Building a kooky, ADHD-friendly productivity app

Most productivity apps look like spreadsheets. Task Tree resembles a cartoon forest from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

Built by Nolan Perkins — designer, content creator, and full-time internet uncle — Task Tree is for people with ADHD (including Nolan) who are allergic to traditional productivity tools. If you’ve ever opened a to-do app and immediately cried, this one’s for you.

Here’s how it works: you get a tree. Every time you complete a task, you get a bird or something similarly delightful. They hatch, flutter, collect traits, and take naps while you’re idle. Your tree grows leaves, changes colors, and evolves with every productive day. If you slack off, your birds fall asleep. Your forest gets quiet. 

It’s weird, and it works. 

Nolan wanted to create a system that felt more like a game and less like a guilt machine. “I was reading The Giving Tree to my kids, and I realized that’s the vibe,” he said. “I want this to feel gentle and alive, like you’re taking care of something instead of being punished by it.”

In 2021, Nolan built V1 of Task Tree. It was a standard to-do list that showed promising sign-up numbers, but he knew he could improve the app. He shut it down after a year and has been rebuilding V2 since the start of 2025.

That’s when Rive flew in. 

Learning Rive live on TikTok

Before Task Tree, Nolan hosted a live design show where he built mini-apps, often based on community suggestions. One of those experiments, a budgeting app called Save Joey, featured a fish in a bowl whose water level dropped if you overspent. He built the entire app live while learning Rive for the first time.

“It was chaos. I didn’t do anything offline. I had no plan. But I got hooked on Rive.”

From Shel Silverstein to state machines

Every visual detail in Task Tree, from the leaves, the birds, and their freakishly adorable eyes, is made in Rive. 

Each Rive instance is tied to progress, reward, or personality:

• You control the shape and color of your tree by unlocking them in the shop.

• Birds can be fused with card packs to customize their look: beaks, eyes, patterns, and plumage. 

• A Traitdex lists all the accessories you’ve discovered. (Each card is a Rive instance.)

• Birds have individual profiles that list their traits and include an animated profile picture. 

• A confetti burst plays when you complete a task (soon to be replaced by birds flinging hearts).

More control for designers, less work for devs

Each bird can be customized with traits like hats, eyes, and patterns. “You get hearts for finishing things, and you can spend those hearts on traits. That kind of reward loop is everything when trying to make progress feel good.”

All those behaviors — bird animations, trait swoops, confetti bursts — are powered by state machines inside the Rive Editor. 

“There was some trial and error. It was fast and easy once I got the hang of state machines. Way easier than coding interactions from scratch.”

Next up? “We’ll add Data Binding. People want to fully customize their birds and trees, every trait, even the outlines. Being able to link structured data to Rive properties will be huge.”

Rethinking UI, one snoring bird at a time

Task Tree is fun, but underneath the branches is a deeper design philosophy. Tools like Rive make it possible to build user interfaces that are expressive, dynamic, and emotionally resonant.

“We got pushed into this modular design systems world where everything’s a component. But tools like Rive let us bring back weird, branded moments. If AI designs the boring stuff, we can finally have fun again.” 

“I knew I wanted the birds to fall asleep and start snoring when you’re idle. Then, when you come back, they say, ‘Oh hey, you’re back!’ It’s those moments that make people remember your app.”

Rive helps Nolan build those moments without a ton of dev overhead. “The more I use Rive, the more I think, ‘Okay, where else can I add a splash of personality?’”

Climbing up the design ladder

Nolan’s path to Task Tree started long before his first time using Rive. He studied creative advertising in college, taught himself web design, and eventually helped build Fittr, an early machine learning fitness app that hit #3 on Product Hunt and gained 20,000 users in a week. 

“I remember refreshing the dashboard and seeing hundreds of new users every time. That was the moment I realized design could change my life.” 

He went on to work with startups and web agencies before pivoting to design education and content creation. These days, he’s best known for his tutorials, TikToks, and long-form YouTube videos — often partnering with Figma, where he’s behind the animations for many of their social and product launches. Last week, he gave a talk at Config 2025: “Building in Public: Why Designers Should Be Creators.”

What’s next for Task Tree

Task Tree is already seeing promising numbers. 75,000 users signed up for their first public launch in 2021. Now they have 2,000 beta users for the public launch of V2 on May 7, and an average daily session duration of 23 minutes. 

Nolan plans to reskin Task Tree into multiple micro-apps, such as a Pomodoro timer, a roommate chore tracker, maybe even a couple-specific version where your (love) fern dies if you don’t do the dishes.

All with different Rive graphics and game mechanics, but the same core logic underneath.

Task Tree launched May 7 on Android and iOS.

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