Why three states beat two on action items

I almost shipped a two-state action item list. Open. Done. Simple. Clean. Every checklist app in the App Store does it that way, and there's a reason — binary is unambiguous.

Then I watched someone use the early beta of BoardSnap on a real sprint board.

She snapped the whiteboard after the kickoff. BoardSnap pulled out seven action items. By Thursday, three were genuinely done, two hadn't been touched, and two were — this is the part that matters — started but not finished. She kept tapping the open circle on those two, not to mark them done, but just to... acknowledge them. Like the list was missing a word she needed.

### The problem with binary

A two-state list lies to you twice. First, it treats "haven't started" and "blocked" as the same thing. Second, it makes "in-progress" items invisible — they collapse into open, which makes it look like nothing happened since the meeting.

That second failure is the subtle one. A board from last Tuesday has six open items. If three of them are actually underway, that's a completely different situation than six untouched items. But a binary list doesn't let you express that. So the list looks stuck when the work is moving.

Teams respond to that signal by ignoring the list. If it doesn't reflect reality, it stops being useful. And when a tool stops being useful, nobody comes back to it.

### What in-progress actually does

The middle state — I call it in-progress, but it's just the dot-in-the-ring icon in BoardSnap — does three things:

1. It makes partial progress visible.

When you can say "two of six are underway," the list starts describing reality instead of aspirations. That's the difference between a task tracker and a whiteboard photo you forgot to delete.

2. It shifts accountability without shame.

Marking something in-progress is a low-stakes act. You're not claiming you finished it. You're saying you touched it. That's enough to re-engage with the list without the emotional weight of admitting something is late.

3. It creates a natural pull toward done.

In-progress items feel different from open ones. There's a small psychological contract — you said you started this, so you want to finish it. The state change creates a kind of micro-commitment that open items don't have.

### The 18% retention lift

In our first beta cohort, users with a strict open/done workflow returned to their boards about 2.1 times per week on average. Once we shipped the tri-state model and users started naturally using in-progress, that number moved to 2.5 times per week — 18% higher.

I won't overclaim causality here. We changed other things in the same window. But the correlation held across both the product team testers and the handful of consultants who joined the beta. The people who used in-progress most heavily were the ones who came back most often.

The mental model I have for why: in-progress items are hooks. Every time you open the app, you see something unresolved that you already started. That's a pull notification without the notification.

### How we built it

The tri-state model in BoardSnap works like this: tap once → in-progress, tap again → done, tap again → open. The icons are deliberately distinct — an empty ring, a ring with a filled center dot, a filled ring with a checkmark. At a glance you can read the state of a full action list without reading a word.

BoardSnap AI assigns initial states when it reads the board. If the board has items marked with checkmarks already (teams sometimes do this mid-meeting), those come through as done automatically. Items with circles or dashes come in as open. Nothing starts as in-progress — that's a state the human creates, which is the right call. The AI shouldn't guess what you've started.

### One thing I'd tell every to-do app builder

The first instinct is always to add more states. Today / this week / this month / blocked / waiting-on. I've seen this go wrong. State explosion kills usability because the cost of choosing the right state becomes higher than the benefit of having it.

Three is the right number. Open says you haven't started. In-progress says you're moving. Done says you're finished. That's the full story of any task. Everything else is noise.

If you're building a task product — for whiteboards or anything else — start with three states. Add a fourth only when you can show me a real workflow that breaks with three.