or Twitter a productivity app in itself, I’m not sure what brought those sites up.

Prioritising: all email carries the same ‘weight’ in the inbox but some need action and some are time wasters. I have things to do on my to do list, in my inbox, in voice mail, notes in evernote etc etc – how to get one overview that tells me at a glance what matters today, now so I can make intelligence choices based on all info? For all GTD’s marvellousness, I just haven’t mastered this.

Vague time: calendars are very rigid – if I know I have to make a call sometime during the morning, I can’t tell it to remind me “sometime in the morning” , I have to pick a time, then hit snooze a million times until a free minute coincides with the reminder.

Maybe all this exists already and it’s just because I’m stuck with Lotus Notes at work that I don’t know about it…

Mint.com does this to a certain extent. The webapp connects to your bank account and automatically classifies your transactions so you can see trends and manage your spending. But what if it worked with Springpad or Evernote, or similar, and recognized when you bought your wife’s birthday gift, and checked that task off?

What if your apps could hook into the program production chain and automatically check off deliverables once they’ve been done, automatically check the program/app for bugs (or at least monitor for them) and add bug reports to a tracker.

What if my car could sense when it needed its oil changed, and a program automatically searched for available maintenance times and prices and I just had to click a “Book it” button on my phone to schedule an oil change?

The more mundane, tedious crap we can take off of our backs, the better the quality of life for everyone will be.