I originally started by building the desktop version of Listvik.
Desktop first made sense to me because it has space for a whole week.
That’s the nice thing about desktop: screens are wider than they are tall, and that shape lends itself naturally to a weekly planner. All seven days fit comfortably. There’s enough breathing room for each column. You can see the week as a whole without it feeling cramped, and everything stays clean and readable.
It felt right.
Then there was a moment that made the next step obvious.
I was out doing an errand and wanted to tick off a task on my phone.
That was the moment it clicked: tasks don’t only exist when I’m sitting in front of a computer.
A lot of the things I need a planning app for happen away from my desk. Grocery runs. Quick reminders. Something I remember in the middle of walking somewhere. Something I need to check before a meeting. Something I want to mark done the second it’s finished.
That’s when the need for a mobile version stopped being a nice-to-have and became unavoidable.
The problem with mobile
As soon as I started thinking seriously about mobile, the core tension became obvious.
How do you fit a full week of columns onto a device where the screen is taller than it is wide?
On desktop, the weekly view feels natural. On mobile, the same idea can fall apart pretty quickly.
There are a few common ways apps solve this.
Some focus on one day at a time. Some turn the calendar into a long, scrollable stream of dates. Some try to show the whole week at once in a very condensed layout, which technically works, but often at the cost of readability.
None of those approaches felt quite right to me.
I didn’t want the mobile version to become a compromised miniature of the desktop version. And I didn’t want to abandon the weekly thinking behind Listvik either.
So I had to ask a more basic question.
The wait a minute moment
When I look at my phone in the context of tasks, what do I actually want to do?
Usually it’s one of these:
- tick something off
- note that something needs to be done
- check whether there’s something I need to do right now
That was the real shift.
In that moment, standing somewhere with my phone in my hand, it usually does not matter whether I have five tasks later in the week or ten million. What matters is today. What matters is what’s in front of me now.
That doesn’t mean the rest of the week stops mattering. It just means that on mobile, the primary context is different.
Desktop is great for planning. Mobile is often about acting.
That distinction helped clarify the product much more than any layout experiment did.
The direction I landed on
The solution I ended up with for mobile is simple:
show today first, and let everything else be one swipe away.
Instead of trying to force the entire week into a tiny space, the mobile version centers the day you’re actually in. You open the app and land on today. From there, you can swipe to any other day easily.
The rest of the week is still there. Any other date is still accessible. But the default focus is the one that makes the most sense when you’re on your phone: today.
That felt like the right compromise, but honestly it feels less like a compromise and more like the app finally understanding the device it’s on.
What I like about this approach
It keeps the weekly structure intact without making the mobile experience feel cramped.
It accepts that mobile is not just a smaller desktop screen. It has its own rhythm. Its own use cases. Its own expectations.
And it keeps Listvik aligned with the thing I care about most: clarity.
The desktop version is still the best place to look at your week as a whole, move things around, and get that calm overview.
The mobile version is there for the real-life moments in between. The checkmark while you’re out. The quick capture. The glance to see what matters now.
That feels honest to how people actually use a planning tool.
Still the same product, just a different context
I don’t think building mobile is about squeezing every desktop idea into a smaller frame.
I think it’s about preserving the core feeling of the product while respecting the context.
For Listvik, that core feeling is still the same: calm, clear, weekly planning.
But on mobile, that feeling shows up a little differently.
Less “see everything at once.” More “know what matters right now.”
And I think that’s okay.
Actually, I think that’s better.
Because the goal was never to build the most clever calendar layout. The goal was to build something that feels useful in real life.
And real life doesn’t just happen at a desk.
