There's a moment, maybe thirty minutes into a drive to the airport, where your brain suddenly serves up a question you can't answer. Did I lock the back door? Did I pack the medication? And suddenly you're mentally rifling through your suitcase from the passenger seat, trying to remember whether you saw the orange bottle go in. That's not a packing problem. That's an anxiety problem. And Daniel's asking about exactly that.
Here's what he wrote. "As somebody with ADHD, one of the things I struggle with is packing for vacations. It's not really about the packing itself — it's the organizational challenge and the nagging fear that I've forgotten something important. There's always that moment halfway to the airport when you wonder, did I pack my medication? My passport? Did I turn off the air conditioning? Lock the back door?" He says we've talked before about how underrated checklists are, and he still thinks that's true. But what's surprising is how few apps seem to focus on reusable checklists or personal standard operating procedures. There are endless to-do list apps, but many are designed around one-off tasks rather than repeatable routines.
So his question is: if you're someone who travels regularly and has a set of things you absolutely cannot forget — medications, travel documents, chargers, work equipment, pet care, even pre-departure tasks around the house — what are the best tools available today? He's especially interested in apps that let you create reusable packing templates, customize them for different kinds of trips, and adapt them over time. Weekend getaways, international travel, business trips — ideally you can tweak those lists without rebuilding from scratch every time.
He also wants tools that extend beyond packing. A departure checklist that reminds you to empty the fridge, take out the trash, lock the windows, adjust the thermostat, water the plants. And he points out that in aviation and medicine, checklists exist because even experts forget things under stress — so why don't more consumer apps embrace that same philosophy?
He wants to know which apps genuinely stand out and what makes them different, whether any are particularly well-suited for people with ADHD where reducing anxiety and decision fatigue is just as important as remembering your toothbrush, and more broadly, why reusable checklists and personal SOPs remain such an underappreciated category of software. "They seem like such a simple idea," he writes, "yet they can provide enormous peace of mind — letting you get to bed the night before a trip knowing you've covered everything that matters."
So today we're going to dig into the actual app landscape — what exists, what works, and why this simple idea is so hard to find done well.
The thing that jumps out at me from Daniel's prompt is that he's identified something that most software product managers completely miss. To-do list apps are designed around a specific question: what do I need to do today? That's their organizing principle. But packing and pre-departure routines are asking a fundamentally different question: what do I need to do every time I leave? And those are not the same problem. A to-do list is about novelty and discovery — you're adding new tasks, clearing them, moving on. A packing checklist is about repetition and completeness — you're running the same playbook and the only thing that matters is not missing a step.
The category mismatch.
Exactly the category mismatch. And it's structural, not a feature gap. You can technically set up recurring tasks in Todoist or Things or TickTick, but the whole interface is built around daily workflow. It's optimized for the rhythm of wake up, check today's tasks, complete them, repeat. That rhythm breaks completely when you're trying to think in trip mode — where the context is "I'm going to Chicago for three days of meetings" versus "I'm going to the beach for a week." Those are different lists, and a daily to-do app doesn't help you think about what's different between them.
So Daniel's instinct to reach for the aviation and medicine analogy is right on the money. Those fields use checklists precisely because they know experts forget things under stress. The cognitive load of a departure — whether you're flying a plane, performing surgery, or just trying to get your family out the door for a week-long trip — is exactly the kind of stress that triggers omission errors. Your brain is juggling too many things, and the thing that drops is almost always something obvious. Did I pack socks? Did I turn off the stove?
And what's interesting is how those fields treat checklists. In aviation, the pre-flight checklist isn't a suggestion. It's not a productivity tip. It's safety infrastructure. It exists because the consequences of forgetting are catastrophic, and the system is designed around the assumption that you will forget something unless the checklist catches it. Consumer software doesn't think that way. It treats checklists as a feature — a little checkbox widget you can add to a note — not as a product category in its own right.
So the episode today: first we'll look at what actually exists in the app landscape, then we'll examine why the category is structurally underappreciated, and finally we'll give some practical guidance for building your own system with the best available pieces. Let's start by looking at what's actually out there — because the landscape is more interesting than you might expect.
So there are two dedicated packing apps that are worth naming right up front because they represent the two main design philosophies in this space. The first is PackPoint — packpoint dot co. PackPoint is probably the most prominent dedicated packing app, and its core mechanic is that you tell it where you're going, for how long, and what activities you'll be doing, and it generates a packing list for you. It pulls in weather data for your destination and adjusts recommendations based on that. So if it's going to rain in Seattle, it adds an umbrella. If you're going hiking, it adds gear you might not think of.
That's clever.
It is clever. And for someone who doesn't travel often, or who gets overwhelmed just starting a packing list from a blank page, PackPoint is useful. It removes the initial friction of "what do I even need to bring?" by doing the thinking for you. But — and this is the big but — PackPoint is trip-centric, not routine-centric. Every trip starts fresh. You tell it the parameters, it builds a list, you pack, you're done. Next trip, you do it again. There's no template system, no way to say "I always bring these seven medications" and have that automatically included. You're rebuilding context every single time.
Which is exactly the friction Daniel's trying to avoid.
Right. If you have ADHD, the friction of rebuilding from scratch every trip is the thing that makes you not use the app at all. You open it, see the blank form, feel the cognitive load hit, and close it. The value of a checklist system for neurodivergent users isn't the list itself — it's the reduction of decision fatigue. You want to clone a template, tweak two or three items for this specific trip, and be done.
So PackPoint solves the wrong problem. It solves "I don't know what to pack" when the real problem for frequent travelers is "I know what to pack, I just need to not forget any of it."
And that brings us to the second app, which is PackingListApp — packinglistapp dot com. This one takes a fundamentally different approach. It's template-first. You build reusable lists — here's my weekend trip list, here's my international travel list, here's my business trip list — and when a trip comes up, you duplicate the relevant template and modify it. That's much closer to the personal SOP model Daniel's describing. You're not reinventing the wheel every time. You're running the playbook and making small adjustments.
So that's the closest match to what he's asking for.
It's the closest match in the dedicated packing app space, yeah. But here's the tradeoff. PackingListApp is a niche product. It's made by a small developer, it has limited ecosystem support, and it doesn't have the polish or the recommendation engine that PackPoint does. It won't check the weather for you. It won't suggest hiking boots because you said you're going to Colorado. It assumes you already know what you need and just want a system for not forgetting it. Which, for Daniel's use case, is actually the right assumption. But it means the app feels... sparse. And for some users, that sparseness reads as underdeveloped rather than focused.
I think there's a broader point here about the app landscape. Neither of these apps does the thing Daniel also wants, which is the pre-departure household checklist. Empty the fridge, lock the windows, water the plants, adjust the thermostat. Those aren't packing tasks. They're departure tasks. And they're a different use case — it's home security and maintenance combined with travel prep. Very few apps treat this as a unified workflow.
No, and that's the fragmentation problem. What most power users actually do — and I've seen this in forums, in ADHD communities, in frequent-traveler groups — is they cobble together two systems. A template-based packing app for the suitcase, and a recurring checklist in their general-purpose to-do app for the household stuff. It's not elegant, but it works.
And then there's the third category, which is the one that actually comes closest to the full vision but requires the most setup. Note-taking apps with checklist templates — Notion, Obsidian, even Apple Notes if you're willing to build it out. Power users build their own SOP systems in these tools. You can create a template with every possible item, organized by category, with sub-checklists for different trip types. You can duplicate it, modify it, and archive old trips. It's infinitely flexible.
The downside being you have to build it yourself. And for someone with ADHD, the executive function required to design a comprehensive packing system from scratch is... let's say non-trivial. You're asking the person who struggles with organizational tasks to first build an organizational system before they can use it. That's a high bar.
There's a paradox there. The people who would benefit most from a well-designed personal SOP app are the least likely to have the bandwidth to build one themselves in Notion.
And that's exactly where the market failure lives. But let's hold that thought — we'll come back to why this category is so underdeveloped. First I want to mention one more thing about what exists today. Some general-purpose to-do apps have gotten better at templates. Todoist introduced templates a while back — you can create a project template and duplicate it. TickTick has a similar feature. Things doesn't really do templates, but you can duplicate a project manually. The problem isn't the feature, it's the framing. These apps still present themselves as daily task managers. The template feature is buried in a menu somewhere. It's not the core experience. So even though the capability technically exists, the app doesn't help you think in terms of "I'm going into trip mode now."
Which means the user has to supply all the context-switching themselves. "Okay, I'm not in daily task mode anymore, I'm in departure mode, let me go find that template I built six months ago and hope it's still relevant."
That context-switching is itself a source of cognitive load. The ideal app would let you tap a button that says "I'm going on a trip" and immediately present you with the relevant checklist, already populated with your saved preferences, asking only the questions that are variable — destination, duration, weather.
We've seen what exists. PackPoint is trip-centric and rebuilds from scratch. PackingListApp is template-first but sparse. General-purpose to-do apps have the technical capability but the wrong mental model. And Notion and Obsidian can do anything but require you to build it yourself. Now the bigger question: why is this category so underdeveloped? And I think the answer tells us a lot about how software gets built.
The structural reason is brutally simple. Checklists are invisible when they work. A to-do list app shows daily activity — you're in it every morning, checking things off, adding new tasks. There's a daily engagement loop. A packing checklist gets used maybe four to six times a year. There's no retention metric to optimize, no ad inventory to sell, no subscription hook that makes sense for the user. It's a terrible SaaS business model.
Venture-backed companies won't touch it.
They won't touch it because the unit economics don't work. A venture-backed startup needs to show monthly active users growing twenty percent month over month. A packing app has users who open it four times a year. That's not a growth curve, it's a flat line with seasonal spikes. No VC is going to fund that. And because there's no venture money, the category is left to indie developers and hobbyists — which means apps exist, but they're underfunded, sporadically maintained, and rarely updated for new OS features.
That creates a self-reinforcing cycle. A user hears about a packing app, tries it, finds it's buggy or hasn't been updated in two years, gets frustrated, and gives up on the category entirely. Then they tell their friends "yeah, I tried one of those, it wasn't great." The category gets a reputation for being janky, which further suppresses demand, which means even fewer developers bother building in the space.
That's exactly the dynamic. And it's a shame because the underlying need is real and widespread. Almost everyone travels. Almost everyone has had the "did I forget something?" panic. The value proposition is obvious. But the business model isn't.
There's a second-order problem too, which is psychological. Checklists feel too simple to be worth paying for. We're conditioned to pay for complexity — for features, for integrations, for AI-powered whatever. Paying for something that just... reminds you to pack socks? That feels like it should be free. But the value isn't in the reminder itself. The value is in the removal of anxiety. It's in being able to close your eyes the night before a trip and not run through a mental inventory of everything you might have forgotten.
That's where the ADHD angle becomes really important. For a neurotypical person, a packing checklist is a convenience. For someone with ADHD, it's a cognitive prosthetic. It's not making a mildly annoying task slightly easier — it's making a difficult task possible without spiraling into anxiety. The value proposition is fundamentally different, but the app stores don't have a way to communicate that distinction. It all just looks like a checklist app.
Daniel's aviation and medicine analogy keeps getting more relevant the deeper we go. Those fields treat checklists as safety infrastructure. They're not products. They're not monetized. They're built into the workflow because the cost of not having them is catastrophic. Consumer software treats checklists as a feature to bolt onto a note-taking app. The philosophy is completely different.
It's worth asking why that is. I think part of the answer is that consumer software is overwhelmingly built by people who don't experience the world the way Daniel does. The product manager at a to-do list company probably doesn't have ADHD. They probably don't experience packing as a source of genuine anxiety. So they build for their own use case — "wouldn't it be nice to have a packing list feature?" — rather than for the use case of someone who cannot function without externalizing that cognitive load.
It's the curse of building for yourself, except the "yourself" in this case is a very narrow slice of the population.
Right. And the people who do experience the need most acutely — neurodivergent users, frequent travelers with complex logistics, people managing medications or medical equipment — they're a minority of the user base, even though they'd derive the most value from a well-designed solution. So the market optimizes for the median user, who needs a to-do list for daily tasks, and the edge cases get left to the indie developers.
Let me ask you something. If you were designing the ideal solution for Daniel's use case — not constrained by business models or venture capital or what currently exists — what would it look like?
Four things. First, template-first design. The core of the app is not a blank list, it's a set of templates you build once and adapt forever. Weekend trip, international trip, business trip, beach vacation — you create them, you refine them over time, and they're always there waiting. Second, trip-type presets that actually understand the differences between trip types. An international trip automatically prompts you for passport, visa, currency, adapter plugs. A business trip adds laptop, charger, presentation remote. The app knows what questions to ask based on the template you selected.
Third?
Third, a unified departure SOP that combines packing with household tasks. One checklist that covers both "what goes in the suitcase" and "what needs to happen to the house before I leave." Empty the fridge, lock the windows, adjust the thermostat, water the plants, set the alarm. It's all one workflow because it's all one departure. And fourth — this is the one nobody does — a review and adapt loop. After every trip, the app asks you one question: "Did you forget anything?" If you say yes, it adds it to the template. If you say "I brought this and never used it," it flags it for removal. Over time, your checklist gets better without you having to actively maintain it.
That fourth one is the killer feature. It turns the checklist from a static document into a living system that improves with use. And it does it without requiring the user to remember to update anything — the app prompts you at the right moment.
No current app nails all four. PackPoint does the presets but not the templates. PackingListApp does the templates but not the presets or the review loop. Notion can do all four if you build it yourself, but the setup cost is high and the review loop requires manual discipline. The closest thing to a complete solution right now is a DIY combination — a template-based packing app for the suitcase, plus a recurring checklist in your to-do app for the household stuff, plus a habit of spending sixty seconds after each trip noting what you forgot.
Which brings us to the practical question. Given all of that — the fragmented landscape, the business model problems, the lack of a perfect all-in-one tool — what do you actually do about it?
Start with PackingListApp for the suitcase. It's the closest match to the template-first model Daniel described, and it handles the core use case well. Build your templates — weekend, international, business — and refine them over time. Don't try to make them perfect on the first pass. Just get the obvious items in there and let the review loop do the rest.
For the household departure tasks?
Use whatever to-do app you're already using. If you're in the Apple ecosystem, Reminders works fine — create a list called "Departure Checklist" with all your recurring household tasks, and when a trip comes up, uncheck everything and run through it. If you're on Todoist or TickTick, same idea. The key is to not overthink the tool. The best system is the one you'll actually use.
That's the thing I keep coming back to. For ADHD listeners specifically, the goal isn't the checklist. The goal is the ability to close the loop. Once you've checked everything, you can stop thinking about it. That's the peace of mind Daniel's after. The checklist is just the mechanism.
That's worth saying explicitly because it's easy to get caught up in optimizing the tool and lose sight of what you're actually optimizing for. You're not trying to build the world's most comprehensive packing system. You're trying to build a system that lets you go to bed the night before a trip without running through a mental inventory of everything you might have forgotten. If a paper list on the fridge does that for you, use the paper list.
The category is underdeveloped. The perfect app doesn't exist. But the workaround is straightforward and it works. Template-based packing app plus recurring household checklist plus sixty seconds of review after each trip. That covers the full SOP with the best available pieces.
I'd add one thing to that. Share your templates with your travel companions. If you're traveling with a partner or family, having a shared checklist means you're not both independently wondering whether someone packed the sunscreen. It externalizes the cognitive load for the whole group, not just for you.
Before we wrap up, there's one more thing worth thinking about. Where does this category go next? The obvious answer is AI. An assistant that knows your routines, knows your travel history, knows what you forgot last time, and can generate a departure checklist on demand — that might finally solve the personal SOP problem without requiring you to build or maintain anything. You just say "I'm going to Chicago for three days" and it hands you a checklist that already knows about your medications, your preference for an extra phone charger, and the fact that you always forget to empty the fridge.
We're not there yet. The AI assistants that exist today are impressive in some ways but they don't have the persistent memory or the contextual awareness to do this reliably. But the pieces are coming together. And when they do, this category might finally get the attention it deserves — not because the business model changed, but because the technology made it cheap enough to build that someone will do it as a side project and it'll actually be good.
Daniel's instinct is right. Checklists are underrated. The fact that the software category is underdeveloped is a market failure, not a reflection of the idea's value. Aviation and medicine figured this out decades ago. Consumer software is still catching up.
If you've built your own packing SOP system — whether it's a Notion template, a combination of apps, or a beautifully annotated paper list — we'd love to hear about it. Send us your setup. We're at show at my weird prompts dot com.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Find us at my weird prompts dot com, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back soon.
