App Review: Add a visual punch to your to-do list with Lightpad

Calendar apps come really handy when it comes to staying on track with your daily objectives. But very few of them make proper use of two interesting elements that play a big role in remembering tasks: visual layouts and colours. Lightpad is a new calendar tool that uses a natural ascending layout, like a linear timeflow, to “to connect time perception to your visual cortex," according to its official website.

So how does it work? Lightpad organizes your calendar and to-do tasks in the form of an upward moving layout. It looks quite distinct from the age-old usual tabular calendar. Every date in a month is displayed like a milestone. The number of tasks you have on a particular day are displayed in the form of small squares. The empty ones are for tasks that are still due and the filled ones are completed tasks. The design is pretty intuitive. Hover over a date or scroll to it and you can see what all is on the agenda for the day. When you click on a date, it opens up a menu where you can add the gist of a new task and add it to the existing list. Once you hit the button that signifies the completion of a task, that particular line is shaded in a different colour. Exit the menu, and you’ll see that the tiny square is also filled.

Lightpad plays on these small visual cues, which, as per its official website, utilize the full potential of a user’s visual cortex. “Vision involves nearly half of your cerebral cortex, thus being the most sophisticated of your senses. Perhaps, your vision alone can process planning much better than your consciousness," the website explains. Instead of stitching week rows in a table, Lightpad uses a spatial layout to combine your visual cortex and consciousness to make planning effortless, the website adds. The website explains that this spatial layout also allows a user to understand how far or close the tasks are on the timescale. This helps in managing task priorities accordingly.

The next interesting feature is the tags system. Each tag can have its own color scheme, which can be used to create a code for work, friends, and family tasks. Scientific research has shown that certain colours appear more memorable than others, making this colour-tagging system more interesting.

When you are not busy tracking tasks, Lightpad also has a notepad feature that allows you to take notes. Within this is a ‘focus mode’, which removes all other visual distractions in the layout to help you focus on just your written notes.

Lightpad is a PWA, or a progressive web app, that works offline, on mobiles and desktops. You can sign in using your Facebook and Google account. The app’s base plan is free to use, but comes with limited features. Other subscription offers come with a Google Calendar Sync option too and added colour schemes.