Bucket Lister is a morbid, colorful to-do list for your dreams and life goals

Is your favorite to-do list app not long-term enough for you? Then meet Bucket Lister — a to-do list app that focuses on the big picture and has a timer counting down to the end of your life.

In short, Bucket Lister is an iPhone app that tells you how much time (using country averages) you have left to live and then has a space for your dreams. I, for example, have 63 percent of my life remaining and have started listing out “dreams” of mine like sky diving and climbing Mount Everest.

The brain behind the app is Sherwood Forlee, a serial entrepreneur and tinkerer who previously worked as a designer/mechanical engineer for IDEO, Frog Design, and Smart Design. You might have seen Sherwood’s handywork before with clever viral products like “anti-theft-lunch-bags” and the “Speak-er.”

Forlee told me via e-mail that the general idea behind Bucket Lister came from two things. First, since he is his own boss, he felt “hours and days” would go by without accomplishing anything meaningful. Two, he had a cousin pass away, and that put the amount of time he had to live in perspective.

“These two events — the overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction with my time-management skills and the passing of a blood relative — prompted me to investigate a solution that would incentivize myself to ‘get shit done’ while I still had a chance to,” Forlee said.

Because of his background in design, Forlee has made the app colorful, and you can even sort your dreams list by color, due date, or progress. It’s quite simple to navigate.

Forlee says he actually uses the app for both long-term and short-term goals. (That said, I feel like the app is best for chronicling life goals.)

“With short-term goals, the effect is much more dramatic as the clock for each goal decreases at a much higher rate, visually speaking, than long-term goals,” Forlee said. “In order to provide people with more incentive with longer term goals, there are daily, weekly, or monthly reminders, which list the amount of time remaining. ”

While you could you could use other popular to-do list apps like Wunderlist, Clear, or Any.Do to list your big life goals, Bucket Lister seems like it could complement those. Ideally, you’d have one app for your menial tasks and one for the grand things that may never happen but want in a list format.