Planning tools that fight you are worse than none.
If keeping the day in your head doesn’t work — and streak apps punish you for being human — this planner was built around a different set of choices. Here’s what they are and the research behind them.
This page is wearing Sage: softer greens, quieter contrast, easier on a busy mind. One of six themes, all free.
The pain
You know exactly what needs doing. The day still happens to you.
The list exists — mostly in your head, which means holding it costs effort all day long. Starting is a wall. Twenty items scream equally. And the app you tried last time reset your streak the first bad week, which told you everything about who it was built for.
The answer
Out of your head, out loud, at the moment it occurs to you.
Speaking removes the capture tax: no app-opening, no typing, no menu — the thought becomes a filed item in the time it takes to say it, from wherever you’re standing. Then three bands do the sorting twenty items can’t do themselves: A is must, B is should, C is nice. Two decisions run the day instead of twenty.
“Add call the accountant as an A priority”
Filed at the top before the thought could leave.
“My focus today is the quote”
One thing, pinned, visible every time you look.
What the research found
Across 94 studies, deciding in advance when and where you’ll act had a medium-to-large effect on whether people followed through.
That’s the mechanism this whole planner is built on — and the same research group later tested it specifically with children with ADHD, where the if-then plan lifted response inhibition to the level of children without ADHD. The mechanism appears to work hardest for exactly the people planning tools usually fail.
Habits grew from repetition in a consistent context — and missing a single day did not materially affect the process.
Which is why there is no streak here. No chain to break, no counter to zero, no red mark for a day you were busy living. Miss a day; pick it up tomorrow. That is the entire recovery procedure.
Nothing lives in your head.Say it, it’s captured, dated, filed. Working memory is spared the job.
Time is visible.The schedule, the carried-days badge, the week and month at a glance — the future gets a shape instead of arriving as a surprise.
Capture happens at the moment, not at the desk.The point where a thought occurs is the point it can be filed.
No punishment mechanics.Tasks carry forward without shame. Habits have no streak. The planner’s job is tomorrow, not a verdict on yesterday.
The paper question
“Just use paper” is half right.
The case for paper is real: it’s fast at the moment of capture and it never fights you. The friction was always the pen — everything written twice, everything unfinished copied forward by hand.
This planner is the paper layout with the pen removed. Planner view is the two-page spread itself, on iPad and desktop, filling itself in when you speak — and the phone carries the same day when you’re away from it. Faster than paper at the moment of capture, and nothing ever copied forward by hand again.
I’ve watched good, capable people give up on planning because the system punished them for one bad week. The system was the problem. It usually is.
— Dave Rees, Founder. From boatbuilder, to business owner, to Founder.
How it works
Start with two things, not a system.
Say tomorrow’s one focus tonight.A single decided thing beats a reorganised everything.
Speak tasks the moment they occur.The capture is the habit; the sorting is the planner’s job.
Let the rest carry.Anything unfinished rolls forward on its own. Nothing to rewrite, nothing to feel bad about.
