I wanted something simple: an app that allowed me to enter a list of tasks and how frequently I want to do them (daily, twice a week, etc), and sort the ones I’ve been neglecting to the top. It should show me when I last did them, and have a calendar view showing my historical performance. And it doesn’t really need to do anything else. Systematic doesn’t have the calendar view yet, but it does everything else, and it’s dead simple.

You have two buttons at the top of the screen: add a task, and edit the task list. Below that is your list of tasks, with the do-soon ones at the top. Tapping on any task starts a timer that tracks how much time you’ve spent on it, and you can stop, pause, restart, or adjust the time spent. Your progress and deadline show up in small print on the task button.

In the editor, you name the task, select an icon, a frequency (once, daily, weekly, monthly), a duration (from 5 minutes to 50 hours), a repeat count (1-50 times per period), and a deadline. So, I can say that I want to practice Go-San-Go three times a week for ten minutes per session, with my success evaluated on Sundays.

And that’s it. Until the author adds the calendar view, you can only see your previous session for each task, but it uses Core Data for storage, which means everything is stored in a simple SQLite schema, and the DB itself is available from the File Sharing pane in iTunes, so it’s trivial to extract the data yourself.

$2.99, designed for iPhone-sized screen; I suspect it just looks huge on an iPad right now.